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Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race

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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)