Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race

by Charles W. Mills

"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.

Genres: Philosophy, Race, Nonfiction, Politics, Sociology, Academic, Feminism

272 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1998

About the author

Charles 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.

Reviews

[Andrew Allison · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Irami]

Blackness 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."

[A YOGAM · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Kev Nickells · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Alfresco · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[edenstephen]

Electronic version owned (pdf).