All one has to do is to replace the category 'white' with that of 'brahmin' or 'badralok', 'black' with 'dalit', and 'racism' with 'casteism', for every argument of Charles Mills to go through!
Shiva Shankar.
------------------------
"... Here in the United States, for example, we have the absurd situation of a huge philosophical literature on social justice in which racial injustice — the most salient of American injustices — is barely mentioned. ... ... Sociologists have documented the remarkable extent to which large numbers of white Americans get the most basic things wrong about their society once race is involved. (See, for some hilarious examples, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's "Racism Without Racists.") My favorite example, from a poll about three years ago, is that a majority of white Americans now believe that whites are the race most likely to be the victims of racial discrimination! If that's not an epistemology of ignorance at work, I don't know what would be."
Lost in Rawlsland By GEORGE YANCY and CHARLES MILLS, NOVEMBER 16, 2014 http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/lost-in-rawlsland/?_r=0
This is the second in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week's conversation is with Charles Mills, the John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University and the author of several books, including the influential 1997 work "The Racial Contract." — George Yancy
... Mainstream Marxism has (with a few honorable exceptions) been "white" in the sense that it has not historically realized or acknowledged the extent to which European expansionism in the modern period (the late 15th century and onward) creates a racialized world, so that class categories have to share theoretical space with categories of personhood and subpersonhood. Modernity is supposed to usher in the epoch of individualism. The Marxist critique is then that the elimination of feudal estates still leaves intact material/economic differences (capitalist and worker) between nominally classless and normatively equal individuals. But the racial critique points out that people of color don't even attain normative equality. ...
... It (Marxism) also has various weaknesses, the recounting of which would be too long to get into here. Yes, I would claim that the tension between recognizing (some) people as "individuals" in modernity while subordinating others through expropriation, chattel slavery and colonialism requires a dichotomization in the ranks of the human. So we get what I termed above a "racial" liberalism, which extends personhood on a racially restricted basis. White supremacy can then be seen as a system of domination, which, by the start of the 20th century, becomes global and which is predicated on the denial of equal normative status to people of color. As members of what was originally seen as a "slave race" (the children of Ham), blacks have generally been at the bottom of these hierarchies. But the exclusions were broader, even if other nonwhite races were positioned higher on the normative ladder. At the 1919 post-World War I Versailles Conference, for example, the Japanese delegation's proposal to incorporate a racial equality clause in the League of Nations' Covenant was vetoed by the six "Anglo-Saxon" nations — Britain, the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. (For a detailed account, see "Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality" by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds.) So this event brings out in a wonderfully clear-cut way the reality of a global polity normatively divided between racial equals and racial unequals. ...
Shiva Shankar.
------------------------
"... Here in the United States, for example, we have the absurd situation of a huge philosophical literature on social justice in which racial injustice — the most salient of American injustices — is barely mentioned. ... ... Sociologists have documented the remarkable extent to which large numbers of white Americans get the most basic things wrong about their society once race is involved. (See, for some hilarious examples, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's "Racism Without Racists.") My favorite example, from a poll about three years ago, is that a majority of white Americans now believe that whites are the race most likely to be the victims of racial discrimination! If that's not an epistemology of ignorance at work, I don't know what would be."
Lost in Rawlsland By GEORGE YANCY and CHARLES MILLS, NOVEMBER 16, 2014 http://opinionator.blogs.nytim
This is the second in a series of interviews with philosophers on race that I am conducting for The Stone. This week's conversation is with Charles Mills, the John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University and the author of several books, including the influential 1997 work "The Racial Contract." — George Yancy
... Mainstream Marxism has (with a few honorable exceptions) been "white" in the sense that it has not historically realized or acknowledged the extent to which European expansionism in the modern period (the late 15th century and onward) creates a racialized world, so that class categories have to share theoretical space with categories of personhood and subpersonhood. Modernity is supposed to usher in the epoch of individualism. The Marxist critique is then that the elimination of feudal estates still leaves intact material/economic differences (capitalist and worker) between nominally classless and normatively equal individuals. But the racial critique points out that people of color don't even attain normative equality. ...
... It (Marxism) also has various weaknesses, the recounting of which would be too long to get into here. Yes, I would claim that the tension between recognizing (some) people as "individuals" in modernity while subordinating others through expropriation, chattel slavery and colonialism requires a dichotomization in the ranks of the human. So we get what I termed above a "racial" liberalism, which extends personhood on a racially restricted basis. White supremacy can then be seen as a system of domination, which, by the start of the 20th century, becomes global and which is predicated on the denial of equal normative status to people of color. As members of what was originally seen as a "slave race" (the children of Ham), blacks have generally been at the bottom of these hierarchies. But the exclusions were broader, even if other nonwhite races were positioned higher on the normative ladder. At the 1919 post-World War I Versailles Conference, for example, the Japanese delegation's proposal to incorporate a racial equality clause in the League of Nations' Covenant was vetoed by the six "Anglo-Saxon" nations — Britain, the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. (For a detailed account, see "Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Men's Countries and the International Challenge of Racial Equality" by Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds.) So this event brings out in a wonderfully clear-cut way the reality of a global polity normatively divided between racial equals and racial unequals. ...
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