Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race [Paperback]

Charles W. Mills (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 9, 1998

Charles Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience. Ralph Ellison's metaphor of black invisibility has special relevance to philosophy, whose demographic and conceptual "whiteness" has long been a source of wonder and complaint to racial minorities. Mills points out the absence of any philosophical narrative theorizing and detailing race's centrality to the recent history of the West, such as feminists have articulated for gender domination. European expansionism in its various forms, Mills contends, generates a social ontology of race that warrants philosophical attention. Through expropriation, settlement, slavery, and colonialism, race comes into existence as simultaneously real and unreal: ontological without being biological, metaphysical without being physical, existential without being essential, shaping one's being without being in one's shape. His essays explore the contrasting sums of a white and black modernity, examine standpoint epistemology and the metaphysics of racial identity, look at black-Jewish relations and racial conspiracy theories, map the workings of a white-supremacist polity and the contours of a racist moral consciousness, and analyze the presuppositions of Frederick Douglass's famous July 4 prognosis for black political inclusion. Collectively they demonstrate what exciting new philosophical terrain can be opened up once the color line in western philosophy is made visible and addressed.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

The title of this collection of eight engagingly written, erudite essays by an African American professor of philosophy at the University of Illinois is a take-off on Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, in which Ellison graphically portrayed the American black person as systematically obliterated from society's consciousness. There are two major themes here: the first concerns the philosophical professoriate, which is predominately?and, the author contends, dominatingly?white; the second is whether or not race moderates philosophical consciousness. These are deep questions, and in dealing with them, Mills addresses a broad spectrum of issues: black-Jewish relations, gender (the progress of women vs. blacks), white supremacy, racism, genocide, jurisprudence, and much more. The thought of philosophers and others from ancient times to the present is given incisive analyses, as are epistemological, metaphysical, ethical, political, sociological, and literary considerations. The subject of this book is long overdue for airing. Highly recommended for a variety of pertinent academic and larger public library collections.?Leon H. Brody, U.S. Office of Personnel Mgt. Lib., Washington, DC
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

Mills, a philosophy professor, takes his profession to task for its silence on race even while it expounds on ethics. He skewers esteemed philosophers, including Immanuel Kant and John Locke, whose biased views so informed their work that they could exhort the sanctity of individual rights, taking as a given that nonwhites (nonpersons) were never intended to be covered by such rights. The upshot has been the seeming contradiction of a nation with a philosophical base founded on individual rights that nonetheless has a history of brutal treatment of nonwhites. There is no contradiction, according to Mills. Racism is not an aberration of an otherwise nearly ideal American democratic political system but is part of the political fabric, inherited from European imperialists. Mills examines emergent critical race theory and its movement beyond the political and sociological arena to the venerable territory of philosophy. Copiously researched and footnoted, this is tough going for the uninitiated but an outstanding work that addresses one of the many racial issues of our times. Vanessa Bush --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 288 pages
• Publisher: Cornell University Press (April 9, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0801484715
• ISBN-13: 978-0801484711
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.9 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #455,877 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Charles W. Mills is John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University. He did his PhD at the University of Toronto, and previously taught at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Illinois at Chicago. Mills works in the general area of oppositional political theory, with a particular focus on race. He is the author of numerous articles and book chapters, and five books: The Racial Contract (1997), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (1998), From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (2003), Contract and Domination (with Carole Pateman) (2007), and Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality: Race, Class and Social Domination (2010).

Customer Reviews

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5.0 out of 5 stars PERTINENT PHILOSOPHICAL COMMENTS FROM A PROMINENT PHILOSOPHER, December 10, 2010

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Steven H. Propp (Sacramento, CA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Paperback)

Charles W. Mills is a philosophy professor at Northwestern University. He previously taught at the University of Oklahoma and the University of Illinois at Chicago.

He writes in the Preface to this 1998 book, "These essays represent my exploration of the possibilities generated when race is taken seriously in some of the standard areas of the field: metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, applied ethics, social and political philosophy. With one exception, all were written within the span of four years and show the development of my thinking."

Here are some quotations from the book:

"The 'whiteness' of academic philosphy has long been a source of wonder and complaint to minorities. Among the humanities, it has been one of the most resistant to what have come to be called 'multiculturalist' revisions." (Pg. xii)
"What exactly is it about philosophy that so many black people find alienating, which would explain the fact, a subject of ongoing discussion in the APA Proceedings and Addresses, that blacks continue to be far more underrepresented here than in most other humanities and that black graduate students generally steer away from philosophy?" (Pg. 2)
"So Immanuel Kant, theorist of abstract noumenal persons equally deserving of respect, reveals himself simultaneously as one of the founders of the very ontology of subpersons and racial disrespect that black activists such as Garvey have traditionally had to fight against." (Pg. 74)