MOVING TO FRONT (ORIGINALLY POSTED SEPT. 29)--A LIVELY DISCUSSION CONTINUES IN THE COMMENTS
Via Jason Stanley, I came upon this very funny video clip of Mills talking about "The Whiteness of John Rawls." The NYT has also published its obituary, which contains this useful summation of his critique of liberalism in The Racial Contract:
In it he argued that white supremacy, far from being a bug in the Western political tradition, was one of its features, and that racism represented a political system every bit as coherent and intentional as liberal democracy.
“White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today,” he wrote in the book’s first sentence.
He posited that one of liberalism’s core tenets, the “social contract,” a theoretical agreement in which individuals ceded some rights in exchange for protection by the government, was designed explicitly to exclude people of color. (He readily noted the debt he owed to feminist political theory, especially the philosopher Carole Pateman and her 1988 book “The Sexual Contract.”)
“What Mills does is to deconstruct the domain of white political theory by showing that Black people and people of color were never meant to be included,” George Yancy, a philosopher at Emory University in Atlanta, said in an interview....
I am far from being a Rawlsian liberal, but my impression is that Rawlsian liberals have found this critique wholly unpersuasive, as involving misunderstandings of the theory. But what say the experts? I will prefer signed comments, but you must at least include a valid email address, which will not appear.
