Charles Mills

This paper discusses the adequacy Rawls' theory of justice as a tool for racial justice. It is argued that critics like Charles W Mills fail to appreciate the both the insights and limits of the Rawlsian framework. The paper has two main parts spread out over several different sections. The first is concerned with whether the Rawlsian framework suffices to prevent racial injustice. It is argued that there are reasons to doubt whether it does. The second part is concerned with whether a Rawlsian framework has the resources to rectify past racial injustice. It is argued that it has more resources to do this than Mills allows. This second part of the paper centers on two Rawlsian ideas: ideal theory and the fair equality of opportunity (FEO) principle. It is argued that ideal theory is essential for the kind of rectificatory work that Mills wants nonideal theory to do, and that where there is a socioeconomic legacy of past injustice, it is hard to see how FEO could be implemented if it did no rectificatory work, a result which means that there is less need to turn to nonideal theory at all.

Wittgenstein’s “grammatical method” analyzes multiple uses of language across contexts of use, with the aim of identifying differences and dissolving conceptual confusion. This paper uses Wittgenstein’s method to undermine Jorge L. A. Garcia’s volitional account of racism. Garcia claims that his theory accommodates the ordinary use of terms like “racist belief.” However, he did not consider whether such terms might have multiple uses/meanings. My paper identifies three uses of “racist belief” that escape Garcia’s analysis. Consequently, philosophers should take Wittgenstein’s advice to heart: do not assume that target-terms have a single use, but “look and see” whether they do.

The article is available here: https://www.pdcnet.org/pdc/bvdb.nsf/purchase?openform&fp=soctheorpract&id=soctheorpract_2017_0999_2_8_3

This paper focuses on epistemic practices within biomedical ethics that are related to disability. These practices are one of the reasons that there is tension between biomedi-cal ethicists and disability advocates. I argue that appeals to conceptual neutrality regarding disability, which Anita Silvers recommends, are counterproductive. Objectivity as neutrality serves to obscure the social values and interests that inform epistemic practices. Drawing on feminist standpoint theory and epistemologies of ignorance, I examine ways that appeals to objectivity as neutrality serve to maintain the status quo and ignorance regarding disability. I adapt Charles Mills's notion of "white ignorance" in order to consider the systematic social ignorance regarding disability that is treated as knowledge. Bioethicists commonly dismiss the reports of disabled people regarding their quality of life as biased, while claiming that their own judgments are objective. Sandra Harding's notion of strong objectivity is useful for thinking about ways that examination of values and interests informing epistemic practices related to disability in biomedical ethics could create better knowledge practices by taking the standpoint of disabled people seriously.

Kant develops a concept of savagery, partly characterized by laziness, to envision a program for human progress. He also racializes savagery, treating native Americans, in particular, as literal savages. He ascribes to this “race” a peculiar physiological laziness, a supposedly hereditary trait of blunted life power. Accordingly, while he grants them the same “germs” for perfections as he does the civilized Europeans, he allows them no prospect of actually fulfilling any such perfection. For the road to perfection must be paved through industry, a condition that Kant denies to the “savages” by racializing their alleged laziness. This case will shed new light on the debated relation between Kant’s moral universalism and his racism.

I explore the epistemic structures associated with the system of compulsory heterosexuality, in particular, the ways in which compulsory heterosexuality structures both our mental lives and our access to it, and the epistemic costs, for women, associated with  entering into heterosexual relationships. My starting point will be with a paper of Charles Mills, in which he considers the ethics - and in doing so, charts the epistemological dynamics - of sexual and romantic relationships between black men and white women. I will show that Mills’ arguments can be used as a map, or scaffold, which we can use to construct structurally similar arguments against (certain) heterosexual relationships. Doing so will allow us to pick out and diagnose important epistemic structures embedded  in the institution of compulsory heterosexuality. This project can be thought of as an attempt to integrate into analytic feminism some important insights associated with queer feminism and queer theory.

This paper explores the affective dimension of resilient epistemological systems. Specifically, I argue that responsible epistemic practice requires affective engagement with non-dominant experiences. To begin, I outline Kristie Dotson's account of epistemological resilience whereby an epistemological system remains stable despite counter evidence or attempts to alter it. Then, I develop an account of affective numbness. As I argue, affective numbness can promote epistemological resilience in at least two ways. First, it can reinforce harmful stereotypes even after these stereotypes have been rationally demystified. To illustrate, I examine the stereotype of Black criminality as it relates to false confessions (Lackey 2018). Second, it can encourage "epistemic appropriation" (Davis 2018), which I demonstrate by examining the appropriation of 'intersectionality' and #MeToo by white culture. Finally, I conclude that resisting harmful resilience requires affective resistance, or efforts which target numbness via different kinds of affective engagement. I consider Kantian 'dis-interestedness' as a candidate.

This essay reads the social contract tradition through the lens of cruel optimism. Using Berlant’s theory to highlight the complex affective structures of promissory relations, I argue for deeper engagement with the rhetorical and affective dimensions of the contract tradition. I reveal the disavowed place of rhetoric in critical contract theory and turn to early modern political thought to recover a fugitive tradition of contract in which imaginative language appealing to affect is essential for diverse political purposes. I consider the example of racial reparations to show the expanded critical possibilities of contract-talk in the mode of claiming broken promises.

More than 95 percent of criminal convictions in the U.S. never go to trial, as the vast majority of defendants forfeit their constitutional rights to due process in the pervasive practice of plea bargaining. This paper analyzes the relationship between American mass incarceration and this mass forfeiture of procedural justice by situating the practice of plea bargaining in the normative framework drawn by recent Supreme Court rulings and the recent proliferation of criminal statutes, including mandatory minimum sentencing legislation. Looking at systemic racial disparities in sentence severity and incarceration rates for otherwise similarly situated defendants, I argue that, rather than a voluntary waiver of constitutional rights, this mass forfeiture of due process rights ought to be conceptualized as the product of an entrenched system of procedural entrapment. Such entrapment, I argue, ought to be abolished not only on grounds of procedural injustice, but because the practice refashions rather than redresses forms of racial domination derived from prior eras. The article concludes by exploring the tactic of mass conscientious plea refusal through the collectively organized assertion of constitutional due process rights as a strategy of resisting mass incarceration.

In his reading of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, George Yancy argues that felt invisibility is a form of ontological and epistemological violence that points to the normative constructs of white perception. Yancy’s phenomenological account of the “unseen” Black body problematizes the condition of emergence of racialized bodies in the perceptual field under the white gaze. This book chapter aims to elaborate further on the racialization of the visual field by expanding Yancy’s claims on invisibility beyond black bodies, to consider specifically the invisibility of Asian and Asian American “yellow” bodies.
The first section focuses on Yancy’s notion of “seen absence” to demonstrate how white perception marks the Black body as hypervisible, while rendering it invisible at the same time. The second section expands on Yancy’s notion to examine how “yellow” bodies, despite their hypervisibility, are quickly dismissed or recede into the periphery in the white logic of perception. The perceptual neglect for yellow bodies is, I argue, a manifestation of the white perceptual logic, which situates racialized bodies temporally in a time other than the “now,” and spatially in a place other than “here.” In the last section, I suggest that whiteness be understood as perceptual dysfunction that delimits one’s own cognitive possibilities and ways to engage with the world, rendering certain bodies invisible.

It is sometimes argued that ideal theories in political philosophy are a form of ideology. This article examines arguments building on the work of Charles Mills and Raymond Geuss for the claim that ideal theories are cognitively distorting belief systems that have the effect of stabilizing unjust social arrangements. I argue that Mills and Geuss neither succeed in establishing that the content of ideal theories is necessarily cognitively defective in the way characteristic for ideologies, nor can they make plausible which mechanisms ensure the alleged negative effects of the widespread acceptance of ideal theorizing. This does not mean that all hope is lost for the ideology objection, however. By turning to a second Marxian model of ideology, I argue that the ideological character of ideal theories is not so much a matter of their content, but rather of their form. Ideal theories falsely present the normative concepts that they use as semantically practice-independent and thereby block potential challenges from subordinate groups to dominant ideologies. It is therefore not the normative content of ideal theories which proves to be objectionable, but the particular role their concepts play in wider political discourse.

In this Masters project, I investigated the institutional and intellectual history of the South African Institute of Race Relations from 1929 to 1950. In particular, I analysed the praxis of the Institute during this period using the theoretical framework of Charles Mills’ concept of ‘racial liberalism’ to make sense of the ways in which it was interpolated into broader national and political processes in early twentieth century South Africa. The dissertation examines the South African Institute of Race Relations’ transnational connections with European and American empire-building
projects in the early twentieth century, considers the Institute’s conception of race and race relations in South Africa during the same period, analyses the Institute’s production of social scientific discourse on race relations and the so-called ‘native question’, and interrogates the relationship between the Institute’s liberal praxis and its material and intellectual dependence on a racial contract. I suggest that the praxis and intellectual production of the Institute was an integral part of the consolidation of settler colonialism following the South African War of 1899-1902, and an intellectual predecessor to the segregationist paradigm of the apartheid period.

In this paper, I make explicit some implicit commitments to realism and conceptualism in recent work in social epistemology exemplified by Miranda Fricker and Charles Mills. I offer a survey of recent writings at the intersection of social epistemology, feminism, and critical race theory, showing that commitments to realism and conceptualism are at once implied yet undertheorized in the existing literature. I go on to offer an explicit defense of these commitments by drawing from the epistemological framework of John McDowell, demonstrating the relevance of the metaphor of the “space of reasons” for theorizing and criticizing instances of epistemic injustice. I then point out how McDowell’s own view requires expansion and revision in light of Mills' concept of 'epistemologies of ignorance'. I conclude that, when their strengths are used to make up for each others' weaknesses, Mills and McDowell’s positions mutually reinforce one another, producing a powerful model for theorizing instances of systematic ignorance and false belief.

The political theory of Charles W. Mills seeks simultaneously to expose liberalism’s complicity with white supremacy and to transform liberalism into a source of antiracist political critique. This article analyzes both Mills’ critique of liberalism and his attempt to reconstruct it into a political philosophy capable of adequately addressing racial injustice. I focus on his (a) problematization of moral personhood, (b) theorization of white ignorance, and (c) conceptualization of white supremacy. Together these establish the need to integrate a new empirical axiom into liberal political theory: the axiom of the power of white supremacy in modernity, or the axiom of white power, for short. This axiom is analogous to James Madison’s axiom of “the encroaching spirit of power.” Any liberal theorist that fails to take the encroaching spirit of power seriously meets the scorn of his peers. The same should be true for white power, Mills suggests. I conclude that Mills' reconstruction of liberalism is incomplete and urge him to develop a fully-fledged liberal theory of racial justice to complete it.

This paper uses and adapts John Rawls’ writings on justice in order to argue that past injustice can change what publicly counts as justice today. This differs from forward-looking approaches based on alleviating prospective disadvantage and backwards-looking historical entitlement approaches. In different contexts, Rawls’ own concern for what he calls the ‘social bases of self-respect’ may require the public endorsement of different principles of justice or a different specification of justice. Rawls’ difference principle focuses on the worst-off group defined in terms of class. A historicized difference principle is concerned with the relative standing of racial, gender, and other historically stigmatized groups. This assures group members that they receive fair treatment. It disincentivizes attempts to manipulate justice to a group’s advantage. Similarly, Rawls thinks providing one package of basic liberties to all citizens signals respect. However, indigenous peoples have often been forcibly coerced into being individual citizens. Given this history of disrespect, signaling respect could require recognizing indigenous self-government rights. Assurance requires respecting indigenous peoples as peoples, as in Rawls’ law of peoples, and disincentivizing attempts to make them into mere citizens. What counts as justice can change through past injustice, guided by forward-looking considerations of self-respect and public assurance.

This is the penultimate version of a piece that was published as: Timothy Waligore, "Rawls, Self-Respect, and Assurance: How Past Injustice Changes What Publicly Counts as Justice," Politics, Philosophy & Economics, Vol. 15, No. 1 (2016): 42-66. An earlier, slightly longer version of this piece is elsewhere on this webpage.

In this paper, I will criticise Rawls’s ideal theory from the perspective of a nonideal approach to political theorising which combines a political realist stance with a particularist ethical conception. This will involve showing the comparative benefits of theorising from the realist/particularist perspective over Rawls’s ideal theoretical approach. By forwarding an alternative approach to political theorising, I will be focusing on a recent movement in political philosophy which has been interrogating the strengths and weaknesses of the different methodological practises used by political theorists. This is referred to as the ideal vs. nonideal theory debate, and the stance I will forward will be distinctive, because unlike other arguments in this area, it combines a political stance with a complementary ethical conception. I will advance two arguments which show the benefits of adopting a realist/particularist approach to political theorising. These will expose flaws in the way Rawls ascertains his principles of justice, by outlining a particularist critique of the ethics-first approach which Rawls follows. Secondly, I will show how each aspect of Rawls’s ideal theory (full-compliance; utopia; end-state) is less applicable to the real world, imperfect agent when compared to the aspects of the realist/particularist stance, which include an emphasis on agent-relative reasons and context-sensitivity. By comparing the benefits of the realist/particularist stance up against Rawls’s ideal theory, I will demonstrate that identifying what justice corresponds to, and recognising and acting in accordance with norms of action can be done without relying on ideal theory. Furthermore, unlike Rawls’s ideal theory, the realist/particularist stance can change what justice corresponds to, in accordance with changes in contextual situations. Therefore, if one wishes to dispense with ideal theory, the realist/particularist approach offers a positive alternative.

This chapter explores the politics of white complicity in contemporary debates about framing and commemorating white activism against apartheid, specifically war resistance in 1980s South Africa. As such, the chapter analyses the politics of complicity in activism by privileged subjects, the obscuring and exposing of complicity in the commemoration of previous activism and the role of academic research in upholding and threatening ongoing ‘ignorance’ about such complicity.  In a reflexive account of researching and analysing the social and political activism of the End Conscription Campaign (ECC), a white led anti-apartheid movement and specifically the responses to published work and analysis of the ECC, I argue that the ECC challenged many fundamental aspects of militarised apartheid governance, but my analysis of the movement also traced the compromises and contradictions of the ECC and the gendered political messages it posed. As white South Africans, activists were also caught in debates about complicity and privilege in racial, economic and gendered terms. Furthermore, when researching in the 2000s, I became aware that former activists and conscientious objectors were keen to obscure former divisions in the movement and emphasise their agency and heroism in opposing apartheid, narratives that fed into broader political discourses premised on white citizenship claims in contemporary South Africa. The chapter explores the outraged responses to analyses by some former ECC activists, resistance to the study and questioning of whiteness as a salient category of research and an attempt by the (white led) parliamentary opposition (the Democratic Alliance) to rehabilitate white liberal agency in ending apartheid and discrediting the ANC government. This white 'backlash' politics is also contextualised as emergent from the responses to the  #RHODESMUSTFALL and # FEESMUSTFALL movements. The chapter also relates this to the increased focus on supposed white suffering during apartheid (of conscripts and other soldiers) and the decentring of injustice suffered by the black population. I argue that that these are socio-political narratives premised on ‘white talk’ (Steyn 2000) and ‘white ignorance’ (Mills, 2007 ; Steyn 2012): a politics of obscuring and complicit with ongoing white privilege.

Twitter post by @AdoyoCS, the inspiration for the founding of the Cosmopolitan Italies Collective, an interdisciplinary and transnational "constellation" of intellectuals dedicated to constructing a space devoid of coloniality.

As a champion for the Black Lives Matter movement and a vehicle to speak against colonization, medieval Italian author of the Divine Comedy Dante Alighieri seems an unlikely candidate. Yet, award-winning author, musician and Dante scholar Adoyo (PhD, Harvard University) will discuss how Dante’s universal poetic voice serves as inspiration to speak in the service of justice today. The conversation will be moderated by Dr. Asaro and will include time for questions from participants.

This event is sponsored by the Enhanced Student-Faculty Interaction Fund. For questions, contact Brittany Asaro at brittanyasaro@sandiego.edu.
Join Zoom Meeting (or scan QR code)
Meeting ID: 936 6297 2547
Passcode: DANTE

Linda Martín Alcoff is a professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, and a long-time friend and colleague of Charles W. Mills. In this interview with Darren Chetty and Adam Ferner, she discusses Mills' life and work and their shared history. The interview has been edited for concision.

Political Theory is the study of the ideas, concepts, and arguments that allow us to, as Hannah Arendt puts it, “think what we are doing” – to make sense of the foundations and possibilities of our shared political life. In this course, students will gain a familiarity and fluency with the main traditions, themes, and debates of Political Theory, focusing in particular on the issues of virtue, justice, nature, freedom, authority, violence, power, race, sex, and gender. Students will be challenged to reconsider their political preconceptions and commitments in light of reading, discussing, and writing about authors from diverse historical backgrounds and ideological perspectives. In this way, students will themselves participate in the tradition of Political Theory.

This writing-intensive course proceeds in four roughly chronological thematic units. In Unit 1, “Virtue vs. Virtù,” we read works by Plato and Machiavelli that question the role of knowledge and morality in political life. Unit 2, “The Social Contract and its Critics” turns to John Locke, Carole Pateman, Charles Mills, and Jedediah Purdy to explore the foundations and limitations of the modern liberal state. In Unit 3, “Freedom, Colonialism, Violence,” we read the work of John Stuart Mill and Frantz Fanon to determine the meaning and value of individual freedom in a world marked by colonial and racial violence. Unit 4, “Power, Identity, Resistance” turns to Friedrich Nietzsche and Judith Butler to investigate how power operates to create modern political subjectivities, particularly the sexed and gendered subject.

I argue that critical social epistemologists, such as Miranda Fricker and Charles Mills, should not adopt conceptualism about mental content. Specifically, I argue that Adorno's thesis of "the non-identity of concept and object" accounts for the tension between moral belief and moral perception that is necessary for critical social epistemology to be genuinely critical. Moreover, Adorno's nonvoluntaristic conception of agency and autonomy shows that overcoming what Fricker calls "hermeneutic injustice" is itself an expression of autonomy.

Without intending to fuel romantic fixation on Subcomandante Marcos, this paper underscores the necessity of a communicative-rhetorical praxis as a vital dimension of Zapatista insurgency.  The practice of Zapatista insurgency reflects a profound understanding that indigenous efforts to gain a voice in the future of Mexican politics necessarily expose the ideological limits of neoliberalism, here understood not solely as a policy of economic development. Neoliberalism includes, first and foremost, a corresponding imaginary and fantastic story about the foundations of society in which the indigenous appear to be either backward or infantile. As a counterpoise to these distorting depictions, I argue, the Zapatistas find it imperative to amplify their own political imagination and to wage a poetic revolution.

Philosophers since Plato have worked to discover how it is that we know whatever it is we know.  Western philosophy ancient and modern has taken on the task of finding out how we can look past the way things merely seem to the way they really are.  Lately, however, a number of thinkers have argued that the question how we can fail to know certain things, especially things with political consequences, is just as interesting and much more pressing.  That question is often taken to go along with the question whether we, or at least some among us, are in fact responsible, and indeed culpable, for creating that very useful ignorance. I suggest, however, that the prospects for an interesting and socially beneficial epistemology of ignorance are not good.  I do not think that there are deceptive phenomena and intellectual structures that we can penetrate with an improved philosophical perspective; or, at least, I think it won’t pay to think in those terms.

Written in the context of a assault on a Black youth by a member of a Jewish community patrol in Baltimore, the piece argues that Jews must come to grips with whiteness in order to understand their role in perpetuating a system of racism/white supremacy which produces distinct outcomes for Blacks in America.

This essay diagnoses systemic interconnections between COVID-19 pandemics , anti-Black racism, and the intensification of digital capitalism. By drawing on Charles Mills' rectificatory justice and Hannah Arendt's reflections on understanding and action, it argues that the role of philosophy lies in safeguarding racial justice and understanding against the hegemony algorithmic governmentality.

This article explains and defends a novel idea about how people can be misled by a discussion topic, even if the discussion itself does not explicitly involve the making of false claims. The crucial aspect of this idea is that people are liable to infer, from the fact that a particular topic is being discussed, that this topic is important. As a result, they may then be led to accept certain beliefs about the state of the world they consider necessary for the topic’s importance. What the article calls “importance misrepresentation” occurs when these beliefs about the state of the world are false or otherwise mistaken. This article will explore different ways in which importance misrepresentation can occur, and uses this idea to help clarify and strengthen some well-known criticisms of the topic choices of academic philosophers.