Charles Mills’s Liberal Redemption Song

Abstract

Previous articleNext article FreeReview EssayCharles Mills’s Liberal Redemption Song*Derrick DarbyDerrick Darby Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreWon’t you help to singThese songs of freedom?’Cause all I ever haveRedemption songs(Bob Marley)I. IntroductionCharles Mills thinks that contemporary liberal political philosophy has a race problem. Its most celebrated theory of justice cannot rectify the shameful American legacy of white wrongs against black rights. This explains why he has been so critical of John Rawls. Mills argues that Rawls has produced principles of justice that are utterly unfit for racial justice duty. The publication of Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism marks the twentieth anniversary of Mills’s contemporary classic, The Racial Contract.1 This new book, mainly a collection of previously published essays, lays out his evidence—most of it historical, sociological, and psychological—for why liberalism has a race problem. It explains why he refuses to reject liberalism wholesale or retain it unmodified, and why he wants to transform liberalism into a useful normative tool for racial justice. The present essay reconstructs Mills’s case for the redemption of liberalism. It argues that his alternative principles of justice may rectify racial wrongs but are unlikely to gain sufficient support to facilitate the move to a racially just society. I worry that Mills offers a solution that is not silent about the race problem but is powerless to fix it given what we know about the social psychology of race and racism.2II. Liberalism’s Race ProblemGiven his well-known reputation as a critic of Rawls and Rawlsian liberalism, Mills makes a surprising concession at the end of his book. He writes, “Rawlsian political philosophy could at last become a real player in the righting of the historic and current white wrongs to black rights” (215). What’s going on here? Is the Rawls slayer having a change of heart? Does Mills now believe that Rawlsian liberalism is not so bad after all? Well, not exactly. To resolve the puzzle, let us begin with his understanding of liberalism, a conjecture about the primary audience for his book, and reflection on the meaning of racial realism.After observing that liberalism, understood as a political ideology, comes in different variants, Mills contends that all varieties are “committed to the flourishing of the individual” (5). However, this does not suffice to individuate the ideology, or to register meaningful differences in thought between those who espouse it, whether we are thinking about liberals in American politics or in the analytic philosophical tradition. For example, Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders, and Hillary Clinton all want individuals to flourish. However, they have different views about what this looks like, and about what obligations government, the private sector, and individuals have to realize this aim. The same can be said about George W. Bush, Rand Paul, and Donald Trump—all are committed to individuals flourishing—but it would be bizarre to describe them as liberals (though non-Americans might have a different take on this). Likewise, it may seem strange to call John Rawls, Robert Nozick, and G. A. Cohen liberals, though each was undoubtedly committed to individual flourishing.The problem here, as Mills realizes, is that if we have mundane political discourse in mind, say, from the Fox News perspective, liberalism represents a leftist ideology and liberals lean left. And the worst of the bunch, we are told, lean left on both social and economic issues. These critics say that liberals defend abortion, attack gun rights, want basic income for the poor, and seek reparations for black people and Native Americans. Then there are the public debates about differences between classical and contemporary liberals, with the former—the “true” believers in unfettered freedom from serfdom—proclaimed by some observers to be the original liberals, who represented liberalism before welfare and egalitarian liberals allegedly tarnished the ideology. Hoping to avoid these matters, by relying on what he calls a sense of the term found in political philosophy that transcends the left/right and classic/contemporary dichotomies, Mills tells us that liberalism is a celebrated “anti-feudal egalitarian ideology of individual rights and freedoms that emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to oppose absolutism and ascriptive hierarchy” (28). But this definition does not solve the worry, especially if it entails that libertarians such as Robert Nozick and Ayn Rand are liberals too—a claim that has been contested.3Mills may insist that we not get hung up on semantics. What’s really at issue, on his view, is a fundamental difference between dominant or exclusionary variants of liberalism and nondominant or inclusive variants. The villain in his story is the former. According to Mills exclusionary liberalism is an ideological tool that white philosophers have crafted, which is—by design—unable to undo white supremacy and black domination. Mills holds that Rawlsian liberalism, with its distributive principles of justice as fairness, represents the state-of-the-art modern version of this ineffective tool. While Nozick, Dworkin, and Cohen have also said much about justice, Mills’s response has to be that their silences about race and white supremacy have left them no better off than Rawls when it comes to providing principles that can solve the race problem. So, we can quibble about which theorists are liberals. We can also argue for expanding the language to describe libertarians and egalitarians. But the real issue is whether political philosophers attend to race and its legacy, and whether this informs their normative theorizing to yield the emancipatory principles needed to undo past racial wrongs.Mills’s grand philosophical project has been to remake the liberal apparatus, so that it can better serve radical egalitarian white and black liberals, and their allies, seeking a theoretical tool to rectify the white wrongs perpetuated by this shameful legacy of transgressing black rights. However, leaving unsettled the question of how liberalism is understood and whether Mills’s argument for the redemption of liberalism is pitched to everyday liberals, ivory tower liberals, or liberal radicals raises additional concerns. Mills operates with a peculiar conception of racial justice: he means by it “not pre-emptive measures to prevent racial injustice but corrective measures to rectify injustices that have already occurred” (162). But few liberals in American politics, including Obama and Sanders, or everyday liberals on the street will support this radical view of racial justice—no matter how beautifully crafted of an essay Ta-Nehisi Coates writes in defense of black reparations. A larger number of egalitarian white liberal philosophers might get behind this, though hardly enough to fill up an American Philosophical Association reception, and for ones who support black reparations they will have widely varied views about what form this should take. Many will likely opt for symbolic forms of reparation, a far cry from forty acres and a mule, and not nearly as radical as Mills might deem necessary for rectification.4So one wonders whether Mills is trying to convince everyday liberals, academic liberals, or radical liberals that liberalism needs a makeover. Who is the primary audience for the book’s argument and its black radical liberal solution to the race problem? Of course, he can target an audience that disagrees sharply with him such as right-wing liberals, hoping to convince them of the merits of his view. But, as will become clear, we still need to know whom the argument is primarily crafted to persuade to fully assess it. And, unfortunately, we do not get a straight answer to this question. My best conjecture comes largely from evidence in chapter 7, where Mills offers racial exploitation as a useful construct for framing racial injustice as a systemic structural problem. By foregrounding the view that whites wrongly benefit from past and present practices of racial domination of blacks, which makes the question whether whites are “racist” inessential, we can say that the goal of racial justice is twofold: ending existing racial exploitation and equitably redistributing the ill-gotten gains of the past (131).The closing pages of this chapter present the virtues and drawbacks of the racial exploitation framework for selling the racial justice project to allies. So long as Ben Carson, Condoleezza Rice, and Clarence Thomas are not the first black people that come to mind, it seems sensible to suppose that black people are the natural audience for this book’s argument and solution. But if something like material reparations for past white wrongs is on the table as a solution to the race problem, then some blacks may not join this party. Some will have other ideas about what is needed, including making better use of one’s bootstraps. Others will worry about Obama and Oprah collecting reparations checks. And still others may raise philosophical objections to reparations. And all of this may happen even if they agree with Mills about the basic history of white supremacy and black domination.Mills might say that this all sounds fine until blacks find themselves on the wrong side of a racially biased police arrest, or trying to secure a bank loan, or having their children disciplined more harshly in schools than their white peers. His reasonable point is that all black people have an interest in ending racial exploitation. And if redistributing illicit white benefits is minimally about rearranging things so that blacks are treated fairly and with dignity, then black conservatives should also get on board with this modest form of reparations. But if the racial justice bus is loaded with black people, who are drawn from across the political spectrum, according to Mills, this is not enough to steer it to the racial promised land. So his targeted audience is certainly not black folks exclusively. Mills says, “Given their minority status both in straightforward quantitative terms, and, more important, the qualitative dimension of access to social sources of power, they will clearly not be able to do it on their own” (133). Blacks will need white people to navigate the freedom bus with them. This suggests that some subset of whites is the primary audience for the book. His argument aims to convince some class of white people to help pilot the freedom bus toward corrective justice land. But which white people?Mills lays out a number of possibilities: mainstream white liberals, the majority white population as a whole, and the white working class. And in an illuminating footnote to the final chapter, he offers three more finer-grained possibilities: left-wing liberals, centrist liberals, and right-wing liberals (243). The difficulties with this unruly list of options should be obvious. Just to list a few, these groups (if they can be neatly individuated) have very different interests, values, beliefs, and so on. They obviously have different thoughts about the race problem in America. Whites who voted for Obama, those who voted for Trump, and even those who first voted for Obama and then voted for Trump may have vastly different interests and concerns.Mills cannot possibly think that his critique of Rawlsian liberalism and the case for its redemption will suffice to get all these folks on the racial justice bus and rally their support for race-specific policies such as reparations for black people. It seems, then, that the white population as a whole cannot be the primary audience for this book. But deciding between mainstream white liberals and the white working class still seems like too tall of an order. I know members of the latter group in parts of Michigan, Kansas, Texas, and other states who are miles apart on race matters from people I know in the cities of Ann Arbor, Lawrence, and Austin. And I seriously doubt that a crash course on the racial contract and racial exploitation will be enough to close the gap. We need to hear much more from Mills than we get in this book to convince us otherwise.Evidence we get in this chapter and other places throughout the book suggests that “mainstream” white liberals are really his primary audience. But it is unclear what work this qualification is doing for Mills. Also, if this bunch includes liberals on the left, right, and center, then there still seems to be too much variation in interests when it comes to race matters. So, does “mainstream” mean centrist and left-wing liberals, or does it include right-wing liberals too? If his pitch is, in the end, really to left-wing liberals, then a further puzzle arises. Presumably, what it means to be “left-wing” is to be in favor of, or open to, radical policies that aim to uplift the worst off. So, one wonders, does this group of liberals really need a long lecture about the vices of Rawlsian liberalism and the virtues of black radical liberalism?Not only would this be an obvious case of preaching to the choir, but it also overlooks the possibility that left-wing liberals (black, white, and other) may see considerable radical potential in Rawls’s conception of justice as fairness as it currently stands. After all, Rawls’s interest in egalitarian distributive justice, which distinguishes him from Nozick, is grounded in reconciling basic individual liberty with substantive socioeconomic inequality manifested in the operation of society’s basic structure, so that the worst off do not get left behind by our economic prosperity. But then the debate would hinge on the question of what counts as “radical,” and Mills must take care not to assume an answer that clearly loads the dice against this possibility. If, for example, he takes it to be about ending current social oppression, that’s one thing, but if he says that it requires this and the rectification of past racial wrongs, that’s another thing (25–26). The latter is obviously a much stronger claim in need of justification, which, as far as I can tell, is never offered in the book.Mills could say that this line of questioning is misguided because it presumes that diversity of interests among members of these groups is a problem. All one needs to assume, he might add, is that there is some common core interest which they share, such that if radical racial justice warriors can appeal to that, then we are well on our way to getting these diverse groups of white people to join the cause. He offers a thought about what this interest might be, at least when it comes to appealing to liberals on the left, right, and center spectrum. Mills writes, “I am claiming that even centrist and right-wing liberals, if they are genuinely morally committed to racial justice, and willing to acknowledge how white supremacy has shaped modernity and the historically dominant forms of liberalism, should be open to a corrective black liberalism far more ‘radical’ than the current mainstream variety” (243). This seems like a really big “if.” It also shows that Mills is indeed doing some work in criticizing Rawlsian liberalism with his rather strong definition of what counts as radical while allowing that radicalness admits of degrees. The trouble with this is that those who might applaud Mills’s making black reparations a demand for racial justice may also charge that his case for this is far less “radical” than one which eschews liberalism entirely. Some of these critics will say to Mills, if you really want to be a radical, then ditch the liberal redemption project and push the corrective racial justice agenda under a black Marxist or black nationalist banner.5 And the minute Mills says we can’t do that because blacks need mainstream white allies, he will lose these radicals immediately—as Martin Luther King Jr.’s troubles with black power advocates during the civil rights movement remind us. These radical critics will write Mills off as too damn liberal!Lastly, Mills’s response assumes, unconvincingly in my view, that if white liberals acknowledge our racial past, they will conclude that rectification is in order. The case for doubting that this will happen is related to empirical considerations drawn from social psychology. Mills puts these considerations on the table with a nod to racial realism, which has long shaped his thinking about race. Calling the racial exploitation framework a structural approach to the race problem, which follows Rawls instead of Cohen in taking the basic structure to be the subject of justice,6 Mills says, “Another signal virtue of approaching things this way is that it would provide a more realistic sense of the obstacles to achieving racial justice” (132). He then tells us that a strength of the left tradition, which takes a materialist approach to social problems, is that it aims for more than articulating normative ideals. It also aims to say how they can be made real, and it does this, Mills says, “by identifying both the barriers to a more just social order and the possible vehicles for overcoming these barriers” (132).Racial realism identifies “rational white perception of their vested group interest in the established racial status quo” (132) as a primary barrier to realizing racial justice. And racial realists take seriously the importance of appealing to white group interests as well as morality in ending black exploitation and securing racial justice. My work on racial inequality and injustice also takes racial realism as a point of departure, and I worry that Mills fails to appreciate the seriousness of the challenge that in-group psychology poses for rallying mainstream white liberals—both garden variety and academic—around his solution to the race problem.7 I will make my case in Sections IV and V. And, to be clear, my claim is not that Mills contradicts himself. It is that he fails to appreciate the problem these psychological considerations pose for his backward-looking principles of rectificatory justice.If “ideology, like halitosis, is,” as Terry Eagleton tells us, “what the other person has,” then defenders of white liberalism have a bad case of it, according to Mills.8 It is the ideological nature of white liberalism, a term he uses to describe Rawlsian liberalism, that makes it unfit for racial justice duty. But one need not be so harsh. After all, one can also say that black radical liberalism, the term he uses to characterize his view, is also ideology without meaning to denigrate it. If we describe ideology generically, not pejoratively, as a package of ideas—both descriptive and prescriptive—that are used to understand the social world and our ethical obligations, then both kinds of liberalism count as ideology. By this neutral definition, both conceptions of liberalism—the one that is blind to race (Rawlsian) and the one that is not (Millsian)—are constituted by a package of descriptive and normative claims. Thus, the uselessness of Rawlsian liberalism, according to Mills, is not due to an immutable fact about the ideology of liberalism itself. Rather it is contingent on a certain way of developing the package of descriptive and normative elements of the ideology in ways that whitewash the racial history and thereby avoid the rectificatory principles needed to address its implications.Mills concedes that Rawls condemns racism and racial discrimination but takes him to task for the “marginalization of race in both his explicit normative theory and his (usually more tacit) underlying descriptive theory” (148). The link between descriptive and normative theory is absolutely crucial for Mills. One cannot produce a satisfactory normative theory, with suitable principles for addressing the race problem, unless one starts with an adequate descriptive theory that puts racial domination front and center. Rawlsian liberalism runs into trouble, he argues, precisely because it engages in the wrong kind of idealizing. So, to be clear, Mills is not against idealizing per se. He is against idealizing that confounds the pursuit of racial justice. When theorizing about a just society, we can start from the premise of a society without any history of racial injustice, which he accuses Rawlsians of doing, or from one with such a history that needs to be rectified. Only the latter ideal, which he labels the rectificatory ideal, can help establish what is required to remedy past racial injustice, or help us choose the right public policy options (156). Race-based affirmative action, targeted basic income for blacks, and black reparations are examples of the types of proposals that could be justified by this more radical liberal vision of justice. Because of the emphasis on rectification, I shall call Mills’s alternative conception justice as rectification.To be fair, in his closing pages Mills stresses that he is only prepared to offer an outline of his alternative theory of justice as rectification, saving for future work a more detailed brief of the “project of articulating a black radical liberalism that is true both to the (idealized) liberal tradition, the liberalism that should have been, and respectful of the black diasporic experience in modernity, victims of the liberalism that actually was and is” (215). My critical remarks are meant to provide food for thought for this future work. And I hope that one lesson extracted from them may be especially useful for Mills and his disciples within and outside of philosophy: if black radical liberalism takes the psychological obstacles to ending racial injustice seriously, as racial realism requires, then to have any hope of radicalizing liberalism for mass consumption in white America, its normative prescriptions must be forward looking, not backward looking. They must take us beyond past white sins in generating support for a society with less racial injustice.9 With white social psychology being what it is, justice as fairness may offer us a surer, steadier, and stabler route to making reasonable headway on the race problem than justice as rectification.III. Mills’s Redemption SongIt is one thing to criticize Rawlsian liberalism and another to offer a competing theory of justice that is as comprehensive and illuminating as justice as fairness. Ironically, while Mills condemns Rawls for never getting around to giving us principles for rectificatory justice, in the twenty years since the publication of The Racial Contract Mills has yet to produce an alternative systematic conception of justice. Anyone familiar with his work (and famous lecture handouts!) knows that criticizing social contract theory, Rawls, and Rawlsian liberals has been Mills’s calling card over the years. But fans of his work, of which I am one, are entitled to expect more from him this many years after he first exposed the racial contract. A major disappointment, especially for those of us working on race in the tradition of analytic political philosophy, is that Mills relegates the thing we have all been waiting for to his epilogue (as prologue)—a statement of his alternative nonideal theory of liberalism and its principles for addressing the urgent demands of racial justice.If a political ideology should be judged by whether it fulfills normative promises, we should celebrate liberalism only if it delivers the goods. Mills distinguishes two conceptions of liberalism: ideal theory liberalism and nonideal theory liberalism. The former instructs us about what justice demands in a make-believe perfectly just society not blemished by group exploitation, domination, and oppression. This is the kind of liberalism that Mills attributes to Rawls. The latter variety, which Mills favors, offers us guidance on what is required in nominally liberal real societies with histories of injustice. He then draws on the actual history of race, racism, and racial injustice in the modern world to argue that ideal theory liberalism fails to deliver the normative goods of freedom, equality, and respect to blacks in America and throughout the African diaspora.10 Mills concludes that praising this hegemonic ideology is hardly in order. More fittingly, we should treat liberalism’s failure as a public relations nightmare that requires immediate action. He considers three options.Do we toss liberalism out with the trash and find another critical framework for our emancipatory and rectificatory justice political goals?11 Do we cry foul and rebut the charge that liberalism in its current form fails blacks?12 Or do we distinguish between two kinds of liberalism—the kind that is blind to race, racism, and racial injustice (an ideal racial liberalism or white liberalism) and the kind that is not (a nonideal deracialized or black radical liberalism)—and argue that the latter is better suited for generating principles of rectificatory justice to fulfill liberalism’s promise and merit our esteem? Mills pursues this redemptive strategy in Black Rights/White Wrongs.Calling attention to the discrepancy between America’s liberal proclamations and its illiberal practices places Mills within a venerable tradition of black philosophers. For example, consider these words: “Uprooted from the sunny land of his forefathers by the white man’s cupidity and selfishness, ruthlessly torn from all the ties of clan and tribe, dragged against his will over thousands of miles of unknown waters to a strange land among strange peoples,” writes Anna Julia Cooper, “the Negro was transplanted to this continent in order to produce chattels and beasts of burden for a nation ‘conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.’”13When we take stock of liberalism’s historical legacy as Cooper once did, and as Mills does now, we find that the racial damage tally, which cries out for corrective justice, extends many years backward and forward from when Cooper made her insightful observation at the dawn of the twentieth century.14 But before this normative goal can be realized and suitable principles of rectificatory justice advanced, Mills maintains that the racial nature of the American polity and ideal theory liberalism has to be confronted and deracialized. Only then can this dominant ideology be transformed to serve the more radical agenda to address past and present racial injustice and finally resolve liberalism’s race problem.So, according to Mills, deracializing ideal theory liberalism is necessary for transforming and radicalizing liberalism for racial justice work. And he utilizes nonideal theory—a methodological approach to ethics and political philosophy that takes its cue from real-world experiences of racial injustice—to get the job done. According to Mills, “The best way to bring about the ideal [of a more just society] is by recognizing the non-ideal [actual injustice of society], and that by assuming the ideal or the near-ideal, one is only guaranteeing the perpetuation of the non-ideal” (90).Mills is the foremost champion of radicalizing liberalism for realizing racial justice. Yet black philosophers have been keenly aware of liberalism’s race problem for generations. Some say to hell with liberalism and look elsewhere (e.g., Marxism, pragmatism, prophetic Christianity, critical theory, existentialism, intersectionality, and other traditions) for a political philosophy of black emancipation and radical social transformation (Rejection). Others say to retain mainstream liberalism as is and demonstrate that it already contains the principles it needs to uplift blacks and complete the unfinished journey to emancipation in liberal America (Retention). Another strategy, more controversial than Rejection and more ambitious than Retention, is to view race as part of the conceptual architecture of liberalism, to revise how we think about liberalism in the light of this observation, and to produce an alternative conception of liberalism better suited to deliver the necessary principles for addressing the legacy of racial injustice in the United States.In pursuing this third strategy, what distinguishes Mills from those who came before him and from his contemporaries is his claim that the whitewashed liberalism that Western political philosophy has sold to the world—with its origins in the social contract tradition—is not really color-blind at all, contrary to appearances. It is racial, and so the apparent contradiction between liberal pronouncements about the freedom, dignity, and equality of all men and the practices of racial exploitation, domination, and oppression is merely apparent. Thus, the key to reclaiming liberalism’s true emancipatory potential is to deracialize it—to see it for what it really is, a white liberalism, and to replace it with a black radical liberalism. I shall call this strategy Redemption, because if liberalism could sing a song after Mills got done with deracializing and thus radicalizing it, it would likely sing this well-known gospel verse: “If you run across anybody that used to know me / tell them I’m doing fine / The last time that you saw me / I was lifting up holy hands / I’ll tell them I’ve been redeemed.” Although Mills has done more than any other philosopher to call our attention to liberalism’s race problem, his case for its redemption remains a work in progress.According to Mills, a troubling consequence of Rawls’s philosophical construction of an ideal society, which mistakes an ideal norm for actual reality, is that it obscures the need for principles that can adjudicate “the merits of competing policies aimed at correcting for a long history of white supremacy” and black domination (157–58). While dist