Critical Theory in Critical Times

CHARLES W. MILLS

If self-challenge and self-criticism are definitive of the Western philosophical tradition generally, going all the way back to Socrates, then surely the body of modern philosophical work self-consciously designating itself as “critical theory” should be all the more welcoming of the critique of its foundational assumptions. Whether in the individualist Kantian injunction to “persons” to reject heteronomy of reason and think for oneself or in the more sociopolitically informed Marxist call for group demystification from regressive ideologies, a scrutiny of unexamined inherited frameworks is supposed to be programmatically required by critical theory’s own commitments. But, as Amy Allen’s chapter in the present volume argues, critical theory has yet to rethink its Eurocentrism. In her opinion, more than twenty years after Edward Said’s indictment of the biases of Frankfurt School critical theory, outlined in Culture and Imperialism, “not enough has changed; contemporary Frankfurt School critical theory, for the most part, remains all too silent on the problem of imperialism.”1

How could this be, given critical theory’s classic pretensions to be advancing an emancipatory project for humanity? Allen’s diagnosis locates the problem in the “left-Hegelian strategy” of the two most important living figures in the tradition, Jürgen Habermas and Axel Honneth, which attempts to ground critical theory’s normativity in the idea of “progress as a ‘fact’ ” (as against an aspirational ideal). For both thinkers, Enlightenment modernity “represents an advance over premodern, nonmodern, or traditional forms of life,” which for Allen and other postcolonial critics means in effect endorsing “an imperialist metanarrative” that positions Europe as the superior continent over the rest of the world. Thus, it seems to recuperate the traditional civilizing mission in nominally progressive guise. As a corrective, Allen recommends that we return to the less sanguine vision of members of an earlier generation of Frankfurt School thinkers, Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno, who were “extremely skeptical about the idea of historical progress.” Allen pairs Adorno with Michel Foucault as developing “an alternative methodology for thinking history,” and she concludes by emphasizing that she is not saying that postcolonial theory needs Foucault or Adorno but that these two thinkers “offer important resources within the tradition of critical theory for the crucially important project of decolonizing critical theory.”2

I am in sympathy with much of what Allen says—certainly on the silences of critical theory, but also on the desirability of retrieving it. However, I want to bring race more centrally into the conversation, as providing an angle of critique in some ways simultaneously external and internal. “Whites” and “nonwhites,” after all, do not, as categories and groupings of human beings, predate modernity but are brought into existence and dialectical interrelationship by modernity. Moreover, despite what outsiders to the field might expect, much of current postcolonial theory actually marginalizes race thematically (Allen points out Foucault’s own ignoring of the relationship), while, on the other hand, many critical race theorists operate with a narrowly US-centric view of race, delinked from global historical processes and comparativist genealogy.

Nonetheless, a significant number of us would argue that they need to be brought together theoretically, and that the most illuminating prism for understanding the emergence of race as a global category is through the history of European expansionism.3 Indeed, some scholars—such as my former colleague Barnor Hesse—would contend that race is intimately tied up with colonialism because it is, in effect, a structure of colonial governmentality, so that to segregate the two conceptually only makes clear one’s misunderstanding of both.4 If critical theory needs to be decolonized, as Allen suggests, it also arguably needs to be deracialized, and such a deracialization would well exemplify the methodology for which Allen calls, that “reconstructs history as a story of both progress and regress.”5

In this concluding chapter, I will suggest that critical theory’s failure to engage seriously with race—whether on the individual level of personhood (as in Kantian ethics) or at the social-systemic level of white supremacy (as in Hegelian/Marxist “world-historical” theorizing)—has blinded it to its own whiteness. As a consequence, it has been handicapped in achieving that self-critical and “estranging” illumination of “the social institutions and practices, patterns of cultural meaning and subject formation, and normative commitments that have made us who we are,” which has been an epistemic and ethical goal from the beginnings of Western philosophy.6

Critical theory needs to start talking to critical race theory. The demand for such a conversation is not at all new, nor is the terminological overlap coincidental. Allen cites Said’s critique, but I would highlight an earlier intervention, from 1990, a quarter century ago, by the African American philosopher Lucius Outlaw. In the essay “Toward a Critical Theory of ‘Race’,” Outlaw criticized the deficiencies on race of both Frankfurt School critical theory and party-linked Marxisms.7 Generally credited with being one of the first philosophy essays (or maybe the first) to make a formal case for a race-sensitive critical theory, Outlaw’s article was crucial to the development of what has recently been officially baptized “critical philosophy of race” (as against the more cumbersome “critical race theory in philosophy”).8 So it is important to appreciate how old this challenge is, even if we restrict ourselves to writings by professional philosophers dialoguing with canonical works. (If we loosen these restrictions, it can be backdated considerably.) The fact that, twenty-five years later, I have to bring this essay to the attention of a critical theory conference and cite it in a subsequent conference volume is itself the clearest possible indication of the extent to which the challenge it raised has been ignored by the field.

Outlaw, addressing both classic Marxism (in its various twentieth-century organized-left versions) and party-independent critical theory, argued at the time that the problem was a social ontology and philosophical anthropology that privileged class membership as real and defining at the expense of other social identities—thus, a race-insensitivity in foundational concepts. It was not necessarily that racism was denied (though that could be a problem also) but that race as a social reality with its own ontology was not acknowledged and was not recognized as central to structuring the modern world. This was, in other words, a class reductionism (race is really class in disguise) or some other kind of racial eliminativism of a distinctively Marxist/critical theoretic variety. These days, of course, contemporary critical theory has moved away from a class ontology to more mainstream liberal conceptions of the self and society. So its eliminativism would now conform to the more familiar, liberal kind, according to which races do not really exist, only individuals.9 But in neither case is the terrain a welcoming one for critical race theory’s insistence on the difference race makes to the interaction of individuals with society, or critical philosophy of race’s investigation of the philosophical consequences of this interaction.

Yet over the last three decades, a significant body of work has been produced on such subjects as race and the metaphysics of the self, race and social epistemology, race and the history of philosophy, race and normative theory (ethics, political philosophy, aesthetics), race and existential and phenomenological realities, and race and “whiteness”—work that should surely be relevant to the mission of critical theory.10 But though this literature has expanded remarkably, it is still largely American, with little influence in European philosophical circles, and even within North America it is generally seen as distinct from critical theory proper.11 Thus, despite what one would think to be a common agenda of emancipation from social domination, critical theory and critical race theory are not in conversation with each other. The demographic and conceptual segregation of the academy that is routine in other disciplines is no less evident here, with largely white speakers and audiences and largely nonwhite speakers and audiences clustered on different sides of the philosophical color line.

How, then, can this unhappy situation be redressed? We need to begin with an unflinching acknowledgment of the extent to which the need for such decolonization and deracialization is a general problem within Western social and political philosophy. In other words, it would be unfair to single out critical theory for critique, even if its pretensions make the gulf between its programmatic ideal and its reality deeper than the corresponding gulf for its mainstream variant. For while the analytic tradition hegemonic in the Anglo-American world (that of Rawls et al.) does not, of course, have the radical emancipatory cachet of critical theory, with its origins (if by now somewhat distant and attenuated) in revolutionary Marxism, it nonetheless is also supposedly committed to the norms of freedom, justice, and respect for the other. After all, Rawls’s first and most important book was explicitly titled A Theory of Justice, and it is typically credited with reorienting mainstream Anglo-American political philosophy from the goal of the justification of our political obligation to the state to the determination of principles of justice for an ideal “well-ordered” society. In addition, Rawls’s resurrection of the contract as a hypothetical “device of representation” is, of course, inspired by Immanuel Kant (for whom respect for our fellow persons is crucial); the blocking of self-knowledge by the veil of ignorance is supposed to be a way of guaranteeing that no one is “othered,” or excluded on the grounds of stigmatized identity; and the lexically prior first principle of justice entrenches the basic liberties of all citizens.12

So, although it is presented in a very different idiom, analytic political philosophy is supposed to be engaged in a normative enterprise comparable to that of critical theory. Yet as I have documented in various essays, Rawls himself had virtually nothing useful to say about race in any of the two thousand pages of his five books, and he doesn’t even mention colonialism and imperialism.13 Nor have his myriad disciples and students done much to remedy this lacuna (Thomas Pogge is the famous exception),14 as can be seen by looking at the overviews of the secondary literature provided in the numerous companions and guidebooks to Rawls of the last decade.15 So the problem obviously goes much deeper than the analytic–Continental divide—indeed, it is largely orthogonal to this divide—and needs to be situated, in my opinion, in the reciprocally reinforcing “whitenesses” of the demography of the field and its conceptual architecture.16

The underrepresentation of racial minorities in the US academy is a familiar story, but the degree of underrepresentation in philosophy is extreme even by the norms of the white university. No more than 5 percent to 6 percent of professional philosophers are nonwhite (including Hispanic whites), a degree of disciplinary unrepresentativeness even more exacerbated than its maleness (about 80 percent).17 Mainstream philosophers may be irked and offended at the invocation of demography, especially in a subject whose pretensions are to leave the (irrelevant) body behind. But for a critical theory with Marxist groundings in materialism and social embeddedness, such a diagnosis should not be found intrinsically problematic, particularly given the nominal commitment to antimonological discursive inclusion.

That people of color, whether liberal or radical, academic or nonacademic, have been the ones who have traditionally raised these questions is no accident. Anybody familiar with the twentieth-century trajectory of the international black radical tradition from the 1920s (post–Russian Revolution) onwards will know of the heated ideological battles between “race” men (and women) and “class” men, black nationalists and black socialists, and the attempt of at least some of the latter to develop a historical materialism—a “black” Marxism—capable of theorizing white racial domination.18 In W. E. B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, Richard Wright’s stories and nonfiction, C. L. R. James’s work on colonialism and race, Frantz Fanon’s opposition to a Sartrean subsuming of Negritude under the “universalist” Hegelian dialectic, and his judgment that Marxism has to be “slightly stretched” whenever it comes to the colonial question, there is a long history of black theoretical grappling with white left categories and finding them wanting.19 Whether in Marxist-Leninist communism or left-liberal social democracy, the unhappy consequence has been, in the title of Michael Dawson’s recent book, a history of Blacks in and out of the Left.20 Famous apostates from organized communism—at that distant time when it was still an important political force—would include Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, George Padmore, and Aimé Césaire. But “reformist” social democracy would be found wanting also. Dawson writes:

One of the classic questions of American history is why a strong social democratic movement never developed in this country … What I want to argue is that a central but understudied aspect of the story is the inability of the organized American left, particularly its social democratic wing, to successfully incorporate black activists, and more generally its refusal to take on questions of racial justice … The historical inability of major sectors of the white-dominated left to incorporate these analytical frameworks led to a more radical and often at least partially separate black radicalism.21

Even in the liberal mainstream, then, demands for racial justice have been met with hostility or indifference, requiring black activists to try to reorient to that end a “white” liberalism generally recalcitrant and uncooperative. In sum, across the liberal to radical spectrum, “white” normative political theory has historically proven unsatisfactory. The exclusions in the Western academy—the silences in both Continental critical theory and analytical Anglo-American Rawlsianism—simply mirror, if in somewhat displaced and mediated guise, the exclusions in the self-conceivedly progressive white-dominated political movements of the United States and other Western nations over the course of the twentieth century.

So we need to face the fact that simple demography plays a significant explanatory role in the silences on imperialism and race, not just in philosophical critical theory but in philosophical (left-)liberal theory. As demonstrated by the “second wave” rebirth of feminist philosophy only after the gradual entry of women into the profession in the 1970s, we should not be surprised to find that those actually negatively affected by the injustice in question will be the constituency most reliably interested in theorizing about and addressing it. White privilege materially underwrites the disengagement of white political philosophers, both Continental and analytic, from this issue. Getting more people of color into the profession would itself be an important step toward challenging its dominant frameworks of assumptions and its hierarchy of priorities.

But let me turn now to critical theory, in particular, and its vastly more sophisticated (and thus more blameworthy for its nonfunctioning) theorization of the ways in which structures of domination perniciously shape social cognition and normative diagnosis. (Liberalism, as in Rawls, does emphasize the value of “publicity”/transparency, but—especially given Rawls’s and Rawlsianism’s ideal-theoretic orientation—provides no analysis of the mechanisms of social opacity comparable to that pioneered in the Marxist tradition’s analysis of “ideology.”) In the same way that class theory (however diluted today) originally sensitized us to—enabling a cognitive distance from—a “bourgeois” point of view, in the same way that feminism has made us self-aware and self-scrutinizingly wary of unconsciously “sexist” and “androcentric” assumptions, so we need to interrogate ourselves—not just whites, but everybody—about tacitly “white” and “Eurocentric” optics of analysis. If race and white racial privilege are not acknowledged to be among those key structures of the modern world—if theoretical attention is limited to racism (especially if individualistically conceptualized), while “race” as a category is judged to be an atavistic holdover from a discredited biology—then there will be little sense of white domination as a social reality that molds us all, influencing recognized moral standings, civic statuses, doxastic tendencies, patterns of consciousness, opportunities and handicaps, wealth and poverty, or life chances in general.

Hence the need for a dialogue between critical theory and critical philosophy of race to make critical theory more self-conscious of these issues of phenomenology, metaphysics, epistemology, social and political theory, and ethics that critical philosophy of race has been exploring in the past three decades. And the need is particularly urgent not merely because of the relative neglect within philosophy of an emancipatory racially informed perspective but also because, in certain respects, the disruption of “normal” cognition required is more sweeping and subversive than that offered by class and gender rethinkings. After all, class and gender theory in the work of white critical theorists has largely been developed with respect to the white working class and white women—in other words, to subordination among their white coracials. But critical philosophy of race comes from the external perspective of people of color, seeing whites as a group from the outside. In disciplines that are a closed book to white critical theorists, in contemporary critical ethnic studies and African American theory, a “critical” body of thought has emerged that takes its starting point from European conquest, African slavery, and the establishment of global white supremacy and that seeks to reorder conventional categories of time, space, and personhood on that basis.

Let me illustrate what I mean by turning to the six themes Allen sees as the “core features” of her “conception of critique as historical problematization”: “reason and power, utopia and utopianism, the historicization of History, genealogy as problematization, critical distance (or philosophizing with a hammer), and problematization and the normative inheritance of modernity.”22 I will discuss them in an interrelated rather than a linear way, in part to demonstrate how the self-conscious recognition of race and white racial privilege transgresses their boundaries.

Start with reason and power. The operation of philosophical self-critique, the turning of reason (in a putatively more enlightened version) on itself (in a putatively less enlightened version) is, of course, not at all distinctive to critical theory but, as emphasized at the beginning, is general to the Western philosophical tradition as such. From Aristotle’s strictures on Plato to Thomas Hobbes’s gibes at the medieval “schoolmen” through Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s derision of the idealism of Hegelianism, the discipline has been marked by a generational score-settling that has often taken place on the terrain of rationality itself. What marks critical theory, at least in its Marxist and Marx-descended versions (as against the earlier Kantian ancestry some would claim), is the linking of this targeted deficient rationality to social structure and group membership. It is not merely a generational blindness that is at work but a supposed propensity some cognizers have for getting things wrong, which is shaped by their societal position, differential experience, and material group interest. The privileged (along a particular axis) live in a “lifeworld” organized by that privilege, so that a subordinated standpoint is required to see its inequities clearly.

But what if the subordinated standpoint in question is largely outside that world altogether? In the idealist tradition, a cognitive Archimedean point aloft from the fray can supposedly be attained, but in the materialist tradition (in its different versions of “materiality”), it is the fray itself that is supposed to generate illuminating norms and insights. The more fundamental the challenge, the less room there is for common ground, the greater the danger of begging the question in the name of a vision of rationality that is itself under scrutiny. If the West itself is under critique (as against a “bourgeois” and “masculinist” rationality within the West), how much of “reason” can be uncontroversially taken for granted by both sides?

Moreover, the possibility of such a reciprocally respecting dialogue is further undermined by the fact that one side has historically denied the other’s equal capacity to “reason” in the first place. Unlike the intra-Western philosophical disputes of the ancient world, which in modernity become intrawhite philosophical disputes, it is not merely (contingently) bad judgment and dubious assumptions that are being imputed to one’s opponents but an inherent incapacity for adequate ratiocination. Aristotle’s criticism of Plato’s claims about the Forms is different from Aristotle’s judgment of the Persians as natural slaves, and, indeed, some theorists of race are now identifying Aristotle as the pioneering Western racist thinker.23

In this analysis, the Greek/non-Greek normative hierarchy evolves to become the more general civilized/barbarian normative hierarchy: non-color-coded “races.” With the advent of modernity, races as we know them in the modern sense appeared in Western discourse, and philosophers played a crucial role in justifying white Western superiority over the rest of the world, usually on grounds of differential rationality. Hobbes represents Native American “savages” as incapable of taking the prudential steps necessary to exit the state of nature and to create a Leviathan; John Locke depicts them as inefficient appropriators, not among the “industrious” and “rational” who are God’s favored humans; David Hume concludes that whites are the only civilized race; Kant is seen by some commentators as the founder of modern “scientific” racism; G. W. F. Hegel denies history to Africans and Amerindians; John Stuart Mill recommends despotism for races in their “nonage”; and even the supposedly revolutionary Marx and Engels limit revolutionary agency to the white Western proletariat.

So the “entanglement” of white Western reason as a whole with white power and white supremacy is arguably much deeper, older, and all-encompassing than that of specific local rationalities. It is tied to a foundational deprecation of nonwhite reason that will make it difficult to come to an agreement on norms of discursive justification that is satisfactory to both sides.

In April 2014, Northwestern University sponsored an event that I was unfortunately unable to attend. But I got hold of a poster after the event was over, and (at an appropriate moment in the talk from which this chapter comes) I displayed this poster to the audience of the critical theory conference. The title of the earlier event was “Settler Common Sense” and, according to the description, the planned agenda was—through an engagement with Thoreau’s Walden—to answer such questions as “How do varied administrative projects of settler colonialism and accompanying legal categories, geographies, and subjectivities come to serve as the background for ordinary nonnative perception?”

Just think about this question for a moment. “Common sense”—that’s recognizable enough as a critical theory category, going back at least to Antonio Gramsci’s work, though with older roots in Marxism’s claims about the “phenomenal forms” generated by capitalism as structures shaping everyday ideation and categories that seemingly come “naturally” to us. But settler common sense? What’s that?

If you move in mainstream critical theory circles, you will, of course, have no clue. You will not be aware of the large literature in history, critical ethnic studies, postcolonial theory, and so forth that talks about white settler colonialism as a particular, important variety of colonialism in general and about how states established on this basis (such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, and—of course—the United States) have crucial commonalities arising out of patterns of indigenous expropriation and the denial to aboriginal peoples of equal (or sometimes any) political status.24 So all the themes of classic critical theory are here: oppression; domination; and a social structure built around the subordination of a particular group, thereby affecting social cognition, “reason,” and common sense, and deeply shaping the identities of the human beings enmeshed (at different locations) in this structure. But for how many white critical theorists in these settler nations will a challenge so radical—undermining the very ground beneath their feet (or at least its moral status), turning it into occupied territory—be admissible into the orthodox apparatus, requiring them, as it does, to see themselves through indigenous eyes as the “nonnative”?

Or consider the black radical tradition, which, though not cognitively disruptive in the same way as the optic of native peoples, has, as discussed, its own disorienting and disquieting consequences for European theory. This is—to abruptly shift metaphors—a formidable “hammer” indeed, since it requires taking up the perspective, the “critical distance,” of those who, with the advent of modernity, were deemed a “slave race,” the descendants of the accursed Ham, and so were far more thoroughly excluded from the promise of modernity than either the white working class or white women.25 Can Adorno’s negatively dialectical “nonidentical” and Foucault’s “unreason” accommodate this figure, or is it too utterly different, too subhumanly irrational, to achieve even this “unrecuperated” status?

What Allen calls “the reconciling, unifying logic of modernity” certainly does not “reconcile” or “unify” enslaved Africans denied what is judged to be modernity’s “central value, namely, freedom.”26 Insofar as there is a “unification,” it is within a material structure of global oppression, the unpaid black slave labor that a growing body of work (vindicating texts from the 1930s and 1940s by W. E. B. Du Bois and Eric Williams) is arguing needs to be acknowledged as the foundation of the making of American capitalism and, more broadly, the modern world.27 Thus it is a “unity” of dominant over subordinated, the cognitive costs of which are the impossibility of white recognition of black humanity. In Montesquieu’s sardonic judgment: “It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians.”28

Lewis Gordon has argued that the familiar Continental vocabulary of Self and Other does not actually include blacks, because they are not the Other—they do not even rise to the level of the Other: “Fundamentally, the self–Other dichotomy is across ethnic, class, or gender lines. But what the Black is, is the not-Other and not-self.”29 Blacks are out of the realm of this discourse altogether, and Hegel, in his master/slave dialectic, was not thinking of African slaves but the master’s co-ethnics, coracials. (Recall Aristotle’s dichotomization, and consider its relevance here. Why would you need recognition from “natural slaves”?)

The “problematization of the normative inheritance of modernity,” then, would require us to acknowledge that, for those situated on the “darker side” of modernity, especially African Americans and Native Americans (both natural slaves, according to Kant), the problem is not (as in Adorno’s critique of Kant) an “abstractly rigorist” ethic of reciprocally recognizing persons unrealizable under capitalism but an ethic that denies personhood to nonwhites to begin with.30 Subpersons rather than persons, their relation to modernity is radically different from those whose inclusion in the scope of these norms is conceded but undercut by material disadvantage. Here, it is not a matter of an equality registered at the level of relations of exchange but undermined at the level of relations of production, as in Marx’s famous critique of wage labor, but an inequality that is itself formal and thus appropriately manifest in the straightforward brutalities of chattel slavery and colonial forced labor, with their body count in the millions. Failing to attain the threshold of white humanity, these individuals are not protected by norms of Enlightenment equality, because this supposedly generic norm was never intended to cover them in the first place. Hence the recently coined phrase “Afro-modernity” to signify, for blacks, this drastically different perspective and correspondingly dramatically divergent political outlook.31

The “historicization of History” that is called for, then, is going to require an engagement with racially informed theory that, in certain respects, will be more challenging and more difficult for mainstream critical theorists to accept and absorb than familiar Marx-inspired revisionism (which, after all, has now been around for more than a century and a half). I am thinking here not merely of critical ethnic studies and African American theory, disciplines already mentioned, but the “new” imperial history, “critical” international relations theory, the “imperial turn” in political theory, and global “whiteness” studies.32

Allen cites the familiar left claim, articulated by Adorno, that “historically constituted objects come, over time, to seem natural and therefore unchangeable,” thus demanding an estranging realization of the historical contingency of this “second nature.”33 But the radical cognitive estrangement demanded by a race-based theory is even more foundational, not merely revealing, say, capitalism as a contingent economic system but also rewriting the very (“natural”) space and time of the polity as themselves “historically constituted,” transcending the nation-state not in the way urged by the cosmopolitan but with reference to alternative geographies and chronologies. The political unit for blacks has been not just the nation-state but what could be called, in the language of Paul Gilroy, the White Atlantic, a “slave power” crossing national boundaries, and—by the early twentieth century—a white supremacy that had become global.34 Jack Goody points out the extent to which overarching Western temporal categories (such as BCE/CE, antiquity, medievalism, and modernity) have become so naturalized that their contingency has been lost sight of, and Eviatar Zerubavel charts the “time maps” that hegemonic mnemonic communities impose on others not permitted to set their own clocks.35 Could it be that the white time map has become so embedded in Euro thought, liberal and radical, that whites will not be able to struggle free of it, and that the desired historicization would require too profound a self-indictment of the “reason” that charted it to be even intelligible?

Finally, I want to conclude on a seemingly appropriate forward-looking note that is, though not contradictorily, also going to be backward looking, by saying something about normative issues, for which both the “utopia and utopianism” and the “normative inheritance of modernity” themes are relevant. I would submit that, on the question of social justice, there is a strange and problematic convergence between critical theory’s origins in Marxism and Rawls’s influential development of liberalism. In both cases, arguably, the ideal, the perfect, becomes the enemy of the better.

Marxism, of course, was supposed to be distinguished from utopian socialism in pointing toward a future that could actually be attained, relying on working-class organization and struggle rather than capitalist crises of conscience and philanthropy. But, in the sense of indicating a radically superior social order, even if not adumbrated in detail, it is still broadly in the Western utopian tradition. Similarly, Rawls famously characterizes as our normative target a “well-ordered society” that is “perfectly just” as part of his ideal-theoretic orientation, even if this is supposed to be, following Rousseau, “realistically utopian.”36 In both cases, however, corrective justice is sidelined as a theme. In Rawls’s case (his idea of “compensatory justice”), it is deferred to a tomorrow that never comes; in Marxism, it is disparaged in the name of the higher socialist/communist order. (Moreover, Marxism had the additional handicap—even if contemporary critical theory has now severed this particular link—of deprecating justice as an attractive norm in the first place, which Marx saw as tied to a “bourgeois” apparatus of individual rights.)

Racial justice is preeminently a matter of corrective justice—falling under what Rawls would call “non-ideal theory”—the rectification of past racist wrongdoing. But though Rawls emphasizes the importance of partial compliance theory in the opening pages of Theory of Justice—“the pressing and urgent matters … we are faced with in everyday life”—never for the remainder of his career would he get to non-ideal theory as “compensatory justice.”37 (In Theory of Justice, his focus is on conscientious objection and civil disobedience, domestically; in Law of Peoples he focuses on burdened societies and outlaw states, internationally).38 As Amartya Sen has pointed out, Rawls gives us very little guidance for correcting the injustices with which we are presently faced.39

Similarly, insofar as critical theory is ultimately aimed at the realization of a radically different social system, it may be impatient with “reformist” corrections of present-day injustices that do not challenge the foundations of the existing bourgeois order. But, for people of color, it is precisely these injustices that are most pressing, because these are the wrongs that have most fundamentally shaped not merely their fates as nonwhites but their very identities as people of color (and, for that matter, the white identities currently being uncritically taken for granted, too). Liberal democracy, the supposedly uncontroversial achievement of Western modernity, has yet to be achieved for African Americans in the United States, for example, where such basic norms as the right to vote, to not be the victims of discrimination, or to receive equitable treatment from agents of the state, such as the police, continue to be fought over. If racial injustice has indeed been foundational to the existing order, then that order needs to be seen as not merely a bourgeois but also a white-supremacist one.

In her section “Problematization and the Normative Inheritance of Modernity,” Allen calls for “uncovering the illusory, congealed history contained within [second nature].”40 I am suggesting that, for white people, that history is a history of the global establishment of white supremacy and of whiteness itself, categories now naturalized and not even to be found in white critical theory’s lexicon. Endorsing Adorno’s judgment that “the problematization of one’s own point of view is morally required if we are to do justice to those who are different from ourselves,” Allen challenges her fellow critical theorists to put under scrutiny that which has become “second nature” for them. I applaud these sentiments and suggest that, for white critical theorists in particular, a thorough engagement with critical philosophy of race is imperative, both for the realization of racial justice and for the necessary antiracist transformation of their own unexamined white identities.

NOTES

1. See Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993), 278; and Amy Allen, “Adorno, Foucault, and the End of Progress: Critical Theory in Postcolonial Times,” this volume, chapter 9.

2. Allen, “Adorno, Foucault, and the End of Progress”; emphasis omitted.

3. See David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1993); and Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1997).

4. Barnor Hesse, “Racialized Modernity: An Analytics of White Mythologies,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 30, no. 4 (July 2007): 643–63.

5. Allen, “Adorno, Foucault, and the End of Progress.”

6. Allen, “Adorno, Foucault, and the End of Progress.”

7. Lucius Outlaw, “Toward a Critical Theory of ‘Race’ ” (1990), in Race and Racism, ed. Bernard Boxill (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

8. See the new (2013) journal Critical Philosophy of Race, from the Penn State Philosophy Department. For a collection of reprints of classic articles, see Paul C. Taylor, ed., The Philosophy of Race: Critical Concepts in Philosophy, 4 vols. (New York: Routledge, 2012).

9. See, famously, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s statement, “The truth is that there are no races.” Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 45. One must, of course, distinguish contemporary liberalism’s eliminativism from an earlier liberalism whose dominant varieties, far from denying race’s reality, emphatically endorsed it.

10. See, for example: Sally Haslanger, Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012); Linda Martín Alcoff, Visible Identities: Race, Gender, and the Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Alcoff, The Future of Whiteness (Malden, MA: Polity, 2015); Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana, eds., Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007); Andrew Valls, ed., Race and Racism in Modern Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005); Thomas McCarthy, Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Derrick Darby, Rights, Race, and Recognition (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Robert Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009); Elizabeth Anderson, The Imperative of Integration (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Lewis R. Gordon, ed., Existence in Black: An Anthology of Black Existential Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1997); and Emily S. Lee, ed., Living Alterities: Phenomenology, Embodiment, and Race (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2014).

11. For a self-conscious attempt to expand beyond these national limits, see the forthcoming (as I write) Critical Philosophy of Race: Beyond the USA, a special issue of the Journal of Applied Philosophy, edited by Albert Atkin and Nathaniel Coleman.

12. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Originally published in 1971.

13. See Charles W. Mills, “Rawls on Race/Race in Rawls,” in “Race, Racism, and Liberalism in the Twenty-First Century,” ed. Bill E. Lawson, supplement, Southern Journal of Philosophy 47 (2009): 161–84.

14. Thomas Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights: Cosmopolitan Responsibilities and Reform, 2nd ed. (Malden, MA: Polity, 2008). Originally published in 2002.

15. For the latest bad example, see Jon Mandle and David A. Reidy, eds., A Companion to Rawls (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014). In its nearly six hundred pages, the book includes a grand total of one and a half pages on race.

16. See Charles W. Mills, “Decolonizing Western Political Philosophy,” New Political Science 37, no. 1 (March 2015): 1–24.

17. As of 2014, minorities (including Hispanic whites) make up about 38 percent of the US population. Thus, non-Hispanic whites make up 62 percent of the population, and non-Hispanic white women are 31 percent of the population. If minority philosophers are about 5 percent to 6 percent of US philosophers, and non-Hispanic white women are about 16 percent to 20 percent, then clearly the degree of underrepresentation of minority philosophers in proportion to the national population is far worse. See Noor Wazwaz, “It’s Official: The U.S. Is Becoming a Minority-Majority Nation,” U.S. News & World Report, July 6, 2015, http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2015/07/06/its-official-the-us-is-becoming-a-minority-majority-nation; and American Philosophical Association, Membership Demographic Statistics, FY 2014, FY 2015, http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/www.apaonline.org/resource/resmgr/Data_on_Profession/Member_Demo_Chart_FY2015_Rev.pdf.

18. See Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). Originally published in 1983.

19. See W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: The Free Press, 1998) (first published in 1935); Richard Wright, Lawd Today!, Uncle Tom’s Children, Native Son (New York: Library of America, 1991); Wright, Black Boy (American Hunger), The Outsider (New York: Library of America, 1991); C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed. (New York: Vintage, 1989) (first published in 1938); Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (New York: Grove, 1991); Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991).

20. Michael C. Dawson, Blacks in and out of the Left (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013).

21. Dawson, Blacks in and out of the Left, 13, 15.

22. Allen, “Adorno, Foucault, and the End of Progress.”

23. Benjamin Isaac, The Invention of Racism in Classical Antiquity (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). Categorizing ancient Athens as “Western” is itself, of course, a contentious point, given the claims some have made about the Afro-Asiatic shaping of the Mediterranean of the time, but I will here assume the conventional narrative.

24. See Carole Pateman, “The Settler Contract,” in Carole Pateman and Charles W. Mills, Contract and Domination (Malden, MA: Polity, 2007).

25. See David M. Goldenberg, The Curse on Ham (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004).

26. Allen, “Adorno, Foucault, and the End of Progress.”

27. See Du Bois, Black Reconstruction; Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1994) (originally published in 1944); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014); and Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 2014).

28. Montesquieu, The Spirit of Laws, ed. David Wallace Carrithers (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1977), 262.

29. Lewis Gordon, interview in African-American Philosophers: 17 Conversations, ed. George Yancy (New York: Routledge, 1998), 107.

30. See Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of European Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); and Charles W. Mills, “Kant and Race, Redux,” Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal 35, no. 1–2 (2014): 125–57.

31. See Michael Hanchard, “Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (1999): 245–68; and Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois.

32. See Stephen Howe, ed., The New Imperial Histories Reader (New York: Routledge, 2010); Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men’s Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam, eds., Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line (New York: Routledge, 2015); Jacob T. Levy and Iris Marion Young, eds., Colonialism and Its Legacies (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2011); and Veronica Watson, Deirdre Howard-Wagner, and Lisa Spanierman, eds., Unveiling Whiteness in the Twenty-First Century: Global Manifestations, Transdisciplinary Interventions (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2015).

33. Allen, “Adorno, Foucault, and the End of Progress.”

34. See Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993).

35. Jack Goody, The Theft of History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006); and Eviatar Zerubavel, Time Maps: Collective Memory and the Social Shape of the Past (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

36. Rawls, Theory of Justice, 4, 8; and John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), 4.

37. Rawls, Theory of Justice, 8.

38. See Rawls, Theory of Justice, sections 55–59; and John Rawls, Law of Peoples (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), sections 13–16.

39. Amartya Sen, The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

40. Allen, “Adorno, Foucault, and the End of Progress.”