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"Racial Equality" Charles Mills, John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University

Photograph of Charles Mills
September 10, 2015
All Day
Mershon Center for International Security Studies

Abstract: Racial equality has been a moral and political demand from people of color for hundreds of years. But discussions within philosophy of this concept, and what it would take to realize it as an ideal, are still comparatively rare. I will argue that racial equality as a concept and an ideal is indeed worthy of philosophical exploration. Moreover, given (what I will claim is) the centrality of race and racial inequality to modernity, racial equality as an achieved reality would have far-reaching implications that would dramatically reshape the world. For people of color, racial equality as a theme and an aspiration is not at all yawn-inducing liberal boilerplate, for the non-achievement of this goal despite liberalism’s promise is the central problem that has constrained their lives for hundreds of years. In this paper I will look at some of the different dimensions of racial in/equality, the theoretical problems it poses for Rawlsian justice theory, and offer some suggestions as to how I think these challenges might be addressed.
 
Bio: Charles W. Mills is John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy. He works in the general area of social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender, and race. He did his Ph.D. at the University of Toronto, and is the author of numerous articles and book chapters, and five books. His first book, The Racial Contract (Cornell University, 1997), won a Myers Outstanding Book Award for the study of bigotry and human rights in North America. His second book, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell University, 1998), was a finalist for the award for the most important North American work in social philosophy of that year. His fourth book, Contract and Domination (Polity Press, 2007), is co-authored with Carole Pateman, who wrote The Sexual Contract (Stanford University Press, 1988), and it seeks to bring the two “contracts” together. His most recent book is a collection of his Caribbean essays, Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality: Race, Class and Social Domination (University of the West Indies Press, 2010). Before joining Northwestern, Charles Mills taught at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he was a UIC Distinguished Professor.
 
Questions? Please contact PTW co-coordinators Inés Valdez [valdez.39@osu.edu] and Benjamin McKean [mckean.41@osu.edu]