93 | Charles Mills and the Racial Contract
Added 2024-07-16 17:16:04 +0000 UTCIn this episode, we talk about the late, great Charles Mills and his landmark book The Racial Contract. Forcefully arguing that the modern discourse of egalitarianism and freedom is underwritten by a tacit commitment to global white supremacy, Mills develops an immanent criticism of liberalism that remains faithful to many of its core values. We discuss the limits and promises of liberal universalism, the potential reform of contractarian logic, and whether white people really mean it when they say they want to abolish whiteness. Rest in peace to a really real one.
References:
Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).
Music:
“Vintage Memories” by Schematist | schematist.bandcamp.com
“My Space” by Overu | https://get.slip.stream/KqmvAN
Comments
I'd love to hear you do an episode on 'Black Marxism' by Cedric Robinson, which I think is a much more convincing exploration of racial capitalism and colonialism embracing W.E.B. DuBois, CLR James (whom you did in Episode 9) and Richard Wright. It also dovetails nicely with Vanessa Wills' work on capitalism and race and with the Gramsci episode, as Robinson views the failures of previous black leaders as being due to their membership of the petit-beourgeois class that ultimately backs down because it is not truly "organic", i.e. drawn from the actual proletariat, and Gramsci insisted that "organic intellectuals" can only come from the true "subalterns", as he called them.
Satchmo Distel
2024-08-12 17:22:31 +0000 UTCyeah seriously incredible episode. related to the last comments, is it is very valuable that mills through a large portion of racial contract does cite actual colonial & political contracts, as in documents written & signed by individual people that are enforcing racialization. way in contrast to most of contractualist theory which relies almost exclusively on metaphors about the relationship of people to the state, and at best derived from documentation that isnt NEARLY as explicit as colonial documentation prioritizing whiteness. my biggest takeaway from the racial contract was that its a really good point against contractualism that the broadest historically shaping literal paper contracts of the modern era were about depossessing and dehumanizing most of the worlds population. which makes you feel crazy when you try to say its really weird that mills ended the book with a defense of contractarianism in principle
Quinn
2024-08-03 07:02:08 +0000 UTCstill at the beginning of this but lilians summary of her thoughts was almost exactly my impression reading Racial Contract. great episode topic & great so far, really helpful for me bc yeah my impression of Mills was so many ambivalent feelings, been hard to say to people interested in this topic "yeah seems like mills is basically just a liberal but i like him as a liberal"
Quinn
2024-08-03 06:14:31 +0000 UTCThe book Will was searching the title for, is "Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality" and contains more of Mills' Marxist period work than "From Class to Race" and a much fuller and more nuanced account of the background to his eventual conversion from Marxism to Radical Liberalism. The "Caribbean Reality" of the title is a reference to the catastrophic collapse of the radical Marxist regime on Grenada, which involved an internal coup and the murder of much of the leadership by the golpistas, even before the subsequent US invasion in 1983. Above all he writes movingly on the devastating effect this had on a whole generation of young Caribbean Marxist radicals of the era - of which he was one. It's definitely worth a read to counter the somewhat mystifying effect of the truncated account in "Race to Class" and the two "transitional" essays included in that collection, which are at best troll-y and possibly the weakest of his published pieces, imho. "Caribbean Reality" provides the missing background. It is a great pity that Mills was untimely cut short before he was able to fulfil the project he promised in his last works - an actual worked out defence of Radical Liberalism as a philosophical standpoint. Not that I would be the target audience, but it would be good to have a substantial work on this ideological tendency that, in numerical terms at least, currently outweighs the radical left, at least in North America and the anglophone world (and I see its influence spreading in the francophone world as well - and I don't just mean the right's adoption of the language of "le wokisme"). I think Lilian is right in that, much as Mills has the background to cultivate a studied ambiguity over, and make strategic nods to, materialism, in the end it's not really sustainable in his radlib work. To frame it somewhat dogmatically, I think the core inversion within the radical liberal frame is that it ultimately holds that ideologies (of oppression) create social relations (of domination) and not the other way around (the materialist position). Finally, just to give another anecdote on the incredible generosity of this man, I actually emailed him on spec a few years back (2020) asking if he had a digital copy of his Phd thesis. Rather than file this incredibly cheeky request from a total randomer in the bin, he not only replied, but also sent me pdfs (I explained I wasn't in academia and didn't have journal access) of the articles he'd written developing the themes of the Phd. A true gent. Sorely missed
Paul Bowman
2024-07-17 18:33:50 +0000 UTC
