Race & the Redemption of Liberalism : Theorizing Racial Justice PART 2 | C. Mills
a Transcribed Lecture from Charles W. Mills
Okay, so anyway, how can you retrieve liberalism given this sordid history and given these critiques? My claim is that rather than, in a sort of brushing all this stuff, you know, under the carpet; to liberalize illiberal liberalism, we need to do several things. Number one, rewrite the history of liberalism so its exclusions are highlighted rather than marginalized. Number two, make clear rather than obfuscate the role of the canonical liberal theorists in justifying these exclusions. Number three, place at center stage, rather than offstage, the concrete shaping by group privilege of the crucial components of liberalism.
So, my claim is that if you make these moves, you can get a liberalism that's quite different from the ones that we're accustomed to. The liberalism that as I say has been complicit with these systems of ascriptive hierarchy that was supposed to be eliminated by the transition to the modern period.
How do we think of people in liberal political philosophy? And liberalism is traditionally thought of as having an ontology of atomic individuals, and our claim that this conventional representation is actually false because there's no inconsistency in saying that in the society based on domination, we need a social ontology that registers the fact of domination. So, you can't assume that everybody is effectively equal if some people are positioned above others. So, you need a social ontology that registers the fact of group domination, whether men over women, whites over people of color, or what. Conceptual cartography, what do I mean? Well think of the second wave feminist critique that the way the polity is drawn, the way the public-private boundary is drawn, is that the distinctive problems of women are basically not allowed to enter into the public sphere. So, the family, patriarchal relations, sex, all of that is part of the private sphere that's not a matter of justice. So, what you know second wave feminists sort of set themselves to do is to argue for the redrawing of that map. So, the conceptual cartography, how we draw the polity, that matters. To consider issues of you know how the society came into being, issues perhaps of corrective justice, we need to know what the actual history is. And part of the problem with actual liberal theory is that it obfuscates, it covers up, it whitewashes the history, the history which has been a history of racial subordination.
So, all of those put together, if you rewrite them, you rewrite the ontology, you remap the cartography, you give a different account of history, it then means that to sort of bring about equality, freedom, and self-realization for individuals, you could end up with principles which seem quite different from liberal principles, but they are still liberal. But this is a liberalism that has now taken the history of the society and the actual structure of the society into account in a way that mainstream liberalism has not.
So, on the axis of class, going back to the 19th century, you have a social democratic version of liberal theory which says liberalist principles are okay. We need to sort of face the fact that the working class is going to be materially subordinated unless you sort of take account of the differential power that capital has. I don't have to tell you, we're now in an epoch, one percent vs. the 99 percent, the rise of plutocracy, as it has been called, the third Gilded Age. So the inequalities of wealth in the United States and other countries are sort of as large as they've ever been. So, there's a social democratic critique. The gender critique, the feminist critique, again, you need to sort of recognize the extent to which men are dominant over women and this patriarchal domination manifests itself in all kinds of spheres.
But the point I would make is that unfortunately, the racial critique has not been as well developed as these other critiques. So that what I'm arguing for that we need to do is develop a racial critique of liberal theory that is going to be comparable in its significance and you know for the importance of rewriting mainstream political philosophy and mainstream political theory, as you know social democratic liberal theory and feminist liberal theory have been.
Okay, let me now talk briefly about what I'm going to call a liberalism that's racial. Racial liberalism, as I use the term, is basically a liberalism that has been shaped by racial domination. So, think of racial liberalism as analogous to what feminists would see as a patriarchal form of liberal theory, where liberalism has been shaped by its evolution in societies of male domination. So, it then means that crucial terms, crucial frameworks, crucial values have all been permeated by the fact of male domination and the need to justify the subordination of the human race.
And I'm arguing for a racial liberalism that's comparable to a patriarchal liberalism and that evolves in the period of European expansionism when key liberal theorists are completely on board with this program, so that Europeans basically expand into the world and you cannot then apply liberal theories equally to people of color as you can to Europeans because then, obviously, it would mean that the processes in which you're involved, your conquest of peoples, expropriation, racial slavery, these are all inconsistent with the liberalism that, you know, is color-inclusive. So it has to be a liberalism that's racially restrictive, so you get a liberalism that's racialized. So, it's a racial liberalism in that sense, in that crucial terms of the liberal theory are rewritten by race so that the privileging of Europeans at the expense of people of color does not seem like an inconsistency because people of color are not seen as moral equals. So you then get a world that I described during the Versailles conference, where the Japanese proposal is shut down because, you know, the Anglo-Saxon nations are basically saying, "Look, the colonial world rests on racial inequality. This principle would upend this world, so clearly we cannot have that as part of the Covenant of the League of Nations."
So the crucial question then is, given that liberalism has been racialized, why is it that there has not been more discussion within political theory and political philosophy of this fact? Why has this not been a sort of self-conscious project to sort of explore and investigate the racialization of liberalism and then to sort of make the theoretical moves necessary to de-racialize it? And my argument here, and some people have objected to this, but tell me what you think, my argument here is that one major factor is the demographic whiteness of the profession. So, this will come as no news to the philosophers in the room. To the non-philosophers, let me break the news to you. As I don't have to tell you, people of color are underrepresented in academia in general, in philosophy. It's so extreme that basically, if you go to a meeting of the American Philosophical Association, you have to put on dark glasses, otherwise you might get snow blindness from the sort of expanse of white faces. The percentage of black philosophers in philosophy is one percent. It was one percent twenty years ago; it's still one percent today. Latinos, maybe another one percent. Asian Americans, another one percent. Native Americans, basically the fingers of two hands, it's about three percent people of color, very white profession. And the demographic whiteness, I would argue, basically helps to sustain a conceptual whiteness. And this term might seem more controversial because the demographic whiteness is just a matter of numbers, you know, hard to disagree with that. The conceptual whiteness, you have to make more of a case for because many white philosophers get their backs up and they say, "Look, philosophy can't be white because philosophy is dealing with the human condition. People of color are human, you're certainly not denying that. Therefore, you guys are automatically included in the general and abstract representations that we're giving you as philosophers." And the problem with the argument, which feminist philosophers have sort of also made the case you know for the maleness of philosophy, is that the distinctive experiences of people of color are not really accommodated within these seemingly general and all-inclusive abstractions. So, as I just mentioned, the experience of people of color in modernity is an experience of colonization, imperial subordination, expropriation, racial slavery, apartheid, Jim Crow. To what extent are these experiences really part of the standard political story we hear in political philosophy? And I would argue at the end that they're almost completely marginal.