Charles Mills: On Seeing and Naming the Whiteness of Philosophy

This put up was initially revealed on The Philosopher as a part of a collection of essays and interviews on the life and philosophy of Charles W. Mills curated and edited by Darren Chetty and Adam Ferner. You may learn the total collection of essays and interviews within the latest issue of The Philosopher. 

On a couple of event, I obtained an e mail message from Charles Mills advising me to watch out and that he was involved about me. He would specific such warnings and apprehensions after I might share with him one thing that I had written and that was revealed exterior of educational philosophy channels correct. What Mills was speaking carried super weight and suggested considerate warning. Not solely did I deeply respect Mills’ philosophical originality, vary, depth, and acuity, however I additionally appreciated his deeply caring disposition. So, in me, there was super admiration for a colleague, for a pal, who not solely appreciated the integrity of philosophers who have interaction philosophizing within the spirit of parrhesia (or brave speech), however who was additionally conscious of the particular and potential risks that such a mode of philosophizing risked producing. I additionally appreciated Mills’ honesty in speaking his worries to me. This was not one thing that I usually obtained (or obtain) from skilled philosophers who had been (are) additionally conscious of a few of my high-profile public articles. As I believe again about my preliminary discovery of philosophy, I had no sense that working towards it will event potential hazard to myself or worry of backlash. For me, the sphere of philosophy was “apolitical.” It was what these few who had been dedicated to the lifetime of thoughts did throughout the pristine halls of academia, it was essentially an intramural exercise. In spite of everything, philosophy (and philosophers) epitomized the “purity of abstraction,” and the seek for “universality.” That was definitely what I believed at the moment. Philosophy was airtight, leaving the social and the political complexities of quotidian life to those that didn’t have the will for “pure intellection,” or monastic philosophical contemplation. Plato’s Socrates, the one in quest of timeless information was my hero. I missed or averted Socrates’ condemnation and his sip of hemlock. Furthermore, I had completely no concept relating to the whiteness of the sphere of philosophy, its pretensions, and the way the morphology of its philosophical assumptions and issues had been formed by the dynamics of white energy and privilege. I didn’t see the debauchery, the truth that “loads of philosophy,” as Mills (1998) noticed, “is simply white guys jerking off” (p.4).        

At 17-years-old, I stumbled upon the sphere of philosophy in The World Guide Encyclopedia. Previous to discovering that there was such a subject, even such a phrase, I had already been moved by a capacious sense of surprise. I felt a deep unsettling anxiousness within the pit of my abdomen, on the core of my being, that longed for solutions to a few of life’s deepest questions. I wished to know why we existed in any respect, why there have been so many non secular worldviews (and which one was true), whether or not God exists or not, and why we needed to die, and if there was something after we died. Initially studying about philosophy in The World Guide Encyclopedia, I learn temporary introductions relating to the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant, Hegel, and others. Weeks later, I insatiably learn by way of Bertrand Russell’s The Historical past of Western Philosophy. It was studying that textual content that led me to assume deeply about Plato’s principle of Varieties and what Russell stated about Spinoza vis-à-vis the mental love of God. In brief, I used to be enthralled by philosophy and ensconced in its ethereal nature. In philosophy, I had discovered my calling or philosophy had discovered me. I soared. I used to be “at house,” and summary questions inside metaphysics had been my forte. Locked in my room, I used to be in my factor. What philosophy needed to say of worth to these exterior the consolation of my room was worthless. Once more, although, I had not but come to know simply how alienating philosophy could possibly be, how its meta-philosophical assumptions had been racially exclusionary, and the way being “at house” throughout the subject of philosophy was a deeply misleading trope. On reflection, I got here to really feel misled relating to philosophy’s conceptual purity. The anti-Black conceptual girders and beams inside philosophy had been hidden. I assume the joke (extra like yoke) was on me.       

Even earlier than understanding the white racial dynamics of philosophy, which functioned, inter alia, to obfuscate and keep away from the non-ideal circumstances of anti-Black racism, there was this profound sense of melancholy, urgency, and dread that I felt. That deep unsettling anxiousness within the pit of my abdomen wasn’t simply unsatiated summary surprise. There was a way of ardour within the etymological sense of struggling. That temper has by no means left me; it has deepened. I didn’t simply assume about such metaphysical questions, I felt the load of such questions; my physique would actually shake. I later realized that Socrates was stated by no means to have cried. Effectively, I cried. With tears streaming, and searching excessive into the sky, I might generally shout, yell out, as I sought to know the conundrum of human existence and why we’re right here. There was all the time a deep silence, a silence that left me feeling forsaken. This was no adolescent existential disaster. The silence continues, and the sense of abandonment resurfaces. I don’t recall any of my philosophy professors (all of whom had been white) overtly disclosing such affective depth, which, after all, doesn’t imply that they didn’t expertise such depth. I believe that I used to be haunted by the silence from the gods of the philosophers, haunted by the fact that demise all the time felt far too imminent, haunted by the plurality of spiritual beliefs that left me involved concerning the souls of unbelievers and people devotees of various religions, particularly given the idea that not all of them may be proper. After which there was the haunting by the sheer incontrovertible fact that I’m, right here and now, with none clear sense of why it’s that I’m. That truth left (and continues to go away) me with super affective unease, and a deep sense of crushing meaninglessness. So, I endure. After I train philosophy, I attempt to talk this a part of myself to my college students. They arrive to know that, for me, the philosophical stakes are excessive. Maybe because of this my college students typically depart my courses in silence. I wish to depart them with the load of impending demise, and the voracious worms that await them/us. I need them to hold the load of this data, to look into that “abyss” and discover braveness, which means, hope, and love. In stream with Black thinker Cornel West (2009), I’m compelled to convey consideration to the funk of life, the putrefaction of corpses, the profound sense of human loss, oppression of the least of those, dread, and pleasure (p.5); I’m a thinker who’s painfully conscious of a blues-soaked cosmos that can be drenched with the complexity of thriller.       

What does this must do with Charles Mills? Effectively, metaphilosophically, every thing. The struggling that I’ve come to determine with how I follow philosophy, rejects the phantasm that philosophy may be carried out from “nowhere,” one which presupposes a disembodied, impassive, disinterested self. Reasonably, philosophy is all the time carried out from someplace, an embodied right here. And whereas early on I didn’t see what this meant by way of processes and social forces of racialization, there was one thing that I delivered to philosophy and philosophical questions, there was an intense affective framing, a strategy of mediation. I understood this. Certainly, I’ve since complexified this understanding. For me, as I see it now, doing philosophy carries formative traces of my affective disposition, my temperament, my hidden assumptions, the acuity of my philosophical creativeness, my lived experiences, my historic context, the epistemic regimes, and communities of intelligibility that I’ve inherited. Certainly, doing philosophy, for me, is impacted by the historic facticity of my Blackness. How I take into consideration philosophy and do philosophy now could be impacted by the fact of the horrors of anti-Black racism, the ache and gratuitous violence endured by Black our bodies, the pervasive dehumanization of Black individuals, and the truth that they’ve been categorized and handled as sub-human and sub-persons in response to a philosophical anthropology predicated upon whiteness. After I found philosophy, I used to be seduced by its claims to “universality,” to philosophy qua philosophy. I didn’t see the faces in The World Guide Encyclopedia as white. I noticed them as human faces, as philosophers simpliciter, as human beings. I had no concept that many of those philosophers supported unabashed racist concepts, particularly anti-Black racist concepts. Isn’t this partly the best way energy works, although? I wasn’t alleged to see it. It conceals itself by way of machinations, maneuvers that conceal its questionable origins and taken-for-granted histories, discourses, mythopoetic constructions, and epistemologies. I didn’t see it coming.

Lots of the identical philosophers who I admired as an adolescent (Hume, Kant, Hegel) had been racists. Whereas I fantasized about being like them, they “knew” that I used to be Black and thereby couldn’t perceive their works. For Hume, Black individuals had been parrots and had no unique ideas of their very own (Eze, 1997, p.33). For Kant (1960), to be Black from head to toe was clear proof that what a Black particular person says is silly (p.133). And for Hegel (2000), Black individuals didn’t possess Geist or Spirit (pp.40-41). Understanding the fact that such hegemonic, anti-Black racist logics are embedded throughout the subject that I cherished—philosophy—generated extra struggling. There was a way of betrayal. One internalizes a way of philosophical illegitimacy and incompetence. It turned one other website of struggling. Inside the subject of philosophy, as a Black particular person, “I wished to return lithe and younger right into a world that was ours and to assist to construct it collectively” (Fanon, 1967, pp. 112-13). As a substitute, as Frantz Fanon (1967) says, I used to be “sealed into that crushing objecthood” (p.109). To be within the firm of white philosophers was to be a factor of curiosity, maybe even scandalous: “Look, a Black thinker!” Strolling with Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Cause tucked beneath my arm got here with its personal internalized torment: “In Europe, that’s to say, in each civilized and civilizing nation, the Negro is the image of sin. The archetype of the bottom values is represented by the Negro” (Fanon, 1967, p. 189). Suppose right here of the toxicity of Black double consciousness that W. E. B. Du Bois (1903) characterised as “this sense of all the time taking a look at one’s self by way of the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that appears on in amused contempt and pity” (p.45).    

All through his wealthy physique of labor, particularly throughout the areas of ethics, social, and political philosophy, Mills is essential of the “view from nowhere.” Mills’ work powerfully demonstrates how the whiteness of philosophy, in its try “to light up the world, factually and normatively” (2012, p.65), entails cognitive distortion, a type of evasion and epistemic violence that’s linked not solely to its monochromatic whiteness, however to “the conceptual or theoretical whiteness of the self-discipline” (1998, p.2). Studying the work of Mills (2017) strengthened, for me, the significance of calling into query the whiteness of preferrred principle and the way it “can solely serve the pursuits of the [white] privileged” (p.80). That “view from nowhere,” for Mills, is a ruse that’s actively maintained by these white philosophers who conceal behind the structural (although contingent) normativity of whiteness. Mills (1998) argues that white expertise is entrenched as normative, and that it’s “so deep that its normativity is just not even recognized as such. For this could suggest that there was another means that issues could possibly be, whereas it’s apparent that that is simply the best way issues are” (p.10). In different phrases, “A relationship to the world that’s based on [white] racial privilege turns into merely the relationship to the world” (p.10). There isn’t any slippage between one’s relationship to the world and one’s relationship to a world. There may be solely the world that whiteness has constructed as “the” world. To learn Russell’s The Historical past of Western Philosophy was to enter a philosophical discursive world that didn’t inform the story of white philosophy. There was no engaged dialogue of how anti-Black racism formed the views of a number of the most outstanding philosophers of the Western philosophical custom. “This omission,” as Mills (1997) would say, “is just not unintended” (p.1). What does one count on provided that “commonplace textbooks and programs have for probably the most half been written and designed by whites, who take their racial privilege a lot as a right that they don’t even see it as political, as a type of domination” (p.1). Nonetheless, this doesn’t free white individuals from taking duty for the violence of their domination. As James Baldwin (1995) reminds us, “However it’s not permissible that the [white] authors of devastation also needs to be harmless. It’s the innocence which constitutes the crime” (p.5). Choices had been made, assumptions had been embraced, materials, institutional, and epistemic buildings had been underwritten by whiteness, and Black individuals suffered beneath a Herrenvolk ethics the place some had been deemed individuals (whites) and others had been deemed sub-persons (Blacks). The truth that Black individuals had been deemed “sub-persons” and weren’t thereby deemed ethical is couched in a “ethical” white universe through which ethical beliefs “had been systematically violated for blacks” (Mills, 1998, p.4). From this, Mills (1998) argues, “Lots of ethical philosophy will then appear to be primarily based on pretense, the declare that these had been the rules that folks strove to uphold, when actually the actual rules had been the racially exclusivist ones” (p.4). So, there I used to be, a younger Black burgeoning thinker who didn’t totally perceive that I used to be studying white philosophical discourses that moved “away from disquieting questions” (Mills, 1998, p.5) of racism. Such discourses constituted “a generalism, an abstractness, which is covertly particularistic and concrete,” (Mills, 1998, p.5) in that they’re actually primarily based on the experiences of white individuals, white individuals who valorized their whiteness.  Mills (2001) writes, “In affirming their racial identification, whites are in impact affirming their humanity and distancing themselves from the less-than-human [read: Black people]” (p.28). By affirming unquestioningly white philosophy, I had, in essence, collaborated in my very own degradation.    

Mills’ work brilliantly and unhesitatingly engages white philosophy by stripping it of an ideological cowl. Inside the context of anti-Black racism, for instance, Mills (1998) begins with the non-ideal “historic actuality of a partitioned social ontology” (p.7) the place Black individuals skilled social demise (every day) beneath horrifying circumstances of enslavement, the place they had been handled as “a residing device” (p.7). The hegemony of whiteness and its binary construction “so structured the world as to have damaging ramifications for each sphere of black life—juridical standing, ethical standing, personhood/racial identification, epistemic reliability, existential plight, political inclusion, social metaphysics, sexual relations, aesthetic value” (Mills, 1998, p.6). In brief, whiteness constituted a totalizing system beneath which Black individuals had no rights that white individuals had been compelled to respect. What Mills (1998) demonstrates is how the philosophical white cartography shifts as soon as the veil is lifted, how “the existential plight, the array of ideas discovered helpful, the set of paradigmatic dilemmas, the vary of considerations, goes to be considerably completely different from that of the mainstream white thinker” (p.7). Mills pulls from the work of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man to display the normative assumptions pertaining to what he calls the Cartesian self, a reference to Descartes. It was Descartes who engaged in hyperbolic doubt as a way for ascertaining what he considered indubitable. After doubting his senses and the complete exterior world, and his personal existence, Descartes reasoned that if he doubts then he should exist. Therefore, his well-known Cogito ergo sum dictum. Mills argues that Ellison’s narration sketches the phenomenological actuality of what it’s wish to be Black and rendered invisible by white individuals who refuse to see you. To start from that place of racial violence, the place one is deemed invisible (or, on different events, hyper-visible) belies a Cartesian self that may leisurely assume its nonexistence, and the nonexistence of the world. Mills (1998) writes, “In case your every day existence is basically outlined by oppression, by compelled intercourse with the world, it’s not going to happen to you that doubt about your oppressor’s existence [or your own] may in any means be a severe or urgent philosophical drawback; this concept will merely appear frivolous, a perk of social privilege” (p.8). On this rating, Mills demonstrates the irrelevance of sure philosophical strikes throughout the context of anti-Black racism. Below white supremacy, Black individuals change into hyperalert vis-à-vis their physique comportment inside white areas. Self-surveillance, sadly, is important as they’re marked inside these areas as racially deviant and suspicious. Below such circumstances, the exterior world is all too actual. As Black within the U.S., for instance, it’s not essential to do something flawed to be killed by the white state; it’s sufficient that one is Black. So, one strikes by way of white areas with warning, tiptoeing to keep away from the distorting prism of the white gaze that operates inside “an invented delusional world” (Mills, 1987, p.18), a world through which George Floyd, for instance, needed to have a knee on his neck (for over 9 minutes) lest he efficiently overpowered three cops.

Think about that you’re a Black particular person going to your class, Philosophy 101, a number of days after witnessing (through video) the horrific killing of George Floyd. That day you’re studying Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. Your white philosophy professor asks you to contemplate what it means to imagine that you just don’t exist. He assures you that Descartes’ philosophical challenge was supposed for any epistemic topic to interact. You strive, however you may’t. You hear the cries of George Floyd. You may’t get out of your head the sound of his calling out to his useless mom— “momma!” You already know that you’re George Floyd, that he and you’re fungible beneath white racist logics. You already know that your day is coming; in your head, you hear your personal voice: “I can’t breathe!” “I can’t breathe!” It all of a sudden happens to you that the collective Black expertise, one full of demise and white bloodlust, belies the perk of white feigned non-existence relating to your self and the exterior world. You understand that you’re not the generic (learn: white) epistemic topic who’s being addressed by your professor. One thing is amiss. You’re feeling it as an affront to Black life (your life) beneath circumstances of anti-Black racism. That is the place you have interaction in immanent critique. Drawing upon your racialized Black expertise, you level out the pretense, the privilege and conceitedness of whiteness, of white philosophy and the white professor. Mills (1998) writes, “In massive measure, this critique has concerned telling white individuals issues that they have no idea and don’t wish to know, the principle one being that the alterative (nonideal) universe is the precise one and that the native actuality through which whites are at house is barely a nonrepresentative a part of the bigger entire” (p. 5-6). In such a course, the normative whiteness of philosophy locations beneath erasure the fact of Black expertise. Actually, the meta-philosophical orientation of the course is complicit with a color-evasiveness that sustains white cognitive distortion, and the hierarchically organized raced polity. Every part stays as is. It’s right here that Mills (1998) is obvious that African-American/Africana/Black philosophy “would see itself as antipodal to a philosophy that, in a single formulation, ‘leaves every thing as it’s’” (p.17).

One of many core themes of Mills’ extraordinary corpus is speaking to white individuals issues that they have no idea and don’t wish to know. This parrhesiastic follow, which Mills engaged with analytic precision and caustic humor, wasn’t simply meant for tutorial philosophers, his purpose was to critique and dismantle the worldwide manifestations of whiteness.  Like Du Bois (1995), Mills was “singularly clairvoyant” (p.453) in seeing the entrails of whiteness, its structural and psychic modes of denial and self-deception, “producing the ironic end result that whites will generally be unable to know the world they themselves have made” (Mills, 1997, p.18). A part of the irony is that the symbolism of whiteness (bringing gentle) does the very reverse—it obscures and propagates ignorance. Mills (2001) argues that this truth questions each the normative dimensions of colour symbolism and the way that symbolism has been linked to modernity and Euro-identity, and the way “whiteness turns into the identification of each enlightenment and of the human bearers of enlightenment” (p.17). On this rating, the symbolism of Blackness, raced and in any other case, signifies dread, doom, and darkness. Mills not solely deconstructs such a problematic and false symbolic order however reverses the dominant optics of modernity. In spite of everything, as Mills (2001) argues, “whiteness is a willed darkness; whiteness is segregated investigation” (p.18). The query then turns into: who actually produces the sunshine? Mills (2001) writes, “It isn’t Blackness that wants illumination however Blackness that does the illuminating” (p.18). In Ellison’s Invisible Man, it’s the unknown Black narrator who illuminates not solely the which means of his Blackness however illuminates the circumstances beneath which he was made invisible. So, the sunshine that he possesses is grounded and grows out of a particularly racialized abjection of the racialized Black physique. “Systematic race-based oppression” is vital to creating the agonizing matrix by way of which racialized Black consciousness evolves and resists. Right here, Mills is pointing to W. E. B. Du Bois’ use of “second-sight” (DuBois, 1903, p. 45) and the way that reward illuminates the world of anti-Blackness. By second-sight, one is singularly clairvoyant. Immediately referencing Duboisian second-sight, Mills (2017) writes, “The attainment of ‘second sight’ requires an understanding of what it’s about whites and the white scenario that motivates them to view blacks erroneously. One learns partially to see by way of figuring out white blindness and avoiding the pitfalls of placing on these spectacles for one’s personal view” (p.55). Once more, although, Mills (2001) meticulously gives the anti-Black logics which are essential for this perception. He argues that not any inferiorized nonwhite place will do, “however a peculiar location throughout the nexus of a number of oppressions created by white supremacy” (p.25). Certainly, for Mills (2001), when referring to the racial nightmare skilled by Black individuals, “No different group has had the distinctive mixture of expertise, group curiosity, motivation, brutal racial exploitation, lack of different identitarian assets, and intimate and quotidian familiarity with the ideologies and practices of the West to be higher situated to know race from the within” (p.35). Mills (2001) additionally writes, “For no different nonwhite group has race been so enduringly constitutive of their identification, so foundational for racial capitalism, and so lastingly central to white racial consciousness and world racial consciousness generally” (p.35). Satirically, racialized whiteness created the very circumstances for each its invisibility and its illumination. On this rating, Black individuals, Black philosophical thought, is harmful to white normativity because it illuminates “modernity extra totally and relentlessly, extra free from illusions, than its (typical) white antagonist” (Mills, 2001, p.25).

As I wrote this quote, I instantly considered the latest anxiety-ridden response within the U.S. (by primarily white Republican politicians and white conservative activists) towards essential race principle and texts that discover such themes as white domination, white privilege, white unconscious racism, systemic anti-Black racism, the historical past of white racism, institutional white racism, and white racism and mass incarceration. The worry of Black thought to see by way of the evasive maneuvers of whiteness is obvious given the latest responses to essential race principle. Mills (2001) recognized this evasiveness and the way it features by way of particular types of idealizing abstractions in social and political philosophy. He writes, “They whitewash, they white-out, essential points of social actuality, above all the actual fact of white racial domination and its holistic influence over the previous few years” (p.36). In every of those contexts, that is an unabashed assault on Black thought, on the illuminating capability of Black philosophical thought to put naked the despicable historical past of whiteness vis-à-vis Black individuals. Whiteness would slightly implode than to face its horrible historical past involving the mutilation of Black our bodies, their castration, their flaying, their rape, and their continued oppression and dehumanization. James Baldwin (1995) lengthy beseeched white individuals “to see themselves as they’re, to stop fleeing from actuality and start to alter it” (p.9). The price, after all, could be nice. White individuals would wish to un-suture, to open themselves as much as the ache of accepting a historical past that they’ve created and from which they proceed to profit. It could require dethroning the idea that whiteness is one thing “particular” to own—epistemically, anthropologically, aesthetically, theologically. Whiteness would have to be laid naked because the empty lie that it’s, and its false god-like standing revealed as a type of violent fanaticism and colour idolatry.

Am I optimistic? No. White individuals are not able to face the vacancy of their shared white identification and admit to that identification’s oppressive, parasitic relationship to Black individuals. There may be nothing about white racialized historical past that makes me assured. Mills (2001) places it this fashion, “Not simply the fabric prices of reparations within the monetary economic system, nationally and internationally, however the prices to the Western psychic economic system of admitting the magnitude of the flawed carried out to human beings represented as n*****s for a whole bunch of years in Western consciousness, would possibly simply be too nice for whites to bear” (p.35). Maybe it’s this value that can be too nice to bear inside philosophy departments the place white political philosophy is practiced. Discussing the influence that his e book, The Racial Contract, has had on the sphere, Mills (2012) says, “I believe the target reply that needs to be confronted is: near zero” (p.56).

This brings me again to the opening of this text relating to Mills’ warning to and concern for me. Mills was totally cognizant of the recalcitrance of white racism. Again in 2015, I wrote an article entitled “Dear White America” that went viral (Yancy, 2015). It additionally generated tons of white vitriolic backlash directed at me. I turned a goal. Verbal assaults can take their toll: white demise threats, fantasies of placing meat hooks into my physique, being known as a “nigger” extra instances than I want to keep in mind, being known as excrement, an ape, a monkey, and being accused of insidiously plotting to have intercourse with white girls, and rather more. All of that from a letter that immediately spoke to white individuals of affection and the potential transformative prospects inherent in an indication of vulnerability relating to their racism. It was my try and illuminate. For that letter, for that gesture of affection, it was essential for me to obtain college police escorts to my courses. Mills confirmed real concern for my wellbeing. Given his personal writings, I believe it got here from an area of shared expertise.

The World Guide Encyclopedia’s entry on philosophy didn’t put together me for this. Nor, nevertheless, did it put together me for the white racism of the philosophers I so admired. Philosophy was about ecstatic surprise and contemplation. Today I endure. For me, working towards philosophy is to endure. The explanations for this are apparent—intercourse trafficking of harmless youngsters, their oppression and demise, Black our bodies that may’t breathe, xenophobia, violence towards LGBTQ+ individuals, tens of millions of individuals useless from a pandemic, the emergence of right-wing populist neofascists, 100 seconds to midnight, and the obvious silence of the Divine (God as Deus Absconditus). Rabbi Abraha Joshua Heschel raises the stakes for every one in all us, the place he asks, “If all agony had been saved alive in reminiscence, if all turmoil had been instructed, who may endure tranquility?” (Heschel, 2011, p.178). Mills definitely understood the pervasiveness of Black social turmoil as skilled beneath the political, financial, phenomenological, and libidinal weight of whiteness. Certainly, he went to graduate college, the College of Toronto, to check philosophy, particularly regarding race and imperialism. And he went intending to write down a dissertation exploring social injustice. Mills was no armchair theorist. Unbeknownst to me, and plenty of others, Mills, as communicated by thinker Linda Alcoff, throughout a zoom wake in his honor, had been subjected to FBI surveillance within the U.S. (Johnson, 2021). This fear, in response to Alcoff, was one which he carried even till a few week earlier than he handed. As a thinker dedicated to revealing whiteness and rethinking what a simply polity would seem like after rigorously addressing our collective non-ideal world, Mills has left us with a physique of labor that may allow us to slay the Leviathan of whiteness. However as he stated, “it’s going to be a protracted haul” (Mills, 2012, p.65).

References

Baldwin, James (1995). The Fireplace Subsequent Time. New York: The Fashionable Library.

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1995). “The Souls of White Folks,” in David Levering Lewis (Ed.) W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader. New York: Henry Holt and Firm.

Du Bois, W. E. B. (1903/1982). The Souls of Black Folks. New York: New American Library.

Eze, Emmanuel Chukwudi (Ed.). (1997). Race and the Enlightenment: A Reader. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

Fanon, Frantz (1967) Black Pores and skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann. New York, Grove Press, Inc.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. (2000). “Anthropology,” from Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. In Robert Bernasconi and Tommy L. Lott (Eds.) The Concept of Race. Indianapolis: Hackett.

Heschel, Susannah (Ed.). (2011). Abraham Joshua Heschel: Important Writings. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books. 

Johnson, Leigh, M. (2021, September 24). Charles Mills, in memoriam. YouTube. Retrieved February 22, 2022, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPo_qxoVNbE&t=880s  

Kant, Immanuel (1794/1960). Observations on the Feeling of the Stunning and Chic, trans. John T. Goldthwait. Berkeley: College of California Press.

Mills, Charles W. (1997). The Racial Contract. Cornell College Press.

Mills, Charles W. (1998). Blackness Seen: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Ithaca: Cornell College Press.

Mills, Charles W. (2001). “The Illumination of Blackness” in Moon-Kie Jung and Joao H. Costa Vargas (Eds.) Antiblackness. Durham: Duke College Press.

Mills, Charles W. (2012). “Philosophy Raced, Philosophy Erased,” in George Yancy (Ed.) Reframing the Follow of Philosophy: Our bodies of Coloration, Our bodies of Data. New York: State College of New York Press.

Mills, Charles W. (2017). Black Rights/ White Wrongs: The critique of Racial Liberalism. New York: Oxford College Press.

West, Cornel with David Ritz. (2009). Brother West: Dwelling and Loving Out Loud, A Memoir. New York: SmileyBooks.

Yancy, George. (Dec 24, 2015). “Expensive White America,” The Stone, New York Occasions. https://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/24/dear-white-america/?_r=0.