Lost in Rawlsland
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 wasrecognized 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 workagainst 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 traditionalCartesian 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.
