Actually, we can’t do without him at all. The death of the philosopher Charles W. Mills tears a void that will not be easy to close. With his ingenuity and inexhaustible humor, he has brought the confrontation with racism to the center of philosophy over the past 30 years. It was a tough fight. A discipline that is committed to pure thinking, the determination of what should ideally be, accused of “color blindness”, understandably meets with resistance.
It is, as Mills insisted, no coincidence that even in recent and recent theories of justice, racism appears at best marginally, just as racism is not an unfortunate exception in society. Rather, according to Mills, racism permeates Western societies to the core; it is part of their normality.
Mills, who was born in Jamaica in 1951, taught at the Graduate Center of New York City University after holding positions at the University of Illinois in Chicago and Northwestern University. His first book “The Racial Contract”, which appeared in 1997 and quickly became a classic of social philosophy and political theory, unfolds the thesis for which he still stands today. The punch line is already in the title: Where the classic contract theory assumes a contract between free and equals, Mills shows that not everyone is involved in this contract.
Even if you reject racism as a white person – you still benefit from it
If feminists have proven the exclusion of women and Marxists the exclusion of the dispossessed from this contract, Mills scandalizes that this is a contract between whites that systematically disadvantages and dominates non-white people. A circumstance that shows itself in the inequality between white and non-white people in the USA, which continues to this day, from police violence to economic inequality.
Mills did not mean to claim that white people literally signed a contract at some point in which it is written that there should be two groups of people – “whites” and “non-whites” – with different rights and opportunities. But if one looks at travel reports, political statements, but also philosophical treatises from the time of European colonialism, in which American natives are described as “savages” or “animals” incapable of political self-determination, one can sense the logic that is at work here is. This contract is not a single document, but is made up of the innumerable documents, ideas, legal regulations and well-established everyday practices that have created a racist world and keep it alive. Even if you reject this world as a white person – you still benefit from it.
With his work, Mills is considered one of the co-founders of the research field of the Critical Philosophy of Race, which has developed in the USA over the past three decades and is only just gaining greater visibility in Germany. “The Racial Contract” was followed in 1998 by “Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy of Race”, which delves into some of the topics in the first book. Among other things, Mills deals with the question of what race actually is. Race is real – but not because there are “races” in the biological sense, but because we attach importance to certain characteristics such as the skin color of people in our societies. Mills is one of the representatives of a social constructivist position with a view to race. For him, the distinction between “whites” and “non-whites” is a product of history. It is made socially, but that does not make it less effective.
However, racism not only affects the wrong arrangement of the world, but also our knowledge of this very world. In his influential article “White Ignorance”, published in 2007, Mills examines the distorted perception of reality for many white people. Whites often know frighteningly little about the history of their own societies – as the current discussion about German colonial history makes clear. There are also false beliefs, such as the assumption that the settlers are American Frontier found an unpopulated and arable land, deeply woven into the collective self-image. According to Mills, this ignorance is not accidental: it is systematically related to the socially privileged position of white people and contributes to maintaining racist structures in society.
As a radical critic of liberalism and its blind spots, Mills stuck to the promises of liberalism to the end. In his last book, “Black Rights / White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism”, published in 2017, he outlines the perspective of a “Black radical Liberalism”, which should renew liberalism from the ground up. Only then could the elimination of historically grown injustices and the creation of a condition in which people can actually live as equals and free with one another succeed. We would have liked to have discussed this with him in the future, as well as so much else. Unfortunately he died on Monday of this week at the age of 70.
Rahel Jaeggi and Kristina Lepold are professors for social philosophy at Berlin’s Humboldt University.