Charles Mills 1951 – 2021

Charles Mills was a Jamaican-American philosopher, distinguished professor at the City University of New York, and one of the most original political philosophers of his generation. The Racial Contract reread the social contract tradition of Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau as in fact a racial contract, in which white personhood was constituted through the systematic exclusion of nonwhites from the moral and political community. From Class to Race, Black Rights/White Wrongs, and Black Visible Identities extended this analysis into a sustained critique of the abstraction of liberal political philosophy from the concrete histories of slavery, colonialism, and white supremacy.

Charles Wade Mills was born to Jamaican parents in London in January 1951 and was raised in Jamaica. He took his bachelor's in physics at the University of the West Indies at Mona in 1971 and his doctorate in philosophy at the University of Toronto in 1985 with a dissertation on Marxism and ideology. He taught at the University of Oklahoma, the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern, and from 2016 the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he was Distinguished Professor.

His books are The Racial Contract (1997), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (1998), From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (2003), Contract and Domination (2007, with Carole Pateman), Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality (2010), and Black Rights / White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (2017).

Mills argued that the social-contract tradition of modern political philosophy had concealed a parallel and constitutive 'racial contract' under which the political and epistemic standing of non-whites was systematically downgraded; the philosophical task is to make that contract visible, to diagnose the 'white ignorance' it produces, and to reform liberalism into a genuinely non-racial form. He died at Evanston, Illinois, in September 2021.