2020 Tanner Lecture on Human Values - Theorizing Racial Justice - Charles W. Mills

[Celerity]

Liberalism – Seeing Beyond the Veil: Race-ing Key Concepts in Political Theory

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.

DANIEL STEINMETZ-JENKINS: What is the notion of the “racial contract” and how does it specifically relate to your understanding of white supremacy?

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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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

Sept. 27, 2021

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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[ShazamIam]

1. It seems like a huge amount of text to say that once the Whitness became part of the heirarchical

nature of the ruling class it was exploited to perpetuate itself for the benefit of the powerful.

I will give the material more time because I wonder if they note the time of the shift to what is identified as, Western, began with the European nation's colonization era at the end of the 15th Century?