Charles W. Mills. (Photo by Sam Alcoff)
Arguably no contemporary scholar has thought more deeply about how liberalism as a political tradition and philosophy has been historically and structurally biased towards the socioeconomic interests of white people than the political philosopher Charles W. Mills. In works such as
The Racial Contract and
Black Rights/White Wrongs, he has sought to show the reality of an ongoing system of white domination in which liberalism both as a philosophy and as a system of governance is complicit. Mills traces the problem back to the origins of modern liberalism, when liberals thinkers such as Kant and Locke limited the question of moral and political equality to whites, at the same time that European powers were enslaving and oppressing nonwhite peoples.1
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