Charles W. Mills: "Liberalism and Racial Justice"
Channel: Simpson Center
Date: 2018-05-29

Charles W. Mills, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center, asks, "How should political progressives relate to liberalism, the now-hegemonic global political ideology?" Mills argues we should try to retrieve liberalism, but that this will require more work than conventionally assumed. Mills articulates that once we recognize, in full depth and detail, how illiberal actual historical liberalism has been, we will need not merely to remap our conventional periodizations, but to rethink the received account and characterization of liberalism in the social contract tradition, examining in particular racial justice.

This Katz Distinguished Lecture in the Humanities is part of “Capitalism and Comparative Racialization,” a 2017-2018 John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. More information is available at:
✔ https://simpsoncenter.org/katz-lectures/liberalism-and-racial-justice

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*Speaker bio*
Charles W. Mills is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He works in the general area of social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender, and race. He is 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.

Other books are: From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), Contract and Domination (co-authored with Carole Pateman) (Polity, 2007), which brings the sexual and racial contracts together, and Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality (University of the West Indies Press, 2010). His most recent book is Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2017). Mills has also co-edited the following: Philosophy: The Big Questions (Blackwell, 2003) with Ruth Sample and James Sterba; a special issue of the Du Bois Review on "Race in a 'Postracial' Epoch" (Spring 2014) with Robert Gooding-Williams; and Simianization: Apes, Gender, Class and Race (LIT Verlag, 2015) with Wulf D. Hund and Silvia Sebastiani.

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.