Beginning with his best-selling The Racial Contract (1997), Charles Mills has been one of the principal and most eloquent voices attempting to shine a light on philosophy’s persistent whiteness. Mills has sought to have philosophy grapple with the fact that liberalism—contra the usual conflation of its theoretical commitments with the actual historical record—“has historically been predominantly a racial liberalism, in which conceptions of personhood and resulting schedules of rights, duties, and government responsibilities have all been racialized” (p. 29). One could thus characterize his intellectual life’s work as seeking to redress the “moral evasions” and “ethnic cleansings” of the analytic variant of liberal political philosophy that has been dominant in U.S. academic circles since the publication of John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice (1971).
In Black Rights/White Wrongs, Mills gives a rather pessimistic assessment of the success of this project, observing that the effect of The Racial Contract on “mainstream political philosophy in general and social contract theory in particular” has been “close to zero” (p. 191). While he does recognize the book’s impact on other disciplines, Mills suggests (I think correctly) that for this audience, the “contract framework is quite dispensable. . . . It is not the case that most of these academics—certainly not those outside philosophy—are interested in the exercise of seeing how Rawlsian contract theory can be revised and reconstructed” (p. 192). This is the dilemma driving his current book: Mills’s oeuvre has been embraced by many as a powerful critique of liberalism and contractarianism, while he views his work as a call for the rearticulation of these traditions in more radical and truly egalitarian forms.
Mills, it could be argued, rejects Audre Lorde’s famous dictum that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house (Sister Outsider, 1984, p. 112).” Contra Lorde, Mills seeks to recuperate contractarian liberalism from its racial origins and reframe it conceptually to place questions of racial justice at its center. “Occupying” liberalism is worthwhile, he argues, for both substantive and strategic reasons: Liberalism’s ideal of moral equality is normatively attractive even if it has never been fully implemented in practice, and as the dominant political ideology in the world today, a conception of racial justice rooted in it has a greater likelihood of being adopted (p. 178). He offers “black radical liberalism” as an example of a “self-consciously anti-racist liberalism” that “(a) recognizes white supremacy as central to the making of the United States and (more sweepingly) the modern world, and (b) seeks to rethink the categories, crucial assumptions, and descriptive and normative frameworks of liberalism in the light of that recognition” (p. 203). Drawing on Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, and W. E. B. Du Bois, his “black radical liberalism” aims to synthesize “the most valuable insights of the black nationalist and black Marxist traditions and incorporates them into a dramatically transformed liberalism” (p. 191).
With the exception of the brief epilogue, however, Black Rights/White Wrongs does not actually sketch “black radical liberalism,” which, Mills tell us, is a project for a future book. Instead, his aim in this book is to show why that project is necessary. He demonstrates in rigorous detail how all extant variants of liberalism, and in particular the Rawlsian variant, have in fact been racially exclusionary, contrary to their self-understanding. This has led them all to consistently evade one of the pressing political problems of the modern era: how to redress racial injustices that were central to the actual historical emergence of modern liberal political orders, such as indigenous genocide and expropriation, the transatlantic slave trade, and Third World colonization.
Mills is a philosopher, and this book is a collection of previously published essays, most of which appeared in nonpolitical science outlets, that work well as a coherent entity. All of the chapters are persuasive and rigorously argued, and peppered with the author’s distinctive humor. Chapter 2, “Occupy Liberalism!” is his manifesto, while Chapter 3 on racial liberalism cogently and succinctly lays out more than 200 years of modern Euro-American political thought, showing how liberalism has consistently had a racial, gendered, and imperial character despite its stated commitment to the moral equality of all persons. Three chapters are all concerned, in various ways, with the place of race in Rawls’s oeuvre and the applicability of his work to questions of racial justice: Chapter 5 on ideal theory, Chapter 8 on Rawls’s silence on race, and Chapter 9 on Tommie Shelby’s reformulation of Rawlsian principles of justice.
The two chapters that will probably be of most interest to political theorists and political scientists make an important contribution to our understanding of racism: Chapter 4 on white ignorance (a revised version of a previously published essay on race and epistemology) and Chapter 7, which sketches an account of the concept of racial exploitation. Also noteworthy is Chapter 6 on how to reconcile Kant’s writings on race with his much more well known work on ethics and cosmopolitanism, which exemplifies how political theorists and philosophers can meet Mills’s challenge to cease whitewashing the Western canon by grappling directly with the racist aspects of the work of central figures in the tradition, rather than setting them aside as marginal. Indeed, Mills’s unflinching candor about the whiteness of philosophy raises uncomfortable questions for political theorists and political scientists about where (and by whom) race is studied in the field, and whether this work is viewed as central or marginal to the discipline’s core concerns.
Political theorists and political scientists working on race will find most of Mills’s arguments in this book compelling. Yet even if it is the case that liberalism is now the only game in town, as the author argues, important questions remain. I briefly point to two of them here. The first has to do with how to overcome the blindnesses and evasions in liberal theory that he has systematically critiqued. If one assumes, as Mills does, that these evasions are not conceptually constitutive, one way to overcome them is by supplementing canonical sources with other traditions that have directly confronted the real history of the modern world. As he points out, liberalism’s various founding fictions, such as “the state of nature as empty of aboriginal peoples, society as non-exploitatively and consensually and cooperatively founded … are unavoidably an abstraction from the European and Euro-American experience of modernity. . . . It is in effect . . . a conceptualization ultimately grounded in and apposite for the experience of white settlerdom” (pp. 38–39). Lorde’s claim about the master’s tools can thus be taken as a call to engage with subaltern thinkers and traditions in order to develop “a new tool kit” that would take “the experience of expropriated reds, enslaved blacks, annexed browns, and excluded yellows” as its starting point (p. 115), which is what Mills hopes that liberal theory will do.
It is thus somewhat puzzling that (with the brief exception of Du Bois, whom Mills draws on to sketch the concept of racial exploitation) nonwhite, non-European thinkers are absent from Black Rights/White Wrongs. This absence is not without consequences. Mills suggests that the usual fault line in black political thought between black liberalism and more radical political projects, such as black Marxism and black nationalism, can be overcome by incorporating the core insights of the latter into a synthetic “black radical liberalism.” In order for this move to work, Mills explains that in his view, the key insight of black nationalism “is the recognition of the reality and centrality of an ontology of race and how it shapes people and their psychology” (p. 204). But this characterization does not grapple with projects of black autonomy that stress the importance of a politics of refusal vis-à-vis the (liberal) state present in certain strands of black nationalism. Moreover, as debates about the aims and tactics of the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States illustrate, it is not the case that such positions have somehow been superseded by forms of black politics that are more compatible with liberalism. Likewise, despite Mills’s commendable attention to the parallel silences about race and gender in mainstream liberal theory, it is not clear how black radical liberalism addresses black feminist critiques that stress the need to move beyond formal equality and economic exploitation in conceptions of racial justice, such as Shatema Threadcraft’s Intimate Justice (2016). Focusing on those aspects of black political thought that are compatible with “black radical liberalism” may thus risk flattening out the breadth and scope of the tradition, which would be unfortunate insofar as it and other subaltern philosophical traditions are already understudied in mainstream political theory and philosophy, as Mills himself has tirelessly observed.
Setting aside for a moment the question of whether it is indeed possible for liberalism to shed its white skin and don a black mask, I also wonder whether Mills overstates the strategic argument for reconstructing liberalism. Despite the endless debates in the United States about the motivations of the white working class since the 2016 presidential election, racial dynamics in the Trump era seem to point to white voters’ increasing focus on symbolic rather than material losses manifested in a politics of white grievance, as I have argued elsewhere. This suggests that it would be difficult to recruit them to the kind of cross-racial antiracist alliance that Mills envisions (p. 133). If couching arguments against racial injustice in liberal terms does not in fact necessarily make them more broadly appealing, this seems to undercut the strategic rationale for seeking to reconstruct contractarian liberalism.
As Mills ruefully predicts, many of his readers may be skeptical about the project of reconstructing contractarian liberalism, yet they will benefit enormously and learn a great deal from engaging with his latest book, as I undoubtedly have. I eagerly await the next book in which Mills’s black radical liberalism is fully developed, which promises to be a tour de force. In the meantime, Black Rights/White Wrongs makes a powerful case that such a reworking of liberalism is urgently needed, and why.
