Black Rights/white Wrongs

Black Rights/white Wrongs
Author: Charles Wade Mills
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2017
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190245425

Liberalism is the political philosophy of equal persons, yet liberalism has denied equality to those it saw as black sub-persons. In Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, political philosopher Charles Mills challenges mainstream accounts that ignore this history and its current legacy in the United States today.

The Racial Contract

The Racial Contract
Author: Charles W. Mills
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 214
Release: 2022-04-15
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1501764306

The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged "contract" has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence "whites" and "non-whites," full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence. The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state. As this 25th anniversary edition—featuring a foreword by Tommy Shelbie and a new preface by the author—makes clear, the still-urgent The Racial Contract continues to inspire, provoke, and influence thinking about the intersection of the racist underpinnings of political philosophy.

Blackness Visible

Blackness Visible
Author: Charles W. Mills
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Total Pages: 280
Release: 2015-12-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1501702947

Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience. Ralph Ellison's metaphor of black invisibility has special relevance to philosophy, whose demographic and conceptual "whiteness" has long been a source of wonder and complaint to racial minorities. Mills points out the absence of any philosophical narrative theorizing and detailing race's centrality to the recent history of the West, such as feminists have articulated for gender domination.European expansionism in its various forms, Mills contends, generates a social ontology of race that warrants philosophical attention.Through expropriation, settlement, slavery, and colonialism, race comes into existence as simultaneously real and unreal: ontological without being biological, metaphysical without being physical, existential without being essential, shaping one's being without being in one's shape.His essays explore the contrasting sums of a white and black modernity, examine standpoint epistemology and the metaphysics of racial identity, look at black-Jewish relations and racial conspiracy theories, map the workings of a white-supremacist polity and the contours of a racist moral consciousness, and analyze the presuppositions of Frederick Douglass's famous July 4 prognosis for black political inclusion. Collectively they demonstrate what exciting new philosophical terrain can be opened up once the color line in western philosophy is made visible and addressed.

The Tyranny of the Ideal

The Tyranny of the Ideal
Author: Gerald Gaus
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 314
Release: 2019-01-08
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0691183422

In his provocative new book, The Tyranny of the Ideal, Gerald Gaus lays out a vision for how we should theorize about justice in a diverse society. Gaus shows how free and equal people, faced with intractable struggles and irreconcilable conflicts, might share a common moral life shaped by a just framework. He argues that if we are to take diversity seriously and if moral inquiry is sincere about shaping the world, then the pursuit of idealized and perfect theories of justice—essentially, the entire production of theories of justice that has dominated political philosophy for the past forty years—needs to change. Drawing on recent work in social science and philosophy, Gaus points to an important paradox: only those in a heterogeneous society—with its various religious, moral, and political perspectives—have a reasonable hope of understanding what an ideally just society would be like. However, due to its very nature, this world could never be collectively devoted to any single ideal. Gaus defends the moral constitution of this pluralistic, open society, where the very clash and disagreement of ideals spurs all to better understand what their personal ideals of justice happen to be. Presenting an original framework for how we should think about morality, The Tyranny of the Ideal rigorously analyzes a theory of ideal justice more suitable for contemporary times.

From Class to Race

From Class to Race
Author: Charles Mills
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2003-11-19
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0742580881

In From Class to Race, Charles Mills maps the theoretical route that brought him to the innovative conceptual framework outlined in his academic bestseller The Racial Contract (1997). Mills argues for a new critical theory that develops the insights of the black radical political tradition. While challenging conventional interpretations of key Marxist concepts and claims, the author contends that Marxism has been 'white' insofar as it has failed to recognize the centrality of race and white supremacy to the making of the modern world. By appealing to both mainstream liberal values and the structuralism traditionally associated with the left, Mills asserts that critical race theory can radicalize the mainstream Enlightenment and develop a new kind of contractarianism that deals frontally with race and other forms of social oppression rather than evading them.

Voting Rights--and Wrongs

Voting Rights--and Wrongs
Author: Abigail M. Thernstrom
Publisher: A E I Press
Total Pages: 344
Release: 2009
Genre: Law
ISBN: 9780844742724

n this provocative book, Abigail Thernstrom argues that southern resistance to black political power began a process by which the act was radically revised both for good and ill. Congress, the courts, and the Justice Department altered the statute to ensure the election of blacks and Hispanics to legislative bodies ranging from school boards and county councils to the U.S. Congress.

In the Shadow of Justice

In the Shadow of Justice
Author: Katrina Forrester
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 427
Release: 2021-03-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0691216754

"In the Shadow of Justice tells the story of how liberal political philosophy was transformed in the second half of the twentieth century under the influence of John Rawls. In this first-ever history of contemporary liberal theory, Katrina Forrester shows how liberal egalitarianism--a set of ideas about justice, equality, obligation, and the state--became dominant, and traces its emergence from the political and ideological context of the postwar United States and Britain. In the aftermath of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War, Rawls's A Theory of Justice made a particular kind of liberalism essential to political philosophy. Using archival sources, Forrester explores the ascent and legacy of this form of liberalism by examining its origins in midcentury debates among American antistatists and British egalitarians. She traces the roots of contemporary theories of justice and inequality, civil disobedience, just war, global and intergenerational justice, and population ethics in the 1960s and '70s and beyond. In these years, political philosophers extended, developed, and reshaped this liberalism as they responded to challenges and alternatives on the left and right--from the New International Economic Order to the rise of the New Right. These thinkers remade political philosophy in ways that influenced not only their own trajectory but also that of their critics. Recasting the history of late twentieth-century political thought and providing novel interpretations and fresh perspectives on major political philosophers, In the Shadow of Justice offers a rigorous look at liberalism's ambitions and limits."--

Seeing Race Again

Seeing Race Again
Author: Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2019-02-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0520972147

Every academic discipline has an origin story complicit with white supremacy. Racial hierarchy and colonialism structured the very foundations of most disciplines’ research and teaching paradigms. In the early twentieth century, the academy faced rising opposition and correction, evident in the intervention of scholars including W. E. B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Carter G. Woodson, and others. By the mid-twentieth century, education itself became a center in the struggle for social justice. Scholars mounted insurgent efforts to discredit some of the most odious intellectual defenses of white supremacy in academia, but the disciplines and their keepers remained unwilling to interrogate many of the racist foundations of their fields, instead embracing a framework of racial colorblindness as their default position. This book challenges scholars and students to see race again. Examining the racial histories and colorblindness in fields as diverse as social psychology, the law, musicology, literary studies, sociology, and gender studies, Seeing Race Again documents the profoundly contradictory role of the academy in constructing, naturalizing, and reproducing racial hierarchy. It shows how colorblindness compromises the capacity of disciplines to effectively respond to the wide set of contemporary political, economic, and social crises marking public life today.

Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality

Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality
Author: Charles Wade Mills
Publisher: University of West Indies Press
Total Pages: 284
Release: 2010
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 9789766402273

Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality is a collection of articles written over many years that explores the common themes of race and class in the Caribbean and the attempt to overcome social domination. Beginning with an autobiographical account of how his own philosophical outlook was shaped by the radicalization of the region following the 1968 Rodney riots, Jamaican philosopher Charles Mills looks both at those turbulent times and at their aftermath. The essays examine abstract political theory (Marxism, critical race theory, liberal social contract theory) while also focusing on specific Caribbean ideas, issues and events, such as M.G. Smith's plural society thesis. portrayals of the Jamaican left in popular thrillers, the collapse of the Grenada Revolution, "smadditizin"' as the affirmation of personhood in a racist society and the evolution of Stuart Hall's views on race. As such, they all share a concern with the struggle for a more just social order and are "radically" oriented. The title has a double meaning insofar as it signifies both the application of radical theory to the Caribbean reality, and the ways in which that reality has too often collided with the theory; revealing its inadequacies. As Mills explains, "The overall aim is to clucidate some classic subjects and themes in radical theory, both generally and with local Caribbean application, and to map in the process a trajectory of intellectual development not peculiar to my own history but traced by many others of my generation also." "Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality is a long overdue collection on the Caribbean from one of its most accomplished scholars....Mills's books to date have focused either on broad questions of race or specific matters related to ideology. This, in a sense, represents his coming home to the Caribbean and his analysis of late-twentieth-century Caribbean polities and society."---Brian Meeks, Professor of Social and Political Change, Director of the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, and Director of the Centre for Caribbean Thought, University of the West Indies, Jamaica

The Time is Always Now

The Time is Always Now
Author: Nick Bromell
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 201
Release: 2013-09-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0199973458

"Why," asks Nick Bromell, "should the political thought of white Americans remain the only theory to which Americans of all ethnicities turn when constructing and reconstructing their understanding of democracy? Must Americans remain locked in an apartheid of experience and perception even after whites have become a minority population in this nation? Hasn't the 2012 presidential election made clear that the time has come to build not just on the votes of citizens of color, but on the varieties of democratic thought their experience has engendered?" In his answers to these questions, Bromell brings to light an underappreciated stream of democratic reflection by black writers and activists from David Walker to Malcolm X. Bromell argues that these thinkers urge Americans to fundamentally re-imagine the nature of their democracy and recognize that indignation can be a powerful and productive democratic emotion; that dignity is just as important to democracy as equality and liberty; that national citizenship can be infused with a sense of responsibility to the world; and that faith can actually promote rather than threaten democratic pluralism. A literary critic and intellectual historian, Bromell draws on a wide range of fiction, essays, speeches, and oral histories, deftly synthesizing recent work in U.S. history, literary and cultural studies, and political theory. Like the figures he discusses, he puts this thought to work in the present moment, this "now." Black democratic insights, he shows, are strikingly relevant to the challenges facing US democracy today, and they provide the basis for a new, post-liberal public philosophy with which to turn back the rise of radical conservatism. Historian Robin D.G. Kelley writes: "In this work of enormous breadth, depth, and imagination, Nick Bromell makes what may be the most original contribution to political theory in the past decade. In this age of alleged color blindness, Bromell has the vision and the chutzpah to turn to African American thought-ideas born of struggle, anchored in questions of dignity, human relationships, and faith-in order to revitalize American democracy. "