George Yancy: You are a philosopher who thinks very deeply
about issues of race. Can you provide a sense of your work?
Charles Mills: I think a simple way to sum it up would be as
the transition from white Marxism to (what I have recently started calling)
black radical liberalism.
G.Y.: So, how does “white” modify Marxism? And what is it
about the modification that helps to account for the transition to what you’re
now calling black radical liberalism?
C.M.: Mainstream Marxism has (with a few honorable
exceptions) been “white” in the sense that it has not historically realized or
acknowledged the extent to which European expansionism in the modern period
(the late 15th century and onward) creates a racialized world, so that class
categories have to share theoretical space with categories of personhood and
subpersonhood. Modernity is supposed to usher in the epoch of individualism.
The Marxist critique is then that the elimination of feudal estates still
leaves intact material/economic differences (capitalist and worker) between
nominally classless and normatively equal individuals. But the racial critique
points out that people of color don’t even attain normative equality.
In the new language of the time of “men” or “persons”
(displacing citizens and slaves, lords and serfs), they are not even full
persons.
Social justice theory should be reconnected with its
real-world roots, the correction of injustices.
So a theorization of the implications of a globally racially
partitioned personhood becomes crucial, and liberalism — once informed by and
revised in the light of the black experience — can be very valuable in working
this out. In a forthcoming essay collection for Oxford University Press, “Black
Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism,” I try to make a case
for this retrieval — the deracialization of a liberalism historically
racialized.
G.Y.: So what then is left of the value of Marxism? And does
your point mean that there is, historically, a fundamental relationship
(perhaps tension) between the political ideals of modernity, the phenomenon of
white supremacy and the subhuman racialization of black people?
C.M.: Marxism is still of value in various ways: its mapping
of the revolutionary transformative effects of capitalism on the modern world;
its diagnosis of trends of concentration of wealth and poverty in capitalist
societies (Thomas Piketty’s best-seller, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century,”
pays tribute to Marx’s insights, while distancing itself from some of his
conclusions); its warning of the influence of the material economic sphere on
the legal, cultural, political and ideational realms.
It also has various weaknesses, the recounting of which would
be too long to get into here. Yes, I would claim that the tension between
recognizing (some) people as “individuals” in modernity while subordinating
others through expropriation, chattel slavery and colonialism requires a
dichotomization in the ranks of the human. So we get what I termed above a
“racial” liberalism, which extends personhood on a racially restricted basis.
White supremacy can then be seen as a system of domination, which, by the start
of the 20th century, becomes global and which is predicated on the denial of
equal normative status to people of color. As members of what was originally
seen as a “slave race” (the children of Ham), blacks have generally been at the
bottom of these hierarchies. But the exclusions were broader, even if other
nonwhite races were positioned higher on the normative ladder. At the 1919
post-World War I Versailles Conference, for example, the Japanese delegation’s
proposal to incorporate a racial equality clause in the League of Nations’
Covenant was vetoed by the six “Anglo-Saxon” nations — Britain, the United
States, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. (For a detailed
account, see “Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the
International Challenge of Racial Equality” by Marilyn Lake and Henry
Reynolds.) So this event brings out in a wonderfully clear-cut way the reality
of a global polity normatively divided between racial equals and racial
unequals.
G.Y.: How do you understand the meaning of white supremacy?
And why is it that the reality of white supremacy has escaped traditional and
perhaps contemporary political philosophers and philosophy? I wonder if there
isn’t a subtle, as you say, “dichotomization in the ranks of the human”
operating even here.
C.M.: By “white supremacy” I mean a system of sociopolitical
domination, whether formal (de jure) or informal (de facto), that is
characterized by racial exploitation and the denial of equal opportunities to
nonwhites, thereby privileging whites both nationally and globally.
Historically, I would say that it was recognized by traditional (modern)
political philosophy, but it was generally taken for granted and positively
valorized. After World War II and decolonization, of course, the public
expression of such views becomes impolitic. So you then have a retroactive
sanitization of the racist past and the role of the leading Western political
philosophers and ethicists in justifying Western domination.
In the fields of political theory and international
relations, there’s now a growing body of revisionist work documenting this
history, for example Jennifer Pitts’s “A Turn to Empire: The Rise of Imperial
Liberalism in Britain and France,” John M. Hobson’s “The Eurocentric Conception
of World Politics: Western International Theory, 1760-2010,” and Alexander
Anievas, Nivi Manchanda and Robbie Shilliam’s co-edited forthcoming “Race and
Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line.”
Unfortunately, mainstream political philosophy is lagging behind the times in
its refusal to admit the significance of this colonial and imperial past, the
way it has shaped the modern world, and its implications for conceptualizing
justice, both nationally and globally. Here in the United States, for example,
we have the absurd situation of a huge philosophical literature on social
justice in which racial injustice — the most salient of American injustices —
is barely mentioned.
G.Y.: In your 1997 book, “The Racial Contract,” you discuss
the concept of an “epistemology of ignorance,” a term which I believe you
actually coined. What is meant by that term? And how do you account for the
complete thematic marginalization of racial justice? Does an epistemology of
ignorance help to explain it?
Political philosophy needs to exit Rawlsland — a fantasy
world in the same extraterrestrial league as Wonderland, Oz and Middle-earth
(if not as much fun) — and return to planet Earth.
C.M.: Yes, I believe it does help to explain it, but first
let me say something about the term. The phrasing (“epistemology of ignorance”)
was calculatedly designed by me to be attention-getting through appearing to be
oxymoronic. I was trying to capture the idea of norms of cognition that so
function as to work against successful cognition. Systems of domination affect
us not merely in terms of material advantage and disadvantage, but also in
terms of likelihoods of getting things right or wrong, since unfair social
privilege reproduces itself in part through people learning to see and feel
about the world in ways that accommodate injustice. “Ignorance” is actively
reproduced and is resistant to elimination. This is, of course, an old insight
of the left tradition with respect to class. I was just translating it into a
different vocabulary and applying it to race. So one can see the idea (and my
later work on “white ignorance”) as my attempt to contribute to the new “social
epistemology,” which breaks with traditional Cartesian epistemological
individualism, but in my opinion needs to focus more on social oppression than
it currently does.
Ignorance as a subject worthy of investigation in its own
right has, by the way, become so academically important that next year
Routledge is publishing a big reference volume on the topic, the “Routledge
International Handbook of Ignorance Studies,” edited by Matthias Gross and
Linsey McGoey. The book covers numerous varieties of ignorance over a wide
range of different areas and divergent etiologies, but my own invited
contribution (“Global White Ignorance”) appears in the section on ignorance and
social oppression. In this chapter, I argue that modernity is cognitively
marked by a broad pattern in which whites generally endorse racist views (one
type of ignorance) in the period of formal global white domination, and then
(roughly from the post-World War II, decolonial period onward) shift to the
endorsement of views that nominally decry racism, but downplay the impact of
the racist past on the present configuration of wealth and opportunities
(another type of ignorance). So remedial measures of racial justice are not
necessary, and white privilege from illicit structural advantage, historic and
ongoing, can remain intact and unthreatened. Insofar as mainstream “white”
American political philosophy ignores these realities (and there are, of
course, praiseworthy exceptions, like Elizabeth Anderson’s “The Imperative of
Integration”), it can be judged, in my opinion, to be maintaining this
tradition.
G.Y.: So, would it be fair to say that contemporary political
philosophy, as engaged by many white philosophers, is a species of white
racism?
C.M.: That would be too strong, though I certainly wouldn’t
want to discount the ongoing influence of personal racism (now more likely to
be culturalist than biological — that’s another aspect of the postwar shift),
especially given the alarming recent findings of cognitive psychology about the
pervasiveness of implicit bias. But racialized causality can work more
indirectly and structurally. 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.
G.Y.: So, part of what I hear you saying is the need to make
important metaphilosophical shifts regarding the whiteness of political
philosophy, in particular, and the whiteness of the profession of philosophy,
more generally. What are a few of these shifts?
C.M.: Yes, by its very nature, political philosophy is going
to have a meta-dimension, in that the drawing of the boundaries of the
political is itself often a political act. The best-known example in recent
decades of such a challenge is feminist political theory, which classically
argued that the conventional liberal division between the public and the
private spheres needed to be rethought, since as it stood, gender injustice was
obfuscated by the relegation of the family to the “apolitical” realm of the
domestic. More recently, we’ve seen the challenges of postcolonial theory and
queer theory, though they haven’t had much of an impact in philosophy circles,
and certainly not in analytic political philosophy circles.
The radically divergent perspectives on reality of blacks and
whites are a straightforward reflection of the radically different realities in
which they live.
In the case of race, we need to do various things, like
exposing the racism of most of the important liberal theorists (such as Kant),
asking what the actual color-coded (rather than sanitized for later public
consumption) versions of their theories are saying (are blacks full persons for
Kant, for example?), and how these racially partitioned norms justified a
white-dominant colonial world. (See my “Kant and Race, Redux” in the
forthcoming special issue on race and the history of philosophy of the Graduate
Faculty Philosophy Journal.) As I said above, we need to recognize and
investigate the workings of racial liberalism/imperial liberalism, since this
is the actual version of liberalism that has made the modern world and that,
more subtly today, is continuing to help maintain its topography of illicit
racialized privilege and disadvantage. In the title of one of my papers, we
need to be “Liberalizing Illiberal Liberalism,” a reconstruction of liberal
theory.
Likewise, we need to ask how it came about, and has come to
seem normal, that “social justice” as a philosophical concept has become so
detached from the concerns of actual social justice movements. Certainly it’s
not the case that if people in the civil rights community were planning a
conference on racial justice next month that they would be heatedly debating
which philosophers to invite! Rather, mainstream political philosophy is seen
as irrelevant to such forums because of the bizarre way it has developed since
Rawls (a bizarreness not recognized as such by its practitioners because of the
aforementioned norms of disciplinary socialization). Social justice theory
should be reconnected with its real-world roots, the correction of injustices,
which means that rectificatory justice in non-ideal societies should be the
theoretical priority, not distributive justice in ideal societies. Political
philosophy needs to exit Rawlsland — a fantasy world in the same extraterrestrial
league as Wonderland, Oz and Middle-earth (if not as much fun) — and return to
planet Earth.
G.Y.: How does your work speak to the situation going on in
Ferguson, Mo., and in other places in the United States where racial injustice
and conflict is flaring?
C.M.: I would say that unfortunately it brings home the
extent to which — in the second decade of the 21st century, nearly 150 years
after the end of the Civil War and with a black president in office — black
citizens are still differentially vulnerable to police violence, thereby
illustrating their (our) second-class citizenship. The “racial contract” as a
theory of the actual non-ideal workings of society and the polity is obviously
going to be a far more illuminating framework for understanding and redressing
these problems than an idealized social contract that takes socially recognized
moral equality and corresponding equitable treatment, independent of race, to
be the norm.
G.Y.: Finally, you mentioned the alarming information coming
out of cognitive psychology regarding implicit bias. I recall reading recently
an article that suggested some black Americans think that the Secret Service’s
failure to protect President Obama is due to the fact that he is black. Why do
you think that these perceptions continue to exist? Are they reasonable? I ask
this especially because your epistemology of ignorance position does suggest
that black people will have a different epistemic perspective on reality —
right?
C.M.: The radically divergent perspectives on reality of
blacks and whites are a straightforward reflection of the radically different
realities in which they live. Segregation has deep cognitive consequences as
well as the more familiar consequences for one’s chances at a good education,
home ownership in good neighborhoods, being able to escape gang violence, etc.
That doesn’t mean that black majority opinion is always going to be right, of
course. But you would expect that those more subject to the inequities of the
system will in general be the ones more likely to have a realistic perspective
on it. Whites have not merely an unrepresentative group experience, but a
vested group interest in self-deception. Sociologists have documented the
remarkable extent to which large numbers of white Americans get the most basic
things wrong about their society once race is involved. (See, for some
hilarious examples, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s “Racism Without Racists.”) My
favorite example, from a poll about three years ago, is that a majority of
white Americans now believe that whites are the race most likely to be the
victims of racial discrimination! If that’s not an epistemology of ignorance at
work, I don’t know what would be.
