Abstract
Introductory Essay
“White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.” With that first sentence in The Racial Contract (TRC, 1997), Jamaican-born philosopher Charles W. Mills established himself as one of the most forceful critics of Western liberalism of the past several decades. The slim volume’s blistering critique of the classic contractarian thinkers reverberated far beyond political philosophy, with implications for theorizing on race and racism across the social sciences and humanities.
This year marks the 25th anniversary of the publication of TRC, and September marked a year since Mills’s passing. We have curated this special symposium, the first in the journal’s history, both to honor the legacy of Mills and to offer critical reflection on his pioneering text. As the contributors to this symposium demonstrate, TRC has shaped critical scholarship on the study of racism, even if Mills himself has remained underappreciated in the mainstream of sociology. With the rise of white nationalism across the globe and conservative fear-mongering more locally over the teachings of Critical Race Theory, and in the face of many more pressing concerns, Mills’s writings remain as urgent as ever.
For this special symposium, we solicited essays from scholars who are indebted to Charles Mills and his scholarship. Teófilo Reis is a sociology doctoral student at State University of Campinas, Brazil, and a PhD candidate in philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is also a former student of Mills, which he reflects on in his essay, “Mills on Sociology, Sociology in Mills.” Beyond these personal reflections, Reis offers commentary on the lasting contribution of TRC to the contemporary study of race and racism. Importantly, Reis draws our attention to Mills’s interdisciplinarity, including his critical affection toward sociology. This interdisciplinarity is what makes Mills’s philosophy, including TRC, so accessible to sociologists of race and racism. As Reis so aptly notes, “Mills used sociology as a tool to help him keep a grip on reality, preventing him from becoming lost in abstraction and doing theory in a fantasyland.”
Saher Selod is a sociologist and chair of the Department of Sociology at Simmons University. In “The Racial Contract: Challenging White Supremacy in Sociological Theories and Providing a Global Theory for Race,” Selod shares her own intellectual journey to TRC. Like many students of color, Selod found the traditional sociological canon, and her graduate training, less than adequate for explaining the post-9/11 American racial state she experienced firsthand as a Muslim American, and toward which she wanted to devote her own studies. Yet, it was her first encounter with Mills and TRC that allowed for her to find space for herself, and her work, within our discipline that still remains deeply Eurocentric in both its form and substance.
Jennifer Mueller is a sociologist and the Director of the Intergroup Relations Program at Skidmore College. In “‘Imagine an Ignorance That Fights Back’: Honoring Charles Mills, Our Inheritance and Charge,” Mueller provides a kind of genealogy of her scholarship on white ignorance that is founded upon Mills’s own formulation of an epistemology of ignorance within TRC. For Mueller, it was Mills’s attention to the embodied aspects of the racial contract—as a social contract between and for whites where the (white) body becomes the primary site for acting out racial dominance—that captivated her attention. Mueller also draws our attention to Charles W. Mills’s other writings, including the essays “Red Shift” (2002) and “‘Ideal Theory’ as Ideology” (2005) and books like From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (2003). Perhaps most importantly, Mueller reveals not only what Mills’s thinking did for her own intellectual development, but also her own antiracist praxis. Mills, and his text, “raised a visceral understanding of the white knowledge resistance” Mueller had been wrestling with, both in and out of the classroom.
In “Twenty-Five Years of Charles Mills’s The Racial Contract in Sociology,” Neda Maghbouleh, the Canada Research Chair in Migration, Race, and Identity and Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, first provides an historical overview of how sociologists have engaged TRC since its publication. Maghbouleh periodizes this engagement in two waves. A first wave, led mainly by Black scholars, drew on Mills’s writings for a long overdue recalibration away from a study of “race relations” to a study of anti-Black racism, which helped to affirm the promise of a Black Sociology (Ladner [1973] 1998). A second wave of scholarship, underway in the last 12 years, has been led by early career sociologists who have helped bring Mills’s insights into myriad sociological subfields and whose research has drawn strength from related trends, including a resurgence of scholarship on W. E. B. Du Bois. Maghbouleh concludes her essay with a reflection on how the global reach of Mills’s writings was a major inspiration for her own award-winning research on race and Iranian Americans.
The education scholars Greg Wiggan, Annette Teasdell, and Tierra Parsons offer a different perspective in the final essay, ““Critical Race Structuralism and Charles Mills’s The Racial Contract: Pedagogical Practices for the 21st Century Educators.” While many sociologists incorporate Mills’s theoretical work into the classroom, these education scholars draw on Mills in order to ultimately “engage in intercultural collaborative communication and actions of change.” The trio also views themselves as preparing the next generation of teachers, many of whom are coming under attack for even discussing issues like racism and sexism. According to Education Week, since January 2021, 42 states introduced bills or took steps to restrict or limit how these issues are discussed (Schwartz 2021). But if you are in need of some inspiration, these scholars suggest ways to create safe spaces in our classrooms for critical discussions about race and social justice issues.
Collectively, the contributions in this symposium use Mills and his writings to reveal how the “personal” becomes fashioned to our intellectual projects, and how generative this can be for our own scholarship. Too often, we discourage scholars from using biography as a means to explore and understand the social world around them (cf. Combs et al., 2016). And yet, the ability to show the relationship between biography and history is among sociology’s most fundamental tenets. The symposium also makes clear the urgency of Mills’s demand for a global perspective on the study of race and racism remains. To date, most American sociologists of race and racism remain deeply provincial in their analysis of the color line. Mills and his TRC ask us to consider how the color line materializes beyond the United States, and in response to global and historical forces that both shape and are shaped by White supremacy.
We hope our readers find these essays as enlightening and inspiring as we do. We hope our readers, and the field, see this symposium as a call to take seriously the writings and contributions of Charles W. Mills. Finally, we hope this special issue reflects our own respect and admiration for one of the true intellectual giants of the twenty-first century. Rest in power, Dr. Mills.