What do you think?
Rate this book
Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race
"This is an important collection. Its organizing theme is that by analyzing the metaphysics of race-creating we can understand the importance of political analyses of the racial state. This claim is vital not only for understanding of contemporary racial problems, but also for enriching our understanding of philosophical anthropology."
―Lewis R. Gordon, Brown University Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience. Ralph Ellison's metaphor of black invisibility has special relevance to philosophy, whose demographic and conceptual "whiteness" has long been a source of wonder and complaint to racial minorities. Mills points out the absence of any philosophical narrative theorizing and detailing race's centrality to the recent history of the West, such as feminists have articulated for gender domination. European expansionism in its various forms, Mills contends, generates a social ontology of race that warrants philosophical attention. Through expropriation, settlement, slavery, and colonialism, race comes into existence as simultaneously real and ontological without being biological, metaphysical without being physical, existential without being essential, shaping one's being without being in one's shape. His essays explore the contrasting sums of a white and black modernity, examine standpoint epistemology and the metaphysics of racial identity, look at black-Jewish relations and racial conspiracy theories, map the workings of a white-supremacist polity and the contours of a racist moral consciousness, and analyze the presuppositions of Frederick Douglass's famous July 4 prognosis for black political inclusion. Collectively they demonstrate what exciting new philosophical terrain can be opened up once the color line in western philosophy is made visible and addressed.
―Lewis R. Gordon, Brown University Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience. Ralph Ellison's metaphor of black invisibility has special relevance to philosophy, whose demographic and conceptual "whiteness" has long been a source of wonder and complaint to racial minorities. Mills points out the absence of any philosophical narrative theorizing and detailing race's centrality to the recent history of the West, such as feminists have articulated for gender domination. European expansionism in its various forms, Mills contends, generates a social ontology of race that warrants philosophical attention. Through expropriation, settlement, slavery, and colonialism, race comes into existence as simultaneously real and ontological without being biological, metaphysical without being physical, existential without being essential, shaping one's being without being in one's shape. His essays explore the contrasting sums of a white and black modernity, examine standpoint epistemology and the metaphysics of racial identity, look at black-Jewish relations and racial conspiracy theories, map the workings of a white-supremacist polity and the contours of a racist moral consciousness, and analyze the presuppositions of Frederick Douglass's famous July 4 prognosis for black political inclusion. Collectively they demonstrate what exciting new philosophical terrain can be opened up once the color line in western philosophy is made visible and addressed.
272 pages, Paperback
First published April 1, 1998
About the author
Charles W. Mills
26 books87 followersCharles W. Mills was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He worked in the general area of social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender, and race. He was the author of over a hundred journal articles, book chapters, comments and replies, and six books. His first book, The Racial Contract (Cornell UP, 1997), won a Myers Outstanding Book Award for the study of bigotry and human rights in America. It has been translated into Korean and Turkish. His second book, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell UP, 1998), was a finalist for the award for the most important North American work in social philosophy of that year.
Mills received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, and previously taught at the University of Oklahoma, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Northwestern University. He was the President of the American Philosophical Association Central Division for 2017-18. In 2017, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Mills received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, and previously taught at the University of Oklahoma, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Northwestern University. He was the President of the American Philosophical Association Central Division for 2017-18. In 2017, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
February 24, 2022
Incredible, really. An account of racism that at first seems obvious and tried but when applied has great explanatory power. Mills gives a pretty convincing answer as to how such brilliant people from the enlightenment onward could be so racist. Chapter 6 (when read after chapter 4) is the clear highlight. Also, absolute baller move to conclude with a critique of Frederick Douglass.
My one criticism is that I think black people are entirely capable of doing the Cogito.
My one criticism is that I think black people are entirely capable of doing the Cogito.
April 18, 2026
A SELECTION OF WRITINGS COVERING A VARIETY OF AREAS
Charles Wade Mills (1951-2021) was a Caribbean-American philosopher who taught political philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; he previously taught at Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Oklahoma, and [in Jamaica] Campion College, and the College of Arts, Science and Technology in Kingston (where he taught physics).
He wrote in the Preface to this 1998 book, “One of the most exciting developments in philosophy over the second half of the 20th century has been the growth of a feminist theory stimulated by the mass entry of women into the profession. New conceptual and theoretical horizons have been opened up, revealing realities that in a sense were always there but that were either not seen or not deemed worth mapping. The ‘maleness’ of orthodox philosophy is now visible in a way that it was not before. Heterodox conceptions have thrown conventional assumptions into relief and raised questions about what previously seemed like unchallengeable verities.
“There are welcome signs that parallel possibilities may be opening up around the question of race. We have witnessed a remarkable upsurge of interest in matters to do with race and African-American philosophy. Numerous books and anthologies (numerous by comparison with the past, that is) are forthcoming, and a new journal, the ‘Journal of Africana Philosophy,’ is in the works. We are beginning to see how many old questions can be given a twist and how many new questions can be posed once the color line in Western philosophy is breached.
“There has always been an alternative, oppositional intellectual tradition in the West centered on the shaping reality of race, but for the most part it has been excluded from the academy in general and from philosophy in particular. (Lewis Gordon chides me here for an analytic chauvinism that makes generalizations about ‘philosophy’ that are actually untrue, or at least far less true, of the Continental tradition.) Now, however, the situation may be on the verge of changing. Such a change is certainly overdue. The ‘whiteness’ of academic philosophy has long been a source of wonder and complaint to minorities. Among the humanities, it has been one of the most resistant to what have come to be called ‘multiculturalist’ revisions. The very nature of the discipline seems to some practitioners to preclude such innovation: by virtue of its abstractness, philosophy supposedly ALREADY generally encompasses the human condition…” (Pg. xi-xii)
In Chapter 1, he asks, “What exactly is it about philosophy that so many black people find alienating, which would explain the fact, a subject of ongoing discussion in the ‘APA Proceedings and Addresses,’ that blacks continue to be far more underrepresented here than in most other humanities and that most black graduate students generally steer away from philosophy? I reject explanations that attribute this pattern entirely to present-day (as against past) racist exclusion. Rather, I suggest that a major contributory cause is the self-sustaining dynamic of the ‘whiteness’ of philosophy, not the uncontroversial whiteness of skin of most of its practitioners but what could be called, more contestably, the CONCEPTUAL or THEORETICAL whiteness of the discipline. This alone would be sufficient to discourage black graduate students contemplating a career in the academy, so that, through mechanisms familiar to those who study the reproduction of dynamic systems, certain defining traits are perpetuated unchallenged or only weakly challenged, and the socialization and credentialing of newcomers proceeds in a way that maintains the ‘persistently monochromatic’ character of the profession.” (Pg. 2)
He adds, “Thus there is a feeling, not to put too fine a point on it, that when you get right down to it, a lot of philosophy is just white guys j--king off. Either philosophy is not about real issues in the first place but about pseudo-problems; or when it is about real problems, the emphases are in the wrong places; or crucial facts are omitted, making the whole discussion pointless; or the abstractness is really a sham for what we all know but are not allowed to say out loud. The impatience or indifference that I have sometimes detected in black students seems to derive from their sense that there is something strange about spending a whole course describing the logic of different moral ideals, for example, without ever mentioning that ALL OF THEM were systematically violated for blacks. So it is not merely that the ideal was not always attained but that, more fundamentally, this was never ACTUALLY the ideal in the first place. A lot of moral philosophy will then be seen to be based on pretense, the claim that these were the principles that people strove to uphold, when in fact the real principles that people strove to uphold, when in fact the real principles were the racially exclusivist ones.” (Pg. 4)
He points out, “if Kant can be regarded as the father of modern moral theory, he is also known to some---a fact that will probably astonish many Anglo-American philosophers---as ‘the founder of the modern concept of race.’ This embarrassing attribution will not be found in the average contemporary philosophy textbook or anthology, but the judgment is not new, and the evidence seems to support it. Radical and minority philosophers have perhaps more of a motivation to uncover such passages, given their conviction that even seemingly abstract the ‘pure’ philosophy has too often been infected by racism and Western imperialism. But Kant is not some minor and obscure figure; he is the increasingly eminent moral/political philosopher of the modern period, and it is surprising that more attention has not been paid to this aspect of his work in establishment mainstream theory.” (Pg. 73)
He continues, “There is, to begin with, his notorious statement in ‘Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime’ that ‘so fundamental is the difference between [the black and white] races of man… it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color,’ so that ‘a clear proof that what [a Negro] said was stupid’ was that ‘this fellow was quite black from head to foot.’ Often cited by black philosophers as a paradigm example of impure reason that stands in need of critique, this passage could, nonetheless, be dismissed as no more than a ‘precritical’ lapse. More problematic for such a dismissive interpretation, however… is Kant’s later essay ‘On the Different Races of Man’ (1775), in which he outlines a classic hereditarian, antienvironmentalist account of innate racial difference that essentially anticipates post-Darwinisn ‘scientific’ racism… So Immanuel Kant, the theorist of abstract noumenal persons equally deserving of respect, reveals himself simultaneously as one of the founders of the very ontology of subpersons and racist disrespect that black activists such as Garvey have traditionally had to fight against.” (Pg. 73-74)
He states, “cultural myths of origin represent Europe as self-sufficient, autochthonous, with the contribution of Afro-Asia having been written out of the history books. ‘There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white,’ boasts Hume. Ancient Greece becomes a self-contained fountainhead of wisdom, removed from its actual origins and influences, and its Enlightened heirs go out into the world as historied and cultured Europeans encountering peoples without history and culture.” (Pg. 127)
He explains, “Aristotle’s views on ‘natural slaves’ in the ‘Politics,’ were not, of course, aimed at Africans but ideologically very important for the ammunition that they gave both to Spanish colonizers in justifying their treatment of Native Americans and later to southern abolitionists in the 19th century U.S. debates on slavery. David Hume’s footnote in his essay ‘On National Characters’ judging that ‘the negroes, and in general all the others species of men’ are ‘naturally inferior to whites’… John Stuart Mill’s precolonialist exclusion in ‘On Liberty’ of ‘barbarians,’ ‘those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as its nonage,’ from the class of human beings for whom ‘despotism’ was not legitimate. Some examples from figures less central to the analytic tradition are G.W.F. Hegel’s contemptuous description of sub-Saharan Africa in the Introduction to ‘The Philosophy of History’; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s occasional remarks, usually in the correspondence rather than the theoretical works, about ‘n-----s,’ and their frequent defense of European colonialism and civilization against ‘barbarian nations’; and, somewhat more obscure, Voltaire’s endorsement in ‘The People of America’ of polygenesis, the view that blacks were a separate species.’ Doubtless an industrious researcher would turn up a lot more embarrassing material, but in philosophy it … could not plausibly be argued to be a prime deterrent of black philosophical interest.” (Pg. 202)
This book will be of great interest to those studying African-American/Africana philosophy.
Charles Wade Mills (1951-2021) was a Caribbean-American philosopher who taught political philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; he previously taught at Northwestern University, the University of Illinois at Chicago, the University of Oklahoma, and [in Jamaica] Campion College, and the College of Arts, Science and Technology in Kingston (where he taught physics).
He wrote in the Preface to this 1998 book, “One of the most exciting developments in philosophy over the second half of the 20th century has been the growth of a feminist theory stimulated by the mass entry of women into the profession. New conceptual and theoretical horizons have been opened up, revealing realities that in a sense were always there but that were either not seen or not deemed worth mapping. The ‘maleness’ of orthodox philosophy is now visible in a way that it was not before. Heterodox conceptions have thrown conventional assumptions into relief and raised questions about what previously seemed like unchallengeable verities.
“There are welcome signs that parallel possibilities may be opening up around the question of race. We have witnessed a remarkable upsurge of interest in matters to do with race and African-American philosophy. Numerous books and anthologies (numerous by comparison with the past, that is) are forthcoming, and a new journal, the ‘Journal of Africana Philosophy,’ is in the works. We are beginning to see how many old questions can be given a twist and how many new questions can be posed once the color line in Western philosophy is breached.
“There has always been an alternative, oppositional intellectual tradition in the West centered on the shaping reality of race, but for the most part it has been excluded from the academy in general and from philosophy in particular. (Lewis Gordon chides me here for an analytic chauvinism that makes generalizations about ‘philosophy’ that are actually untrue, or at least far less true, of the Continental tradition.) Now, however, the situation may be on the verge of changing. Such a change is certainly overdue. The ‘whiteness’ of academic philosophy has long been a source of wonder and complaint to minorities. Among the humanities, it has been one of the most resistant to what have come to be called ‘multiculturalist’ revisions. The very nature of the discipline seems to some practitioners to preclude such innovation: by virtue of its abstractness, philosophy supposedly ALREADY generally encompasses the human condition…” (Pg. xi-xii)
In Chapter 1, he asks, “What exactly is it about philosophy that so many black people find alienating, which would explain the fact, a subject of ongoing discussion in the ‘APA Proceedings and Addresses,’ that blacks continue to be far more underrepresented here than in most other humanities and that most black graduate students generally steer away from philosophy? I reject explanations that attribute this pattern entirely to present-day (as against past) racist exclusion. Rather, I suggest that a major contributory cause is the self-sustaining dynamic of the ‘whiteness’ of philosophy, not the uncontroversial whiteness of skin of most of its practitioners but what could be called, more contestably, the CONCEPTUAL or THEORETICAL whiteness of the discipline. This alone would be sufficient to discourage black graduate students contemplating a career in the academy, so that, through mechanisms familiar to those who study the reproduction of dynamic systems, certain defining traits are perpetuated unchallenged or only weakly challenged, and the socialization and credentialing of newcomers proceeds in a way that maintains the ‘persistently monochromatic’ character of the profession.” (Pg. 2)
He adds, “Thus there is a feeling, not to put too fine a point on it, that when you get right down to it, a lot of philosophy is just white guys j--king off. Either philosophy is not about real issues in the first place but about pseudo-problems; or when it is about real problems, the emphases are in the wrong places; or crucial facts are omitted, making the whole discussion pointless; or the abstractness is really a sham for what we all know but are not allowed to say out loud. The impatience or indifference that I have sometimes detected in black students seems to derive from their sense that there is something strange about spending a whole course describing the logic of different moral ideals, for example, without ever mentioning that ALL OF THEM were systematically violated for blacks. So it is not merely that the ideal was not always attained but that, more fundamentally, this was never ACTUALLY the ideal in the first place. A lot of moral philosophy will then be seen to be based on pretense, the claim that these were the principles that people strove to uphold, when in fact the real principles that people strove to uphold, when in fact the real principles were the racially exclusivist ones.” (Pg. 4)
He points out, “if Kant can be regarded as the father of modern moral theory, he is also known to some---a fact that will probably astonish many Anglo-American philosophers---as ‘the founder of the modern concept of race.’ This embarrassing attribution will not be found in the average contemporary philosophy textbook or anthology, but the judgment is not new, and the evidence seems to support it. Radical and minority philosophers have perhaps more of a motivation to uncover such passages, given their conviction that even seemingly abstract the ‘pure’ philosophy has too often been infected by racism and Western imperialism. But Kant is not some minor and obscure figure; he is the increasingly eminent moral/political philosopher of the modern period, and it is surprising that more attention has not been paid to this aspect of his work in establishment mainstream theory.” (Pg. 73)
He continues, “There is, to begin with, his notorious statement in ‘Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime’ that ‘so fundamental is the difference between [the black and white] races of man… it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color,’ so that ‘a clear proof that what [a Negro] said was stupid’ was that ‘this fellow was quite black from head to foot.’ Often cited by black philosophers as a paradigm example of impure reason that stands in need of critique, this passage could, nonetheless, be dismissed as no more than a ‘precritical’ lapse. More problematic for such a dismissive interpretation, however… is Kant’s later essay ‘On the Different Races of Man’ (1775), in which he outlines a classic hereditarian, antienvironmentalist account of innate racial difference that essentially anticipates post-Darwinisn ‘scientific’ racism… So Immanuel Kant, the theorist of abstract noumenal persons equally deserving of respect, reveals himself simultaneously as one of the founders of the very ontology of subpersons and racist disrespect that black activists such as Garvey have traditionally had to fight against.” (Pg. 73-74)
He states, “cultural myths of origin represent Europe as self-sufficient, autochthonous, with the contribution of Afro-Asia having been written out of the history books. ‘There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white,’ boasts Hume. Ancient Greece becomes a self-contained fountainhead of wisdom, removed from its actual origins and influences, and its Enlightened heirs go out into the world as historied and cultured Europeans encountering peoples without history and culture.” (Pg. 127)
He explains, “Aristotle’s views on ‘natural slaves’ in the ‘Politics,’ were not, of course, aimed at Africans but ideologically very important for the ammunition that they gave both to Spanish colonizers in justifying their treatment of Native Americans and later to southern abolitionists in the 19th century U.S. debates on slavery. David Hume’s footnote in his essay ‘On National Characters’ judging that ‘the negroes, and in general all the others species of men’ are ‘naturally inferior to whites’… John Stuart Mill’s precolonialist exclusion in ‘On Liberty’ of ‘barbarians,’ ‘those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as its nonage,’ from the class of human beings for whom ‘despotism’ was not legitimate. Some examples from figures less central to the analytic tradition are G.W.F. Hegel’s contemptuous description of sub-Saharan Africa in the Introduction to ‘The Philosophy of History’; Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s occasional remarks, usually in the correspondence rather than the theoretical works, about ‘n-----s,’ and their frequent defense of European colonialism and civilization against ‘barbarian nations’; and, somewhat more obscure, Voltaire’s endorsement in ‘The People of America’ of polygenesis, the view that blacks were a separate species.’ Doubtless an industrious researcher would turn up a lot more embarrassing material, but in philosophy it … could not plausibly be argued to be a prime deterrent of black philosophical interest.” (Pg. 202)
This book will be of great interest to those studying African-American/Africana philosophy.
Currently Reading
July 24, 2009Blackness Visible is a series of essays by Northwestern philosopher Charles Mills. I read the "Racial Contract" by Mills a few months ago. In the Racial Contract, Mills argues that standard social contract theory(Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, Mill and Kant) depends, for its viability, on an other: a group who are not extended the full rights of citizenship and dignity that we extend to whites. Locke, Mill, Hobbes, and Kant all name blacks as not worthy of being treated as full people, by virtue of some mental infelicity. They are somewhere between people and beasts of burden and should be assumed as such. It's a sensibility similar to the degraded citizenship we currently extend to illegal immigrants. Blackness Visible, so far, seems to argue that the standard tropes in Western Philosophy: brains in vats, personal identity, lifeboat dilemmas, and enlightenment contractarianism, emerge from a specifically white male philosophical sensibility, agreeable to a tacit colonialist ethic, even though these issues are posited as generalizable across racial, gender, and cultural dispositions.
The book sold me when I read on pg. 4, "There is a feeling, not to put too fine a point on it, that when you get right down to it, a lot of philosophy is just white guys jerking off. Either philosophy is not about real issues in the first place but about pseudo-problems; or when it is about real problems, the emphases are in the wrong places; or crucial facts are omitted, making the whole discussion pointless."
The book sold me when I read on pg. 4, "There is a feeling, not to put too fine a point on it, that when you get right down to it, a lot of philosophy is just white guys jerking off. Either philosophy is not about real issues in the first place but about pseudo-problems; or when it is about real problems, the emphases are in the wrong places; or crucial facts are omitted, making the whole discussion pointless."
November 21, 2025
Charles W. Mills’ (1916 - 1962) „Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race“ ist eine unbedingt notwendige Sammlung von Essays, die sich als radikale Korrektur der demografischen wie konzeptuellen Verengung auf „Weiße“ in der westlichen Philosophie versteht. Mills greift die Metapher der „schwarzen Unsichtbarkeit“ (Ellison) auf und macht sie zu einem systematischen Problem philosophischer Theorie: Er kritisiert die nahezu vollständige Abwesenheit einer Erzählung, die die Zentralität von „race“ für die neuere Geschichte des Westens anerkennt und theoretisch durchdringt.
Mills argumentiert, dass Rasse im Kontext des europäischen Expansionismus – Sklaverei, Kolonialismus, globale Hierarchien – als soziale Ontologie entstanden ist, die einer eigenständigen philosophischen Analyse bedarf. Diese Rasse ist real, ohne biologisch zu sein, und ontologisch wirksam, ohne essentialistisch zu sein. Die Essays entfalten diese komplexe Metaphysik des Rasse-Schaffens, indem sie die weiße und schwarze Moderne gegenüberstellen, die Standpunkt-Epistemologie kritisch untersuchen und die Funktionslogiken einer weiß-suprematistischen Ordnung sowie die Formen rassistischen moralischen Bewusstseins analysieren.
„Blackness Visible“ zeigt eindrücklich, welches neue philosophische Terrain sichtbar wird, sobald die „Farblinie“ – die lange verleugnete Strukturkategorie westlicher Moderne – als theoretisches Problem ernst genommen und systematisch adressiert wird.
Mills argumentiert, dass Rasse im Kontext des europäischen Expansionismus – Sklaverei, Kolonialismus, globale Hierarchien – als soziale Ontologie entstanden ist, die einer eigenständigen philosophischen Analyse bedarf. Diese Rasse ist real, ohne biologisch zu sein, und ontologisch wirksam, ohne essentialistisch zu sein. Die Essays entfalten diese komplexe Metaphysik des Rasse-Schaffens, indem sie die weiße und schwarze Moderne gegenüberstellen, die Standpunkt-Epistemologie kritisch untersuchen und die Funktionslogiken einer weiß-suprematistischen Ordnung sowie die Formen rassistischen moralischen Bewusstseins analysieren.
„Blackness Visible“ zeigt eindrücklich, welches neue philosophische Terrain sichtbar wird, sobald die „Farblinie“ – die lange verleugnete Strukturkategorie westlicher Moderne – als theoretisches Problem ernst genommen und systematisch adressiert wird.
February 25, 2021
I've read a lot of philosophy but this made me realise that black philosophy I have not read. This is part of Mills' point - philosophy (which I tend to separate from crit theory, feminism etc) assume it doesn't need to think about race. So he builds this case to say that racial distinctions (and therefore racism) are tightly coupled to the big boys (usually boys) - Hobbes, Locke, Bentham, Kant etc etc. Not just on the level of their forays into surface level racism (eg x are less human) - which he does well to excavate - but actually submerged within their constitution of humanity in moral, epistemic, metaphysical terms.
Can't recommend it enough really - should form part of philosophy curriculum and probably sit next to something like Agemben's Homo Sacer in terms of articulating historical constitution (and, importantly, exclusion) of human polity. But also it's not, imo, that kind of philosophy that's excruciating - carefully, slowly articulated but not showy or assuming you know liberal (etc) philosophy well. Good.
Can't recommend it enough really - should form part of philosophy curriculum and probably sit next to something like Agemben's Homo Sacer in terms of articulating historical constitution (and, importantly, exclusion) of human polity. But also it's not, imo, that kind of philosophy that's excruciating - carefully, slowly articulated but not showy or assuming you know liberal (etc) philosophy well. Good.
February 12, 2026
4.5/5. Frankly, Mills should be required reading! Building on his previous assertions in The Racial Contract, in Blackness Visible, he lays bare the blatant racist hypocrisy and cognitive dissonance of some of the most well known philosophers. Throughout the book, Mills conveys a very clear point: Your favorite philosophers’ ten-thousand-paged treatises on morality are highly questionable when they frequently denied the humanity of black folks, and willfully contributed to their enslavement and systematic oppression.
Historically accepted epistemological claims and grand pronouncements about what it means to be human are equally suspect, when one considers the sources. Additionally, a modern philosopher who does not take seriously the topic of race/racism and its shaping of human reality, and its impact on all that we see around us, is in denial.
Mills ends the book with a very thoughtful critique of Frederick Douglass’ work, which is the first critique of Douglass I’ve ever encountered. And here I always thought the man was beyond reproach 😅.
Historically accepted epistemological claims and grand pronouncements about what it means to be human are equally suspect, when one considers the sources. Additionally, a modern philosopher who does not take seriously the topic of race/racism and its shaping of human reality, and its impact on all that we see around us, is in denial.
Mills ends the book with a very thoughtful critique of Frederick Douglass’ work, which is the first critique of Douglass I’ve ever encountered. And here I always thought the man was beyond reproach 😅.
August 15, 2012
Charles W . Mills works are always thought provoking. In this piece he seats as the heir to Franz Fanon and Richard Wright critique of euro-centric normative political and ethical views. This book should be considered a classic much like Fanon's Black Skin/ White Mask. His ideas of Herrenvolk ethics build on Fanon's idea of Sociogenic Ontologic view of the Black experience and essential as a platform underwriting contemporary moral ethics for post-colonial and post civil right thinkers challenging ideas of natural rights that dont take race seriously. LOVE IT.
Read
March 1, 2011Electronic version owned (pdf).
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews