It's not about "white guilt". It's not about "retaliation".
So why DO we need to confront America's legacy of racism and genocide?
It is manifestly true that if you go back far enough in history, everyone's ancestors were oppressed by someone else's ancestors.
Doing the dirty on those we decide are "other" is one of the oldest evolutionary contributions to human survival. Stripped of all cultural context, we are programmed to ensure the survival of our children first, even those not yet born, even at the expense of others' children. If you don't survive to pass on your DNA, and your children don't live to pass it on yet again, you're an evolutionary failure.
How far back do we have to go, to find one of your ancestors enslaving one of mine? Or one of my ancestors raping and killing one of yours?
This truth has been used to justify an awful lot of denial.
Here's why the descendants of my European ancestors massacring others' Lakota ancestors outweighs my Pictish ancestors being massacred by someone else's Saxon ancestors. Or why my Briton ancestors being enslaved by someone else's Norse ancestors is outweighed by the enslavement of my neighbor's African ancestors by descendents of my European forebears:
Neither the institution of "thralldom" nor the culture of my Pictish forebears has a major role in shaping how the institutions of modern American life affect us today. (The possible exception of the Asatru revival aside, of course... but that in itself is just an effort to perpetuate the problem, isn't it?)
America's culture and ALL of our social institutions - churches, education systems, economy, entertainment, even our sense of what is and isn't allowable in how we treat other people - are shaped by the actions of the mostly-Europeans who muscled onto this continent for their own profit. They brought along their disregard for the value of any kind of human being except those like themselves. And upon this, they founded a nation.
And, before anyone starts whining about me being a traitor to the White Race >gag< let me stipulate that yes, those patriarchal racist Europeans had a lot of ideas that were both good and even, yes, revolutionary, about constructing a nation to produce liberty and justice for all who looked like them, anyway.
Yep, there's a lot of good stuff in John Locke, and the Enlightenment movement generally, and even in those Greek and Roman and early Christian Fathers who wrote about how we should be treating one another and how our societies should handle issues of fairness and opportunity and various knotty problems of Getting Along With Each Other. And those white male Founding Fathers faithfully absorbed it and transferred their understanding of those ideas into the writings that shaped our Constitution and founding documents.
They built a pretty amazing state, okay, maybe even a Shining City on a Hill. For white male property owners, anyway.
But...
What ideas did they NOT include? The writings of Lao Tzu, of Maimonides, of ibn Habash Suhrawardi? The great oral traditions passed along by the Sachem of the Haudenosaunee? A vast body of human knowledge was outside their experience and understanding.
The assumptions of manifest destiny, the patriarchal structure of Christian denominational doctrine, the inherent belief that only people with white skin and penises are fully capable of actuating the nation-state's power structure, were BAKED INTO America along with the inspiring truths of the Founding Fathers' rhetoric.
But to them, "All men are created equal" really meant MEN. Men like them. This was perhaps the biggest tip-off of all. Not "all people" and certainly not "all peoples". And they built their palladian mansions on the Potomac from the profits of human bondage.
People who wanted to be good, doing evil things.
Their noble intentions and beneficent accomplishments make it all the harder to renounce that evil.
But America will never fully realize the stunning breadth of their vision - a breadth they themselves were unaware of - until WE, their physical, spiritual, and moral descendants, undo their evil.
All of us. But especially those of us they endowed, not with "certain unalienable rights" but certain unalienable PRIVILEGES, so intrinsic to skin color, gender identity, and cultural heritage that many of us are no more aware of them than a fish is of water.
We cannot build the America of the future without coming to terms not only with the America of the past, but the present shaped by that past. We cannot "see" the present with a full 360-degree view, unless we allow the visions of those who have other experiences of America into the picture. We cannot hear and learn from all of American history without listening to the voices of those who had those experiences.
We are not fully "America" until those who suffered from the truncated, incomplete understanding of "liberty and justice for all" are as fully a part of the narrative as those whose forebears meted out that suffering.
It is not about "punishing" white people for the actions of previous generations. It is not about making us feel guilt, or shame.
It is about giving us the gift of sight beyond a narrow vision circumscribed by what we have excluded, until now. It is about giving us the gift of learning and understanding a definition of 'human' that encompasses much more than we have allowed ourselves to imagine. And yes, that will involve some pain, and discomfort. Maybe even some shame and regret.
But let's circle back, now, to the reality that all of our ancestors have done horrible things to the ancestors of those different from themselves. That human inheritance is with us all. Not to deny or escape, but to transcend. We can do this.
And we must, if we are to survive.
determinedly,
Bright
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Charles W. Mills, Philosopher of Race and Liberalism, Dies at 70
He argued that white supremacy was a feature of the Western political tradition, and that racism represented a political system as intentional as liberal democracy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/us/charles-w-mills-dead.html
Charles W. Mills, a London-born, Jamaican-raised philosopher whose incisive criticism of liberalism and race both foreshadowed and framed contemporary debates about white supremacy and structural racism, died on Sept. 20 in Evanston, Ill. He was 70. The cause was cancer, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he taught, said in announcing his death.
Dr. Mills argued that racism played a central role in shaping the liberal political tradition, a system that, he said, supposedly valued individual rights and yet for too long excluded women, the working class and people of color. He swung for the fences, writing critiques of Plato, the American political theorist John Rawls, a contemporary of Dr. Mills, and everyone in between.
“He was one of the most important philosophers ever to treat race and racism as their primary subject,” Chike Jeffers, a professor of philosophy at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a former student of Dr. Mills’s, said in a phone interview. “He did so much to move the field forward, and to get people excited about thinking about race and racism.”
Dr. Mills established himself as a leading critic of Western political theory with his first book, “The Racial Contract” (1997). In it he argued that white supremacy, far from being a bug in the Western political tradition, was one of its features, and that racism represented a political system every bit as coherent and intentional as liberal democracy. “White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today,” he wrote in the book’s first sentence.
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Charles Mills on Rawlsian “Ideal Theory” and Race
https://s-usih.org/2014/11/charles-mills-on-rawlsian-ideal-theory-and-race/
One of the many blogs that I try to keep up with but will often forget to read is The Stone. One of the Opinionator blogs at the New York Times, The Stone is “a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.” On the off chance that you don’t already know about it, I highly recommend it to readers of this blog; if you like what we do, you’ll probably be interested in what gets posted there.
This morning, a number of Facebook friends of mine, including Annette Gordon Reed and John Protevi, linked to a fascinating interview, published on The Stone, that George Yancy, professor of philosophy at Duquesne University, conducted with Charles Mills, the John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University. The second in a series of interviews with philosophers on the issue of race, Yancy’s interview with Mills deals substantially with the history of political philosophy and raises questions that are of potentially great interest to U.S. intellectual historians. The interview is both rich and fairly short, so I won’t try summarizing the whole thing. Readers should check it out for themselves. But I did want to quote at length one point Mills makes about political philosophy in general, and Rawlsian liberalism in particular, which I found especially interesting and significant:
You have a historically white discipline — in the United States, about 97 percent white demographically (and it’s worse in Europe), with no or hardly any people of color to raise awkward questions; you have a disciplinary bent towards abstraction, which in conjunction with the unrepresentative demographic base facilitates idealizing abstractions that abstract away from racial and other subordinations (this is Onora O’Neill’s insight from many years ago); you have a Western social justice tradition that for more than 90 percent of its history has excluded the majority of the population from equal consideration (see my former colleague Samuel Fleischacker’s “A Short History of Distributive Justice,” which demonstrates how recent the concept actually is); and of course you have norms of professional socialization that school the aspirant philosopher in what is supposed to be the appropriate way of approaching political philosophy, which over the past 40 years has been overwhelmingly shaped by Rawlsian “ideal theory,” the theory of a perfectly just society.
Rawls himself said in the opening pages of “A Theory of Justice” that we had to start with ideal theory because it was necessary for properly doing the really important thing: non-ideal theory, including the “pressing and urgent matter” of remedying injustice. But what was originally supposed to have been merely a tool has become an end in itself; the presumed antechamber to the real hall of debate is now its main site. Effectively, then, within the geography of the normative, ideal theory functions as a form of white flight. You don’t want to deal with the problems of race and the legacy of white supremacy, so, metaphorically, within the discourse of justice, you retreat from any spaces worryingly close to the inner cities and move instead to the safe and comfortable white spaces, the gated moral communities, of the segregated suburbs, from which they become normatively invisible.
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Charles W. Mills on Rejecting Rawls and Decolonizing Western Political Philosophy
https://alexsager.com/2016/10/12/charles-w-mills-on-rejecting-rawls-and-decolonizing-western-political-philosophy/
Anglo-American political philosophy students of my generation were socialized into a world where John Rawls reigned. We were taught a grand narrative in which political philosophy had all but disappeared in the 20th century. In 1971, John Rawls’ Theory of Justice appeared, freeing political philosophy from oblivion and pushing it into the future. Theory of Justice put to pasture utilitarianism which was too eager to encourage the violation of rights and libertarians to promote utility. In the process, it gave rise to Robert Nozick’s revival of libertarianism and to the communitarian responses of Michael Sandel, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor. Eventually, philosophers such as Charles Beitz and Thomas Pogge extended the Rawlsian framework to questions of global justice.
Advanced undergraduates and graduate students with any ambition to work in the political philosophy had to spend hundreds of hours parsing the subtleties of Theory of Justice, Rawls’ own revisionary tome in Political Liberalism, and taking seriously Law of Peoples (a work that would have been justly ignored if it had been written by anyone other than John Rawls). (Rawls’ genius is attested to by the fact that it is possible to spend hundreds of hours absorbed in his texts.) Like so many others from my generation and the preceding generation, I immersed myself in the Rawlsian scripture (with its commentaries on commentaries on the subtleties of the system). Inspired by Joseph Carens’ Rawlsian arguments for open borders, I wrote a dissertation on the ethics of immigration largely inspired by Rawls’ liberal egalitarianism.
When I was writing my dissertation, I began to feel something was wrong. The Rawlsian framework didn’t easily translate to what I thought were the central issues surrounding migration: racism, colonialism, social stratification, patriarchy, and state violence. I thought – and do think – that freedom of movement is a fundamental right and that borders controls are far too restrictive. I also believe that immigration has largely laudable distributive effects and anyone genuinely concerned with distributive justice should advocate more migration. Nonetheless, freedom of movement and equality do little to capture the plight of refugees excluded by state violence from seeking asylum, unaccompanied refugee children trapped in the soon to be demolished Callais, or the banal horrors of Australia’s offshore detention. (I develop some of these worries in The Refugee Crisis and the Responsibility of Intellectuals.)
A combination of a tendency to resist academic socialization (possibly a result of feeling a bit out of place after growing up in a libertarian environment in Northern Canada) and exposure to other works led me to look elsewhere. My advisor Kai Nielsen introduced me to the Analytic Marxian writers (he also introduced me to Rawls and Habermas as an undergraduate) which in turn led me to read Marx. Also, in graduate school at the University of Calgary Elizabeth Brake assigned Charles W. Mills’ The Racial Contract to one of my office mates, leading me to read the essays in Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race and From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism and eventually ponder Mills’ “Ideal Theory as Ideology”.
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Charles Mills Thinks Liberalism Still Has a Chance
A wide-ranging conversation with the philosopher on the white supremacist roots of liberal thought, Biden’s victory, and Trumpism without Trump.
https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/charles-mills-thinks-theres-still-time-to-rescue-liberalism/
Arguably no contemporary scholar has thought more deeply about how liberalism as a political tradition and philosophy has been historically and structurally biased towards the socioeconomic interests of white people than the political philosopher Charles W. Mills. In works such as The Racial Contract and Black Rights/White Wrongs, he has sought to show the reality of an ongoing system of white domination in which liberalism—both as a philosophy and as a system of governance—is complicit. Mills traces the problem back to the origins of modern liberalism, when liberals thinkers such as Kant and Locke limited the question of moral and political equality to whites, at the same time that European powers were enslaving and oppressing nonwhite peoples.
Mills’s work aims to study liberalism not merely as a theory of equality or freedom, but as an actual practice, one whose history demonstrates an “across-the-board pattern of unjust systemic white advantage.” In this sense, he argues, contemporary liberalism itself is beholden to white supremacy, not as a racial ideology but as a long-standing political system of white racial domination.
To what degree are contemporary liberal philosophers still beholden to what he terms the “racial contract”? Can liberalism break itself free from its long history of racial and economic inequality? And does not liberals’ advocacy for Black Lives Matter, their resistance against the nativism of Donald Trump, and their support of Joe Biden prove this? To answer these questions, I spoke with Mills about the Biden presidency, the enduring legacy of racial contract theory, and the events at the US Capitol on January 6.
CHARLES W. MILLS: The “racial contract” as a concept is an attempt to bring race and white supremacy into discussions within mainstream political theory. Social contract theory (going back to Kant, Hobbes, Locke, and others) has been central to modern Western political thought. It proposes that we imagine social and political institutions as if they were contractually created by equal men in a pre-sociopolitical stage (the “state of nature”). But there are at least two problems. To begin with, the “men” in the writings of the classic theorists really are male, and they seem pretty white also. And second, while this metaphor might work for genuinely egalitarian social orders, like premodern hunter-gatherer societies, what about oppressive modern societies? Where is there any conceptual room in such a picture for representing gender and racial domination in the modern period?
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and were part of the UWI campus children families. His dad was one of my mentors. Charles Jr. was a genius. The Racial Contract called it ages ago. He said he got the idea for the book. after reading Pateman’s classic The Sexual Contract.
And thanks for your excellent and informative post on Charles’ work.
Additionally: maybe if people look far enough into the past, and think about how their ancestors felt when oppression and violence was done to them, they can understand why we must work today to change the systems which perpetuate oppression, violence, and injustice. Europe inherited the diseases of Empire and power over from the invading Roman legions. Rome inherited the same disease from their conquerors. And so on, back through history. As you so excellently pointed out, what is needed is to acknowledge which groups are most hurt by our current system, so the work of rectifying the injustices can be done. Denying the existence of injustice prevents us from fixing the problems. You said it much better than I did. 
Thanks for the thread TygrBright.
There's no group that has all the answers, that's for sure. But with patience and humility we can help each other become better citizens and better people.
Very well done.
