Charles W. Mills's Challenge for Intellectual Historians

(Now with fuller citations!)

To introduce Charles W. Mills, let’s start with this bracing statement: “Intellectuals write about what interests them, what they find important, and—especially if the writer is prolific—silence constitutes good prima facie evidence that the subject was not of particular interest” (Mills, The Racial Contract 25th edition {Cornell University Press, 2022; 1997}, 94).

I am unsure how many intellectual historians would agree with Mills’s assertion here, and I think it’s worth asking both why Mills thinks it is valid and why I think relatively few intellectual historians (or few historians in general) display Mills’s eagerness to hold intellectuals accountable for what they don’t write about. “Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” is, after all, a truism among historians.

The quoted sentence sits in between the following sentences, which give away the specific quarry Mills is after:

Where is Grotius’s magisterial On Natural Law and the Wrongness of the Conquest of the Indies, Locke’s stirring Letter concerning the Treatment of the Indians, Kant’s moving On the Personhood of Negroes, Mill’s famous condemnatory Implications of Utilitarianism for English Colonialism, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’s outraged Political Economy of Slavery?… By their failure to denounce the great crimes inseparable from the European conquest, or by the halfheartedness of their condemnation, or by their actual endorsement of it in some cases, most of the leading European ethical theorists reveal their complicity in the Racial Contract (Mills 2022; 1997, 94).

That Mills makes up hypothetical titles for these great philosophers’ “missing” works is not just a piece of showmanship—it is a subtle pre-emption of the inevitable response common to the specialist who has a sort of mental concordance ready for any such challenge: they will reply that actually Locke did address the treatment of Indians… or ah, but you’re overlooking what Marx had to say about slavery in Capital Vol. I, Chapter 31!

Yes, these quite prolific intellectuals got around to writing something nicely quotable about these things (Mills might have replied), but the point is not really whether, when Locke or Marx were compelled by the drift of their argument to address systematic land theft or slavery, they said something indicative of an underlying condemnatory attitude toward those things. Why were these things never for them the center or the origin of a substantial piece of writing? Since I brought up Chapter 31 of Capital, why would Marx write, “the veiled slavery of the wage workers in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the new world,” and then never think all that deeply about the pedestal?

Some specialists in Marx or Locke or any of the other named or implied figures in the history of western political and economic thought will likely see in the corners of Mills’s questions about what he calls “the evidence of silence” a quite rudimentary ambush—his point is merely to get us to say, “well, I guess it’s because they were kind of racist” or something to that effect. And they will object that doing so is presentist, or it imposes a flattening moral simplicity on a matter that was, for many or even most people of that day, enormously complicated.

But Mills’s point isn’t just to get us to accede to labeling Locke or Marx or Mill or Grotius or Rawls “kind of racist.” But his actual point isn’t likely to make some people any happier.

Because where the tendency among many historians is to emphasize the “muddiness” or obscurity of our vantage on the morality of a past age—the difficulty of truly comprehending how something that is straightforwardly immoral in the present could have someone at another point in time a dark night of the soul—Mills in fact argues that what we are looking at is not “complexity” but a mental malfunction. “How were people able consistently to do the wrong thing while thinking that they were doing the right thing?” he asks—and replies: “In part, it is a problem of cognition and of white moral cognitive dysfunction.”

Sorry, Jonathan Edwards! Your ability to reconcile your Christianity with buying, owning, and bequeathing human beings isn’t because you were “very much a person of [your] time,”[1] and our trouble performing the same feat is not because “[l]acking detailed investigations of their circumstances, we cannot plumb the motivations of these individuals or discover possible connections between their seemingly disparate acts” (Mills 2022; 1997, 94-95)[2]. It’s because you didn’t process the reality of what was going on in front of you correctly.

As Guy Lancaster noted in a very interesting essay putting Mills in conversation with the “divisive concepts” bills flooding state legislatures, “The idea that whiteness entails some kind of cognitive dysfunction is certainly offensive to those individuals invested in their whiteness, a concept worth the descriptor of ‘divisive.’” But—even though I am sure it would cut no ice with the anti-CRT crowd—it is important and necessary to understand both what Mills means by “whiteness” and what he means by “cognitive dysfunction” because these two concepts have a very special meaning and take on a very special role within Mills’s larger argument about the existence of a “racial contract.”

Mills is very clear on what he thinks whiteness is, or how it works: “‘White’ people do not preexist but are brought into existence as ‘whites’ by the Racial Contract—hence the peculiar transformation of the human population that accompanies this contract. The white race is invented, and one becomes ‘white by law’” (Mills 2022; 1997, 63). And, in elaborating in another part of the book on that “peculiar transformation”:

Part of what it means to be constructed as “white” (the metamorphosis of the sociopolitical contract), part of what it requires to achieve Whiteness, successfully to become a white person (one imagines a ceremony with certificates attending the successful rite of passage: “Congratulations, you’re now an official white person!”), is a cognitive model that precludes self-transparency and genuine understanding of social realities. To a significant extent, then, white signatories will live in an invented delusional world, a racial fantasyland, a “consensual hallucination,” to quote William Gibson’s famous characterization of cyberspace, though this particular hallucination is located in real space. There will be white mythologies, invented Orients, invented Africas, invented Americas, with a correspondingly fabricated population, countries that never were, inhabited by people who never were—Calibans and Tontos, Man Fridays and Sambos—but who attain a virtual reality through their existence in travelers’ tales, folk myth, popular and highbrow fiction, colonial reports, scholarly theory, Hollywood cinema, living in the white imagination and determinedly imposed on their alarmed real-life counterparts. One could say then, as a general rule, that white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self-deception on matters related to race are among the most pervasive mental phenomena of the past few hundred years, a cognitive and moral economy psychically required for conquest, colonization, and enslavement. And these phenomena are in no way accidental, but prescribed by the terms of the Racial Contract, which requires a certain schedule of structured blindnesses and opacities in order to establish and maintain the white polity (Mills 2022; 1997, 18-19).

For a person to be “white” it is necessary (but not sufficient[3]) for them to consent to a fraudulent epistemology, to do their part to sustain or at least not to resist this “invented delusional world.”

One has to learn to see the world wrongly, but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority, whether religious or secular. Thus in effect, on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made (Mills 2022; 1997, 18, italics in the original).

I am reminded here of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s locutions (inherited from James Baldwin) “those Americans who believe that they are white” or “the people who believe they are white” or “the people who must believe they are white.” It’s been a while since I read the key essays where Coates worked out the ideas which emerged more fully fleshed in Between the World and Me, so I don’t want to make a substantial comparison between him and Mills, but what is compressed into these clauses is an insistence that whiteness has a crucial dimension that is voluntaristic, that a white person’s posture toward whiteness must be somewhere on a spectrum between avidly desirous and obliviously acceding.

Mills goes further than this, however:

By recognizing it as a political system, the “Racial Contract” voluntarizes race in the same way that the social contract voluntarizes the creation of society and the state. It distinguishes between whiteness as phenotype/genealogy and Whiteness as a political commitment to white supremacy, thus making conceptual room for “white renegades” and “race traitors.” … In a sense, the “Racial Contract” decolorizes Whiteness by detaching it from whiteness, thereby demonstrating that in a parallel universe it could have been Yellowness, Redness, Brownness, or Blackness. Or, alternatively phrased, we could have had a yellow, red, brown, or black Whiteness: Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations (Mills 2022; 1997, 127, italics in original).

To come full circle, it should now be clear that the reason that Mills holds the great political philosophers of the white or “Western” tradition accountable for the books they didn’t write is that he believes that opposition (or, for some, “treason”) to whiteness is essentially a transhistorical standard against which to judge the living and the dead. But opposition/treason to whiteness is (obviously) not hatred of pale people—it is the continuous struggle to liberate oneself from the cognitive dysfunctions of whiteness, to undo the “epistemology of ignorance.”

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[1] Kenneth P. Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards,” The Yale & Slavery Research Project < https://yaleandslavery.yale.edu/jonathan-edwards >. A less sparing account from a different group of researchers into Yale’s history of enslavement and enslavers can be found here and you can read a little about Edwards’s life at Princeton here.

[2] Kenneth P. Minkema, “Jonathan Edwards’s Defense of Slavery” Massachusetts Historical Review 4 (2002): 24. Available online at < https://edwardseducationblog.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/minkema-defense-slavery.pdf >

[3] Clearly one has to be recognized as “white” by people who are already fully vested “whites.”