Charles W. Mills

Philosopher Charles W. Mills was born and raised in Jamaica, where he studied physics at the University of the West Indies and went on to teach science in local high schools and colleges for several years. He eventually switched to philosophy and completed his PhD at the University of Toronto, where he wrote a dissertation on Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels’s theory of ideology. He briefly taught at the University of Oklahoma before moving to the University of Illinois at Chicago, Northwestern University, and the City University of New York, where he is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy as of 2020. He was also the president of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association from 2017–2018. The Racial Contract was Mills’s first book but remains his most widely read work. It also won a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award. Mills’s next book, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race, extended The Racial Contract’s emphasis on colonialism, racism, and white supremacy’s influential role in the history of Western philosophy. Mills also went on to publish From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (an essay collection on critical race theory) and Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality: Race, Class and Social Domination (a collection of articles about race and class relations in the Caribbean). Most recently, in 2017, Mills published Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, in which he builds on The Racial Contract’s critique of European and American liberal philosophy. As of 2020, Mills is reportedly working on a sequel to Black Rights/White Wrongs.