Biography:Charles W. Mills

From HandWiki
Short description: Jamaican philosopher (1951–2021)
For other people named Charles Mills, see Charles Mills.
Charles W. Mills
Born
Charles Wade Mills

(1951-01-03)January 3, 1951
London, England, UK
DiedSeptember 20, 2021(2021-09-20) (aged 70)
Evanston, Illinois, US
AwardsGustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award
Academic background
Education
ThesisThe Concept of Ideology in the Thought of Marx and Engels (1985)
Academic work
Era20th-century philosophy
Notable worksThe Racial Contract

Charles Wade Mills (January 3, 1951 – September 20, 2021) was a Jamaican philosopher who was a professor at Graduate Center, CUNY, and Northwestern University. Born in London, Mills grew up in Jamaica and later became a United States citizen. He was educated at the University of the West Indies and the University of Toronto.

Early life and education

Charles Wade Mills was born on January 3, 1951, in London, England, to Winnifred and Gladstone Mills.[1][2] His parents were graduate students in London and moved to Kingston, Jamaica, shortly after he was born.[3] He grew up in Kingston.[4][5]

Mills received a BSc in physics at the University of the West Indies in 1971 and an MA and PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1976 and 1985, respectively.[6] His dissertation was titled The Concept of Ideology in the Thought of Marx and Engels.[7] He endorsed historical materialism until the 1990s.[8] While at the University of Toronto, Mills helped to unionize teaching assistants.[5]

Academic career

Mills taught physics in Kingston from 1971 to 1973 at the College of Arts, Science and Technology, and from 1976 to 1977 at Campion College; he later taught philosophy at the University of Oklahoma (1987–90) and the University of Illinois at Chicago (1990–2007) where he was a UIC Distinguished Professor.[6]

Mills was John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University, before his appointment as Distinguished Professor at Graduate Center, CUNY, in August 2016.[9][10][11] He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017.[12] He gave the Tanner Lectures on Human Values in 2020.[13]

Views

Over his career, Mills published six books and over 100 articles.[13] Shannon Sullivan argues that Mills's oeuvre can be understood through the concept of smadditizin, a word Mills used in the title of a 1997 article. Sullivan, quoting Mills, describes smadditizin as "the struggle to have one's personhood recognized" [emphasis in original]. She argues that, no matter whether he embraced Marxism, Black radicalism, or racial liberalism, Mills's work opposed the non-recognition of persons.[14] According to an obituary in CBC News, Mills is regarded as a pioneer in critical race theory and the philosophy of race.[5] Philosopher Christopher Lebron described him in The Nation as a "black Socrates".[3]

Mills's book The Racial Contract (1997) won a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award for the study of bigotry and human rights in North America.[15] The Racial Contract posits that the social contract is really a contract based on the notion of white domination.[3] According to Jamelle Bouie, the work argues that "classic contractarian theories", such as those proposed by "Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant", "were built on an assumption of white racial domination, a racial contract, so to speak".[16]

Later in his career, according to Tommie Shelby, Mills launched a sustained critique of John Rawls's contractarian theory of justice. Shelby notes that Mills rejected the Rawlsian turn to ideal theory in political philosophy in favor of an approach that takes careful account of the realities of oppression.[17] Despite his critique of Rawls, however, Mills came to endorse a version of liberalism in Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, suggesting that the history of liberalism reveals the dismantling of social hierarchies.[18] Reviewing Black Rights/White Wrongs in Political Theory, Ainsley LeSure observes that "[t]hough [Mills] acknowledges that racial justice need not be realized through the liberal tradition, he affirms that it can."[19]

Personal life

Mills has been described as "Afro-Caribbean",[20] "Caribbean",[21][22] and "Jamaican".[23] He described himself as "Caribbean-American".[24]

In a 2014 publication, Mills stated, "I was a citizen of a small Third World country, Jamaica, which owed its very existence to … oppressive international forces."[25] (As of October 2020), Mills was an American citizen.[4]

Mills was diagnosed with metastatic cancer in May 2021.[5] He died of cancer in Evanston, Illinois, on September 20, 2021.[1]

Books

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 Risen, Clay (September 27, 2021). "Charles W. Mills, Philosopher of Race and Liberalism, Dies at 70" (in en-US). The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/27/us/charles-w-mills-dead.html. 
  2. ↑ Herdeck, Donald (1979). Herdeck, Donald E.. ed. Caribbean writers : a bio-bibliographical-critical encyclopedia. Three Continents Press. pp. 146–147. ISBN 0-914478-74-5. OCLC 5223510. 
  3. ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Smith, Harrison (October 1, 2021). "Charles W. Mills, incisive philosopher of liberalism and race, dies at 70" (in en-US). The Washington Post. ISSN 0190-8286. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/charles-w-mills-dead/2021/10/01/6eda0f5e-22c0-11ec-8200-5e3fd4c49f5e_story.html. 
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 Lim, Woojin (October 29, 2020). "'The Racial Contract': Interview with Philosopher Charles W. Mills" (in en-US). https://harvardpolitics.com/interview-with-charles-w-mills/. 
  5. ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Raza, Ali (October 10, 2021). "Toronto-educated philosopher and critical race theory pioneer Charles W. Mills dies at 70". CBC News. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/charles-mills-obit-1.6206566. 
  6. ↑ 6.0 6.1 "Charles W. Mills (Curriculum vitae)". https://www.gc.cuny.edu/getattachment/f3c93233-f9eb-4341-9439-55b7e2842135/attachment. 
  7. ↑ "Search - Theses Canada". Library and Archives Canada. March 8, 2019. https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/services/theses/Pages/item.aspx?idNumber=16025342. 
  8. ↑ Loggins, Jared (September 24, 2021). "The House That Charles Built". https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/the-house-that-charles-built. 
  9. ↑ "Mills from Northwestern to CUNY Graduate Center". November 16, 2015. https://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2015/11/mills-from-northwestern-to-cuny-graduate-center.html. 
  10. ↑ "Professor Charles Mills to Join Graduate Center Philosophy Program". Graduate Center, CUNY. November 28, 2015. https://www.gc.cuny.edu/News/All-News/Detail?id=33725. 
  11. ↑ "Charles W. Mills". Graduate Center, CUNY. https://www.gc.cuny.edu/faculty/core-bios/charles-w-mills. 
  12. ↑ "Charles W. Mills" (in en). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. https://www.amacad.org/person/charles-w-mills. 
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Táíwò, Olúfémi O. (September 27, 2021). "The Radical Generosity of Charles Mills" (in en-US). The Nation. ISSN 0027-8378. https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/charles-mills-radical-generosity/. 
  14. ↑ Sullivan, Shannon (2017). "Smadditizin' Across the Years: Race and Class in the Work of Charles Mills". Critical Philosophy of Race 5 (1): 1–18. doi:10.5325/critphilrace.5.1.0001. 
  15. ↑ Roberts, Neil (April 3, 2017). "The Critique of Racial Liberalism: An Interview with Charles W. Mills" (in en-US). https://www.aaihs.org/the-critique-of-racial-liberalism-an-interview-with-charles-w-mills/. 
  16. ↑ Bouie, Jamelle (September 25, 2021). "The World Lost a Great Philosopher This Week" (in en-US). The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/25/opinion/charles-w-mills-dead.html. 
  17. ↑ Shelby, Tommie (2013). "Racial Realities and Corrective Justice". Critical Philosophy of Race 1 (2): 145–162. doi:10.5325/critphilrace.1.2.0145. 
  18. ↑ 18.0 18.1 Hughey, Matthew W. (February 19, 2018). "Four thoughts on Charles Mills – Black rights/white wrongs: the critique of racial liberalism" (in en). Ethnic and Racial Studies 41 (3): 523–531. doi:10.1080/01419870.2018.1389967. ISSN 0141-9870. 
  19. ↑ 19.0 19.1 LeSure, Ainsley (October 2018). "none" (in en). Political Theory 46 (5): 801–805. doi:10.1177/0090591717750345. ISSN 0090-5917. 
  20. ↑ Ferguson, Stephen C. (2017-01-10). "Exploring the Matter of Race". in Zack, Naomi (in en). The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race. 1. Oxford University Press. pp. 265. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190236953.013.56. 
  21. ↑ Rabaka, Reiland (2011) (in en). Hip Hop's Inheritance: From the Harlem Renaissance to the Hip Hop Feminist Movement. Lexington Books. pp. 45. ISBN 978-0-7391-6480-8. https://books.google.com/books?id=zpg14N3_FxYC. 
  22. ↑ Murphy, Philip (2018-08-01) (in en). The Empire's New Clothes: The Myth of the Commonwealth. Oxford University Press. pp. 120. ISBN 978-0-19-093478-1. https://books.google.com/books?id=H2FmDwAAQBAJ. 
  23. ↑ Gordon, Jane Anna (2020-03-05). "Mapping Afro-Caribbean Political Thought" (in en). The Oxford Handbook of Comparative Political Theory. Oxford University Press. p. 148. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190253752.013.25. ISBN 978-0-19-025375-2. https://books.google.com/books?id=aMHADwAAQBAJ. Retrieved 2021-10-04. 
  24. ↑ Mills, Charles W. (2009). "Rousseau, the Master's Tools, and Anti-Contractarian Contractarianism". The CLR James Journal 15 (1): 92–112. doi:10.5840/clrjames20091515. ISSN 2167-4256. 
  25. ↑ "Unwriting and unwhitening the world" (in en). Race and Racism in International Relations. Routledge. 2014-10-30. p. 203. doi:10.4324/9781315857299-20. ISBN 978-1-315-85729-9. 
  26. ↑ Cohen, Philip N. (June 1999). "none" (in en). Review of Radical Political Economics 31 (2): 102–105. doi:10.1177/048661349903100208. ISSN 0486-6134. 
  27. ↑ Ahmed, Sara (1999). "none". Women's Philosophy Review 21 (21): 63–66. doi:10.5840/wpr1999219. ISSN 1369-4324. 
  28. ↑ Valls, Andrew (September 1998). "none" (in en). American Political Science Review 92 (3): 691–692. doi:10.2307/2585505. ISSN 0003-0554. 
  29. ↑ Harris, Leonard (January 2000). "none" (in en). Ethics 110 (2): 432–434. doi:10.1086/233284. ISSN 0014-1704. 
  30. ↑ de Allen, Gertrude James Gonzalez (2005). "none". Philosophia Africana 8 (1): 83–86. ISSN 1539-8250. 
  31. ↑ Shelby, Tommie (September 2004). "From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism" (in en). Perspectives on Politics 2 (3). doi:10.1017/S1537592704320372. ISSN 1537-5927. http://www.journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S1537592704320372. Retrieved September 21, 2021. 
  32. ↑ Bonner, Frank (January 2009). "none" (in en). Gender and Education 21 (1): 120–122. doi:10.1080/09540250802580877. ISSN 0954-0253. 
  33. ↑ Thame, Maziki (2011). "none". Social and Economic Studies 60 (3/4): 221–225. ISSN 0037-7651. 
  34. ↑ Winant, Howard (February 19, 2018). "Charles Mills for and against liberalism" (in en). Ethnic and Racial Studies 41 (3): 551–556. doi:10.1080/01419870.2018.1389969. ISSN 0141-9870. 

Further reading

  • "Charles W. Mills". Contemporary Black Biography. 146. Gale. 2018. Gale K1606008280. ISBN 978-1-4103-2357-6. 

External links



Retrieved from "https://handwiki.org/wiki/index.php?title=Biography:Charles_W._Mills&oldid=3440121"