Charles W. Mills

Charles Wade Mills (January 3, 1951 – September 20, 2021) was a Caribbean-American philosopher who specialized in political philosophy. Mills was a professor at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), and Northwestern University. He made major contributions to critical race theory, most notably with his book The Racial Contract. Born in London, Mills grew up in Jamaica and later became a United States citizen. He was educated at the University of the West Indies where he received his bachelor's degree in physics, and the University of Toronto where he went on to get his master's and doctoral degrees in philosophy. His parents were graduate students in London and moved to Kingston, Jamaica, shortly after he was born. He grew up in Kingston.

Mills received a BSc in physics at the University of the West Indies in 1971 and an MA and PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1976 and 1985, respectively. His dissertation was titled The Concept of Ideology in the Thought of Marx and Engels. He endorsed historical materialism until the 1990s. While at the University of Toronto, Mills helped to unionize teaching assistants. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. He gave the Tanner Lectures on Human Values in 2020.

Views Over his career, Mills published six books and over 100 articles. According to an obituary in CBC News, Mills is regarded as a pioneer in critical race theory and the philosophy of race. The Racial Contract posits that the social contract is really a contract based on the notion of white domination.

The role gender plays in race relations in Mills's work was addressed by Kathryn T. Gines: "The racial contract and the sexual contract have been perceived as parallel non-intersecting universes and he [Mills] is providing a conceptual intervention." Mills was aware of white female feminism and black female feminism and how both were perceived differently. Gines argues against Mills's point regarding non-white males non-participation in patriarchy: "I problematize Mills’s claim that 'race generally trumps gender' and argue for a more nuanced analysis of nonwhite men’s participation in patriarchy and privilege." Despite his critique of Rawls, however, Mills came to endorse a version of liberalism in Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, suggesting that the history of liberalism reveals the dismantling of social hierarchies. "Caribbean", and "Jamaican". He described himself as "Caribbean-American".

In a 2014 publication, Mills stated, "I was a citizen of a small Third World country, Jamaica, which owed its very existence to … oppressive international forces." , Mills was an American citizen.

Journals

Mills, Charles W. (1988). "Alternative Epistemologies". Social Theory and Practice. 14 (3): 237–263. ISSN 0037-802X. Mills, Charles W. (1994). "Do Black Men Have a Moral Duty to Marry Black Women?". Journal of Social Philosophy. 25 (s1): 131–153. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9833.1994.tb00352.x. ISSN 1467–9833. Mills, Charles W. (1994). "Marxism, 'Ideology' and Moral Objectivism". Canadian Journal of Philosophy. 24 (3): 373–393. ISSN 0045–5091. Mills, Charles W. (2003). ""Heart" Attack: A Critique of Jorge Garcia's Volitional Conception of Racism". The Journal of Ethics. 7 (1): 29–62. ISSN1382-4554 Mills, Charles W. (2005). ""Ideal Theory" as Ideology". Hypatia. 20 (3): 165–184. ISSN 0887–5367. Mills, Charles W. (2009). "Rousseau, the Master's Tools, and Anti-Contractarian Contractarianism". The CLR James Journal. 15 (1): 92–112. ISSN 2167–4256. Mills, Charles W. (2009). "Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls". The Southern Journal of Philosophy. 47 (S1): 161–184. doi:10.1111/j.2041-6962.2009.tb00147.x. ISSN 2041–6962. Mills, Charles W. (2010). "Blacks and Social Justice: A Quarter-Century Later". Journal of Social Philosophy. 41 (3): 354–369. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9833.2010.01493.x. ISSN1467-9833. Mills, Charles W. (2013). "An Illuminating Blackness". The Black Scholar. 43 (4): 32–37. doi:10.5816/blackscholar.43.4.0032. ISSN 0006–4246.