Teaching Philosophy, 1 7:3, September 1 994
223
Non- Cartesian Sums: Philos ophy and
the African-American Experience
CHARLES W. MILLS
University 01 Illinois At Chicago
1 recent1y taught, for the first time, an introductory course in African­
American Philosophy. It was an illuminating experience for me (and, one
hopes, for the students) , because it forced me to think more systemati­
cally about the issue of philosophy and race than 1 had ever done before.
Though my general area of specialization is ethics and social and politi­
cal philosophy, and 1 am African-American (at least in the extended
sense that the Caribbean is part of the Americas), my main research
interests and publication focus have not been in this particular area. So 1
had to do more preparatory work than usual to educate myself and come
up with a course structure, especially since, because of the relatively
undeveloped state of African-American Philosophy in the academy,
there are no standard guides to the subj ect. Oftentimes the structure of a
textbook itself provides an organizing narrative and an expository
framework for teaching the course. Here, by contrast, 1 had to think the
course out myself, and locate and assign readings from a number of
different sources. Far more material is available than there was ten, or
even five, years ago, l but there was nothing 1 found appropriate in terms
of a suitable introductory anthology, with articles that would cover a
broad range of philosophical topics from an African-American perspec­
tive, and which would be accessible to undergraduates with little or no
background. And putting this aU together, of course, meant that 1 had to
try to work out in my own mind what African-American Philosophy
really was, how it was related to mainstream (Western? European/Euro­
American? Dead White Guys'?) philosophy-where it challenged and
contradicted it, where it supplemented it, and where it was in a theoreti­
cal space of its own.
Blacks and White Philosophy
The natural starting-point of my reflections was blacks and philosophy
itself. There are as yet so few recognized black philosophers2 that the
term still has something of an oxymoronic ring to it, causing double© Teaching Philosophy, 1 994. AU rights reserved. 0145·5788/9411703·0223$ 1 . 00
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CHARLES MILLS
takes and occasional quickly-suppressed reactions of surprise when one
is introduced. As a result, 1 would imagine that most black philosophers
think about philosophy and race to a certain extent, even if we don't
actually write or publish in the area. What exactly is it about philosophy
that so many black people find alienating, which would explain the fact,
a subject of ongoing discussion in the APA Proceedings and Addresses,
that blacks continue to be far more under-represented here than in most
other humanities, and that black graduate students generally steer away
from philosophy? 3
1 would reject explanations that attribute this pattern entirely to present­
day (as against past) racist exclusion. Rather, 1 would suggest that a
major contributory cause by now is the self-sustaining dynamic of the
"whiteness" of philosophy itself, not the uncontroversial whiteness of
skin of most of its practitioners, but what could be called, more contestably,
the conceptual or theoretical whiteness of the discipline itself. This alone
would be sufficient to discourage the black graduate student contemplating
a career in the academy, so that-via mechanisms familiar to those who
study the reproduction of dynamic systems-certain defining traits are
perpetuated unchaUenged or only weakly chaUenged, and the socializa­
tion and credentialing of newcomers proceeds in a way that maintains
the "persistently monochromatic" 4 character of the profession.
This is a notion that is hard to tease out; it is a pre-theoretical intuition,
and, as with aU intuitions, it can be hard to convey to those who do not, in
this case because of their color, spontaneously feel it in the first place.
But let me make the attempt. 1 will use gender as a comparison, because
there are both interesting similarities and interesting differences, and
because-as a result of two decades of feminist scholarship-the line of
argument here is far better known, even by those who do not accept it.
In an enlightening paper in this journal, Thomas Wartenberg described
the experience, from the perspective of a white male instructor, of trying
to see his assigned texts from the viewpoint of his female students, and
gradually developing a revelatory sense of the "schizophrenic relation­
ship" they would be bound to have to works characterized by "a system­
atic denigration of the nature of women." s There is no mystery, then,
about why women are likely to feel at least some initial discomfort with
classic philosophy. But the response of blacks poses more of a chaUenge,
because for the most part blacks are simply not mentioned in classic
philosophy texts. Whole anthologies could be, and have been, filled by
the misogynistic statements of various famous philosophers, and entire
books could be, and have been, written on the inconsistencies between
the ostensibly general moral and political prescriptions of famous phi­
losophers and their actuaUy proclaimed views on the status of women. 6
But there is in Western philosophy no rationale for black subordination
in particular (as against arguments for slavery in general) that can com-
N ON-CARTESIAN S UMS
225
pare in detail, and theoretical centrality to the tradition, to the rationale
for female subordination.1 A collection of explicit1y racist statements
about blacks from the major works of the central figures in the Anglo­
American canon would not be a particularly thick document. 8 1t is more
that issues of race do not even arise than that b lacks are continually
being put down.
What, then, is the source for blacks of a likely feeling of alienness,
strangeness, of not being entirely at home in this conceptual world? 1
think the answer has to be sought at another level, in a taxonomy of
different kinds of silences and invisibility. The standing of women in
society had to be theoretically confronted b y Western thinkers (after aU,
they were right there as mothers, sisters, wives) in a way that the standing
of enslaved blacks did not. The embarrassing moral and political prob­
lems posed by the fate of the latter could more readily be ignored, dealt
with by not saying anything about them . As D avid Brion D avis observes
in his book on slavery in Western culture: " [N]o protest against the
traditional theory [of slavery] emerged from the great seventeenth-cen­
tury authorities on law, or from such philosophers and men-of-letters as
Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, Pascal, B ayle, or Fontenelle . . . . The
inherent contradiction of human slavery had always generated dualisms
in thought, but by the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Europeans
had arrived at the greatest dualism of all-the momentous division be­
tween an increasing devotion to liberty in Europe and an expanding
mercantile system based on Negro [slave] labor in America. For a time most
jurists and phi1osophers met this discrepancy simply by ignoring it."9
So the result is a silence, but not one of tacit inclusion, but rather
exclusion: the black experience is not subsumed under these philosophi­
cal abstractions, despite their putative generality. An enlightening meta­
phor might be the notion of a parallel universe that partial1y overlaps
with the familiar (to whites) one, but then, because of crucial variations
in the initial parameters, goes radically askew. For the inhabitants of this
universe, the standard geometries wi11 be of limited cartographic use,
conceptual apparatuses predicated on assumptions which do not hold
true. It is not a question of minor deviations, which, with a bit of bending
and twisting here and there, can be accommodated within the frame­
work. Rather, so to speak, the Euclidean framework has to be Rieman­
nized; a reconceptualization is necessary because the structuring logic is
different. The peculiar features of the African-American experience­
racial slavery, with its link between biological phenotype and social sub­
ordination, and chronologically located in the modern epoch, ironically
coincident with the emergence of liberalism's proclamation of universal
human equality-wi11 be no part of the experience represented in the
abstractions of the European or Euro-American phi1osopher. And those
who have grown up in such a universe, asked to pretend that they are
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CHARLES MILLS
living in the other, will be cynically knowing, exchanging glances which
signify "There the white folks go again." They know that what is in the
books is largely mythical as a general statement of principles, that it was
never intended to be applicable to them in the first place, but that, as part
of the routine, within the structure of power relations, one has to pretend
that it does.
Thus there will be a feeling, not to put too fine a point on it, that when
you get right down to it, a lot of philosophy is just white guys jerking off.
Either it is not about real issues in the first place, but pseudo-problems;
or when it is about real problems, the emphases are in the wrong places;
or crucial facts have been omitted , making the whole discussion point­
less; or the abstractness is really a sham for what we aU know, but are not
allowed to say out loud. The impatience, or indifference, that 1 have
sometimes detected in black students derives in part, 1 suggest, from
their sense that there is something strange, for example, in spending a
whole course describing the logic of different moral ideals without ever
talking about how aU of them were systematically violated for blacks. So
it is not merely that the ideal was not always attained, but that, more
fundamentally, this was never actuaUy the ideal in the first place. A lot of
moral philosophy will then seem to be based on pretense, the claim that
these were the principles that people strove to uphold, when in fact the
real principles were the racially exclusivist ones.
The example of Locke here is paradigmatic of the kind of guilty silence
1 am talking about: the pillar of constitutionalist liberal democracy; the
defender of the natural equality of all men; and the opponent of patriar­
chalism, of enslavement resulting from a war of aggression, of a11 heredi­
tary slavery; who nevertheless had no difficulties in reconciling his
principles with investments in the Slave Trade and a part in writing the
Carolina slave constitution. Women are, of course, also unequal in the
Lockean polity, but their subordination is at least addressed, explained
(inconsistent1y) on the basis of Biblical authority.l0 But nothing at all is
formally said in the Two Treatises ofGovernment about black subordina­
tion: blacks are just outside the scope of these principles. Similar1y, in the
two most-used contemporary political texts, Rawls's A Theory of Justice
and Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia, it will certainly be noticed by
blacks, if not commented on, that U.S. slavery and its aftermath barely
appearY The only slavery Rawls mentions is that of antiquity, while
Nozick 's thoughts on the possible need for rectificatory reparations oc­
cupy a few sentences and an endnote reference. So the focus on "ideal
theory" (Rawls) here will seem in part ideological, a steering away from
disquieting questions and unresolved issues. It is a generalism, an ab­
stractness, which is covertly particularistic and concrete, in that it is really
based on a white experience for which these realities were not central,
not that important.
NON-CARTESIAN S UMS
227
And it is because of this interconnection between "white" principles
and black philosophy that it is not really accurate, at least for African­
Americans, to characterize the issue purely in terms of promoting "mul­
12
This description would be fair
ticulturalism" and "cultural diversity."
enough in the case of geographically and historically discrete communi­
ties, with different cultures and worldviews, coming into contact through
voluntary immigration. But in the case of the African-American experi­
ence, what is involved is a subj ect population simultaneously linked to
and excluded Irom the d ominant group-the "sixty percent solution" of
the Constitution, the 1 857 Dred Scott v. Sanlord decision that blacks in
America had no rights that whites were bound to respect-whose culture
and worldview are, as a consequence, deeply motivated by the necessity
of doing a critique 01 the dominant view. A lot of black thought has
simply revolved around the insistent demand that whites live up to their
own (ostensibly universalist) principles, so that African-Americans like
D avid Walker could challenge American slavery and white supremacy in
the name of the Declaration of Independence, and the S aint Domingue
(Haitian) revolutionaries who triumphed oyer French colonial slavery
could be described as "black Jacobins" acting in the name of the "Rights
13
of Man." (1 should emphasize that I do not mean by this to endorse the
scholarly opinion widely held at the tum of the century, and since dis­
credited, that African culture was completely erased by the experience
of slavery, so that the black mind was a tabula rasa to be written upon by
the white pen. 14 Rather, my point is that African retentions in the "New
World," and the elements of a syncretic new culture growing out of
slavery, were necessarily intellectually shaped in their development by
the experience of resistance to white oppression in a way that African
thought developing on the home continent was not. Alrican-Americans,
as writers like James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison have always pointed
out, are also African-Americans, with the result being that a relationship
simultaneously of influence by, and opposition to, white theory and prac­
tice imprints their cognition from the start.) What is involved, then, is not
so much the purely extemalist collision of different cultures as the (par­
tially) intemalist critique of the dominant culture by those accepting
m any of the culture's principles but excluded by them. In large measure,
this critique has involved telling white people things that they do not
know and do not want to know, the main one being that this altemative
(non-ideal) universe is the actual one, and that the local reality in which
whites are at home is only a non-representative part of the larger whole.
The Personal Experience 01 Sub-Personhood
B ack to the course, and the problem of finding an organizing principle
for it. Obviously, African-American Philosophy is not j ust the philo­
sophical writings of black people, because then any article would
228
CHARLES MILLS
count-on the Gettier problem, on counterfactuals, on bivalence, on the
French Enlightenment-and of course there are such articles. The unify­
ing the me, it seemed to me, had to be something like the struggles of
people of African descent in the Americas against the different manifes­
tations of white racism (cf. Harris's title [note 1]: Philosophy Born of
Struggle). The political, economic, social, and legal dimensions of this
struggle were c1ear enough, and well-documented. But how exactly was
the philosophical aspect of this struggle to be characterized?
I decided that "personhood," or the lack of it, could provide an ingress
to this universe, and that I would work with the concept of a "sub-per­
son" as my central organizing notion. This arguably captures the defining
feature of the African-American experience under conditions of white
supremacy (both slavery and its aftermath): that white racism so struc­
tured the wor1d as to have negative ramifications for every sphere of
black life-j uridical standing, moral status, personal/racial identity,
epistemic reliability, existential plight, political inclusion, social meta­
physics, sexual relations, aesthetic worth.
What is a (racial) "sub-person?" (The phrase, of course, is a translation
of the useful German Untermensch.) What are its specific differentiae? A
sub-person is not an inanimate obj ect, like a stone, which has (except
perhaps for some green theorists) zero moral status. Nor is it simply a
non-human animal, which (again, before recent movements to defend
"animal rights") would have been regarded, depending on one's Kantian
or Benthamite sympathies, as outside the moral community altogether,
or at best as a member with a significantly lower utility-consuming coef­
ficient. Rather, the peculiar status of a sub-person is that it is an entity
which, because of phenotype, seems (from, of course, the perspective of
the categorizer) human in some respects but not in others. It is a human
(or, if this already seems normatively loaded, a humanoid) who, though
adult, is not fully a person. And the tensions and internal contradictions
in this concept capture, I would argue, the tensions and internal contra­
dictions of the black experience in a white-supremacist society. To be an
African-American was to be, in Aristotle's conceptualization, a living
tool, property with a soul, whose moral status was tugged in different
directions by the dehumanizing requirements of slavery on the one hand
and the (grudging and sporadic) white recognition of the obj ective prop­
erties blacks possessed on the other, generating an insidious array of
cognitive and moral schizophrenias in both blacks and whites. " [T]he
concept of man as a material possession has always led to contradictions
in law and custom .... laws that attempted to define the slave's peculiar
position as conveyable property, subj ect to rules respecting debt, de­
scent, and taxation; and as a man who might be protected, punished, or
prevented from exercising human capacities. . . . Everywhere [in the
Americas these laws] embodied ambiguities and compromises that arose
NON-CARTESIAN SUMS
229
from the impossibility of acting consistently on the premise that men
were things."15 This, then, wil1 be a more il1uminating starting-point than
the assumption that in general aU humans have been recognized as
persons (the "default mode," so to speak). In other words, one would be
taking the historical reality of a partitioned social ontology as one's
starting-point rather than the ideal abstraction of universal equality,
qualified with an embarrassed marginal asterisk or an endnote to say
that there were some exceptions.
If this is your foundation, the nature of your perspective on the world,
and the philosophy that grows organicaUy out of it, are bound to be
radicaUy different. Even after emancipation, you are categorized on the
basis of your color as an inferior being, since modern racial slavery
(unlike the slavery of antiquity) ties phenotype to subordination. So you
are seen as having less mental capacity, with rights on a sliding scale from
zero to a ceiling weU below your white co-humans, a creature deemed to
have no real history, who has made no global contribution to civilization,
and who in general can be encroached upon with impunity. Once this social
ontology is faced without evasion and circumlocution it is obvious that the
kind of problems with which such a person must grapple, the existential
plight, the array of concepts found useful, the set of paradigmatic dilemmas,
the range of concerns, is going to be significantly different from that of
the mainstream white philosopher. And this means that many of the
crucial episodes and foundational texts (The Great Moments in Western
Philosophy) which make up the canon and the iconography of the Western
tradition wi1l have little or no resonance for you.
As an illustration, let me contrast two kinds of paradigmatic philo­
sophical situations, and two kinds of selves or sums, the Cartesian self
with which we are aU familiar, and an Ellisonian one which will be
strange to many readers. I think these epitomize the different kind of
problematic involved.
The enunciation of the Cartesian sum can be construed as one of the
crucial episodes of European modernity. Here we have vividly portrayed
the plight of the individual knower torn free from the sustaining verities
of the dissolving feudal world, which had provided authority and cer­
tainty, and entering tentatively into the cognitive universe of an (as yet
unrecognized) revolutionizing individualist capitalism, where aU that is
solid would melt into air. So the crucial question is posed: "what can I
know? " And out of this, of course, comes modern epistemology, with the
standard moves we aU know, the chaUenges of skepticism, the danger of
degeneration into solipsism, the idea of being enclosed in our own possi­
bly unreliable perceptions, the question of whether we can know other
minds exist, the scenario of brains-in-a-vat, etc. The Cartesian plight-rep­
resented as an allegedly universal predicament-and the foundationalist
solution of knowledge of one's own existence, thus becomes emblematic, a
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CHARLES MILLS
kind of pivotal scene for a whole way of doing philosophy, and involving
a whole program of assumptions about the world and (taken-for­
granted) normative claims about what is philosophically important.
Contrast this with a different kind of sum, that of Ralph Ellison's
classic novel of the black experience, Invisible Man. 16 What are the prob­
lems facing this individual? Is the problem one of global doubt? Not at
all; such a doubt would never be possible, because the whole point of
subordinate black experience, or the general experience of oppressed
groups, is that the subordinated are in no position to doubt the existence
of the world and other people, especially that of their oppressors. One
could say that those most solidly attached to the world are the only ones
with the luxury of doubting its reality, while those whose attaehment is
more preearious, whose existence is dependent on the good will or iU
temper of others, are precisely those compelled to reeognize that it exists.
One is a funetion of power, the other of subordination. If your daily
existenee is largely defined by oppression, forced intereourse with the
world, it is not going to oecur to you that doubt about your oppressors'
existence eould in any way be a serious or pressing philosophical prob­
lem; this wiU simply seem frivolous, a perk of social privilege.
The dilemmas of Ellison's black narrator, the philosophical prediea­
ment, are therefore quite different. His problem is his " invisibility," the
faet that whites do not see him, take no notiee of him, not because of
physiologieal deficieney but because of the psychological "eonstruction
of their inner eyes," which conceptually erases his existence. He is not a
full person in their eyes, and so is either not taken into account at all in
their moral calculations, or done so only with diminished standing. If
they did not have power oyer him, this white moral derangement would
not matter, but they do. So his problem is to convinee them that he exists,
not as a physical obj eet, a lower life form, a thing to be instrumentally
tre ated, but as a person in the same sense that they are, and not a means
to their ends. Moreover, because of the intellectual domination these
beings have oyer his world, he may also be frequently assailed by self­
doubts, doubts about whether he is a real person deserving of their
respect, or perhaps an inferior being deserving the treatment he has
received . The sum here, then-the sum of those seen as sub-persons­
will be quite different. From the beginning it will be relational, not mo­
nadic, dialogic, not monologic: one is a "sub-person" preeisely because
others-persons-have categorized one as such, and have the power to
enforce their categorization. Afriean-Ameriean Philosophy is thus inher­
ently, definitionally oppositional, the philosophy produced by property
which does not remain silent but insists on speaking and contesting its
status. So it will be a sum that is " metaphysical" not in the Cartesian
sense but in the sense of challenging a social ontology, not the eonse­
quent of a proof, but the beginning of an affirmation of one's self-worth,
one's reality as a person, and one's militant insistence that others recog-
NON-CARTESIAN S UMS
23 1
nize it also. In the words of Ellison's nameless narrator: " [Y]ou often
doubt if you really exist .... You ache with the need to convince yourself
that you do exist in the real world, that you're a part of all the sound and
anguish , and you strike out with your fists, you curse and you swear to
make them recognize yoU."17
The universalizing pretensions of Western philosophy, which seemed
by its very abstractness and distance from vulgar reality to be all-inc1u­
sive of human experience, are thereby shown to be illusory. White (male)
philosophy's confrontation of Man and Universe, or even Person and
Universe, is really predicated on taking personhood for granted, and thus
excludes the differential experience of those who have ceaselessly had to
fight to have their personhood recognized in the first place. Without even
recognizing that it is doing so, Western philosophy abstracts away from
what has been the central feature of the lives of Africans transported
against their will to the Americas: the denial of black humanity, and the
reactive, defiant assertion of it. Secure in the uncontested sum of the
leisurely Cartesian derivation, whites find it hard to understand the
metaphysical rage and urgency permeating the non-Cartesian sums of
those invisible native sons and daughters who, since nobody knows their
name, have to be the men who cried "1 am! " and the women who demand
"And ain't I a woman? "18 From the beginning, therefore, the problems
faced by those categorized as persons and those categorized as sub-per­
sons will be radically different. One can no longer speak with quite such
assurance of the problems of philosophy; rather, we see that these are
problems for particular groups of human beings, and that for others there
will be different kinds of problems which are more urgent. A relativizing
of the discipline's traditional hierarchies of importance and centrality
thus becomes necessary.
if a
section
has a
strike
through,
you
need
not read
it,
though
of
course
you may
Teaching the Course
Let me now describe how 1 drew the course together. Apart from the
conceptualization challenges discussed, there were also other difficulties
connected with the racial structuring of experience and knowledge in
what in many ways continues to be a de facto segregated society. A
significant number of the students in the class were white (six out of
sixteen), and I felt that they would not really be able to understand the
work of black philosophers without a sen se of the existential condition to
which blacks were responding. On the other hand, most of the black
students had no background in philosophy. So there was a sense in which
I faced a double educational job: to give the black students a quick
overview of mainstream (white) philosophy, and to give the white stu­
dents a quick overview of the black experience. Accordingly, I decided to
include a significant amount of historical/sociologicallpsychological ma­
terial on race and the impact of racism. Finally, in the aforementioned
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CHARLES MILLS
absence of a wide range of introductory articles in African-American
Philosophy, 1 decided that in order to bridge the gap between Philosophy
with a capital "P" and people's experience, 1 would also draw on less
academic materials: popular writings, fiction, and even excerpts from
movies, videos, and daytime talk shows that 1 had previously recorded
when preparing for the course. (1 justified this at the start of the term by
arguing for a democratized, anti-Platonic conception of philosophy and
human attempts to understand the world in general, citing Gramsci's
famous dictum that "AU [people] are intellectuals/philosophers," 19 even
if they do not have that specialized professional training. And in general
1 would argue that African-American philosophers in the academy look­
ing for a tradition, a "usable past," need to seek out and develop the
resources in the history of oppositional black popular culture, and not just
confine themselves to the writings of professional black intellectuals.)
1 began with excerpts from two classic texts of the black experience,
the preface of Ellison's Invisible Man and the essay on "double-con­
sciousness" from W.E.B. Du Bois's The Souls of Black Folk (references
are provided in the appendix). The aim was to give a statement of the
existential plight of African-Americans, the condition of " invisibility"
and of seeing oneself always from two perspectives. "11 is a peculiar
sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at
one's self through the eyes of others.... One ever feels his twoness,-an
American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings;
two warring ideals in one dark body." 20 1 tried to get the white students in
particular to appreciate how such a starting-point would determine a
difference in the kind of philosophy that one developed.
1 then discussed the historical context of this experience, explaining
racism as a systematic set of theories and institutionalized practices
deeply embedded in US. history, and going into details about racial
legislation and the views of leading American figures that were calcu­
lated to shock white students out of the illusion that this was a marginal
problem. (One of my most educational early experiences after coming to
the US. to teach in 1987 was facing a graduate philosophy class in a
S o uthern, predominantly white university and rea lizing, t o my
astonishment, that what 1 had taken to be an uncontroversial banality­
the centrality of racism and the subordination of blacks in US. history­
was something that 1 was going to have to argue for. As a double outsider,
non-white and non-American, it was a revelation to me about the kinds
of evasions of the past that must be routine in the high school curricula
here.) To this end, 1 had prepared a fact-sheet with current statistics on the
comparative condition of blacks and whites,21 and that included coUected
racist comments from such philosophers as Hume, Kant, Hegel, Voltaire,
and Mi11, as weU as from representative American political thinkers like
Benj amin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln.
We then looked at the resultant ontology of race and identity-race as
NON-CARTESIAN S UMS
233
a biological concept and race as a social construct-reviewing the crite­
ria used to determine racial identity, the issues raised by "passing," and
the social metaphysics which stand behind the " one-drop " rule for peo­
pIe of mixed race when bIack ancestry is involved . Apart from the philo­
sophical and sociological material, 1 used a 1 930s short story by Langston
Hughes, "Passing." We discussed whether there was any "obj ective"
answer to the question of what race people of mixed heritage " really"
were, and what, if any, were the moral questions raised for such individu­
als by choosing to identify themselves one way rather than another
(no-race, bi-racial, race R1 or race R2) .
This h a d occupied several weeks, b u t
1
felt it w as necessary, as men­
tioned , to provide the historical and sociological background.
1
then
turned to the introduction of sub-personhood as a central notion for
enabling appreciation of the black philosophical universe. 1 began with a
few pages from Kant's Groundwork ofthe Metaphysic of Morals, just so
that non-maj ors could have a sense of the ideals of "personhood" and
" respect" as crucial moral concepts.
1
paired this with the page from
Huckleberry Finn giving the famous exchange between Tom S awyer's
Aunt Sally and Huck (mistaken by her for Tom), in which, in answer to
her question whether anybody was hurt in a (mythical) riverboat acci­
dent, Huck replies: "No'm. Killed a nigger," and she relievedly com­
ments, "Well, it's lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt." Here,
with the economy of a great artist, Twain gives us a vignette in which a
whoIe social order is encapsuIated, a world in which the moral commu­
nity of full personhood terminates at the boundaries of white skin. 1
followed this with a long excerpt from William Faulkner's lntruder in the
Dust, which tracks the maturation of the young white protagonist from
his " insult" by the black Lucas B eauchamp's refusal to accept seventy
cents for having saved the white boy's life, to his eventual realization of
the perniciousness of the moral code that tied his self-respect to the
maintenance of black inequality. Finally,
1 used a
chapter from Richard
Wright's autobiography of growing up in the South, titled , with an appo­
siteness perfect for the course, "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow."
What the texts by Twain, Faulkner, and Wright provided my students
was a sense, from fiction and autobiography, of what could be called a
" naturalized " ethics, a look at the actual moral code of a white-suprema­
cist system, and its ramifications for dominant and subordinated groups.
They give us moral knowledge of a universe of persons and sub-persons,
where disrespect for the latter from the former was not merely permissi­
ble, but mandated in order to maintain the social hierarchy, and duties
and rights were apportioned accordingly. They show us the behavioral
contradictions in having to interact with "living tools," human insofar as
the y could be communicated with about their tasks, but non-human in
terms of lacking any say about those tasks, with one always threatening
234
CHARLES MILLS
to affect the other. They describe the necessity for boundary patrolling,
the intricate racia1 etiquette devised to police this hierarchy and make
sure that the subordinated b1acks did not forget their p1ace and become
"uppity." Finally, they make it possib1e to understand the characteristic
themes in the b1ack experience, the African-American need to insist on
their personhood, sometimes at the cost of death, the strategies for
subverting the order when direct confrontation was judged futile, the
importance of attaining self-respect, the tensions between the elusive
dream of acquiring personhood on white terms, through the embrace of
white culture (the mark of the "superior" being), and the insistence that
one could be both culturally black and a person. Thus they provide the
raw material from which the philosopher can extract the conceptual web
of an alternative order, the structuring princip1es of a universe, giving us
knowledge in a way that merely conceding b1acks were not always
treated equally would not. And this universe is, as emphasized, not some
alternative cosmos of the science-fiction writer's imagination but our
own world.
Next was the body. The body has not traditionally entered philosophi­
cal discourse, but since it is precisely the body that served here as the sign
of inclusion within or exclusion from the moral community (the physical
sign of the natural slave that Aristotle had sought in vain), the black body
arguably deserves to become a philosophical object. Focussing on gen­
der, I used the notion of "carnal alienation" to distinguish the particular
kind of alienation many black women have felt from their bodies be­
cause of the devastating interaction of the doub1e hegemony of a sexist
norm which values women primarily by their bodies, and a racist norm
which makes the Caucasoid somatotype the standard of beauty. Again,
this is a place where 1 found non-philosophical material most usefuI,
particu1arly The Color Complex, a recent study of co10r hierarchies
within the b1ack community ("high-yaller" vs. "tar-baby"), and its his­
torical link with the stratified color ladder (white, octoroon, quadroon,
mulatto, Negro) of slavery and post-slavery. 1 also showed excerpts from
a video of Spike Lee's School Daze, an exploration of these intra-racial
tensions on an all-black campus. We discussed the 10ng history of at­
tempts in the black community to transform oneself so as to more closely
approximate the white somatic norm through wigs, skin bleaches, and,
more recently, with technological advance, dermabrasion, chemical
peels, and plastic surgery. Difficult moral issues are thereby raised: is one
acting within one's rights in trying to make oneself look whiter, or is one
violating some obligation? And if so, to whom-to oneself (as Kant
thought we had duties to ourself)? To the racial group (and can there be
such duties?)? Or to humanity as a whole?
From the subject of alienation from the black body we moved into the
contentious issue of inter-racial sexual relationships, and the historical
NON-CARTESIAN SUMS
235
pattern, closely observed and great1y resented by black women, of suc­
cessful black men (including many leading black intellectuals) tending to
marry lighter-skinned or white women. The argument is that this pattern
is not happenstance, but a reflection of deeply-ingrained, if unacknow­
ledged, feelings of racial inferiority. The choice of partner then becomes
an endorsement of the differential aesthetic worth of the Caucasoid
somatic norm, a conscious or unconscious strategy for enhancing one's
social status, and perhaps even a way of aehieving personhood by proxy.
Again , there is a tension between individual rights, one's presumed lib­
erty to make one's own free ehoice in a matter of such importanee to
one's life, and the obligations putatively arising from group membership.
Some of the blaek women in the class put forward the view that not
merely did blaek men need to examine their motivations in entering such
unions, but, more radieally, that they aetually had a moral duty to marry
blaek women. Understandably, this beeame a subj eet of fierce debate.22
(The audio-visual material of ehoice here was ineseapable: the all-female
"war-eouncil" seene from Spike Lee's Jungle Fever.)
B oth "earnal alienation" and the topic of inter-racial relationships had
raised feminist concerns, so black feminism was the topic next on the
agenda. The historieal problem faeed by blaek women here has been the
need, in effeet, to fight on two fronts, against the frequent sexism of blaek
men (and their aecusation that feminism is j ust a white woman's thing, a
diversion from black trans-gender unity against racism) , and the fre­
quent racism of white women (too often ignorant of and indifferent to
the ways in which "universal" feminist theory needs to be infleeted by
race-specifie concerns) . The question I posed for the class was to what
extent did "sisterhood" cross racial lines? And the answer, familiar to
anybody active in the women's movement in North America oyer the last
decade, seemed to be: not very far. In faet throughout the term, there was
ongoing tension between some of the white and some of the black
women in the class oyer many of the issues diseussed. A real challenge
was thus raised for adherents of "standpoint epistemologies," since, in a
sense, "eompeting oppressions" were putting forward eonflicting claims
of epistemic privilege. The blaek women, for example, were eoncerned to
affirm the beauty of the blaek female body, while the white women saw
such preoccupation with appearance as a sign of patriarchal soeializa­
tion; the blaek women, as noted, were generally hostile to inter-racial
sexual relationships, while the white women were liberal on the question.
And on such recent events as the Clarence Thomas hearings and the
Mike Tyson rape trial, there were also sharp divisions. Whereas the white
women saw the Thomas hearings and the Tyson trial in straight gender
terms, as straightforward sexual harassment and rape in which raee was
irrelevant, blaek women tended to feel that the treatment of both cases
involved a double standard, and that the faet that the aceused was a blaek
236
CHARLES MILLS
man had evoked the notorious figure of the brute black rapist. In what,
coming from a man, would have seemed like classic, outrageous "blam­
ing of the victim" attitudes, some of the black women questioned the
motivation and veracity of Anita Hill and 1Yson's accuser, arguing that in
both cases there were serious questions about the circumstances of their
accusations.
Finally, we wound up with a discussion of the "underclass," and a
comparative assessment of rival strategies historically advocated for
black liberation, e.g. varieties of separatism (repatriation to Africa, or a
separate state, or a parallel black economy) , integration (via assimila­
tion , or while trying to maintain cultural integrity), or revolutionary
struggle toward a radically different kind of America. In the more som­
ber mood of the '90s, as against the heady ' 60s, there were no black takers
for the last of these options (whites, on the other hand, were generally
more radical), with most black students advocating black capitalism on
some kind of culturally retentionist basis, though there was cynicism
about whether the white establishment would in fact allow this.
Some Conclusions and Reco m m endations
The class showe d , not to my surprise, that black students will take an
interest in the se issues if a conscious effort is made, working from both
ends, to develop the bridging concepts to relate abstract philosophical
d i scuss i ons to the c1ass i c texts of the black experience. This gap will be a
general problem for the reasons indicated above, but will yawn especially
wide in the case of students who want to take an African-American
Philosophy course because of Afrocentric reasons, or j ust plain curiosity,
but don't have any philosophy background. The shortage of suitable
introductory material means that one often has to rely on j ournal arti­
cles, which would be heavy going even for undergraduate maj ors, let
alone those with no background at all. What is needed is an anthology
with selected excerpts from black texts that raise philosophical ques­
tions, as well as specially-commissioned articles to supplement more
difficult material, and presumably as the number of black philosophers
grows, and student interest develops, such a book will appear.
1 want to conclude by saying something about philosophy courses, and
the revision of the curriculum, more broadly. Seeking to placate black
critics merely by adding another course or two like this, and then con­
tinuing essentially as before, cannot be a genuine answer to the longterm
problem of canon reform. For when this is done, what happens, of course,
is that the se courses are simply ghettoized, seen as peripheral to the core
of the discipline, not to be taken seriously by the real philosopher.
Rather, what is desirable is a transformation of the mainstream curricu­
lum in such a way that even a general introductory course will include
such material, making the students realize the variety of human experi-
NON-CARTESIAN SUMS
237
enees and the eorresponding multiplicity of philosophical perspeetives.
We need to look at the traditional main divisions of the field-metaphys­
ies, epistemology, logic, value theory-and ask how their subj eet matter
could be changed by the explicit incorporation of race, by writing "race"
and seeing what difference it makes. 23
ln some cases, there would seem to be little room for race to make a
differenee; it hardly makes sense to talk about developing a peculiarly
African-American symbolic logic. ln other areas, such as ethics, as 1 have
argued, there are obviously much greater possibilities. It seems to me
that for those putting together introductory ethics anthologies or assem­
bling their own paekages of photocopied material, the conceptual ehange
is the really important thing, the admission up front in the text and at the
start of the class that the history of this country has been explicitly
racially exclusionist, so that personhood was assigned on racial lines, and
that the abstract theory was really only intended to apply to a subset of
this population. The moral concerns of African-Americans have thus
eentered on the assertion of their personhood and the struggle against
what eould be termed a Herren volk ethics, and material from the aboli­
tionist and anti-segregationist literature eould be ehosen to refleet this,
supplementing the conventional diseussions. This would give white stu­
dents a more honest sense of the true moral history of the U.S., and
sensitize them to the radically different ways in which blaeks ha ve had to
see these theories, from a loeation outside their purview. And it would for
black students be a sign of good faith, a recognition of their historic
subordination which is glossed oyer in the ahistorical world of the stand­
ard ethics text.
But in other areas there are also possibilities. ln metaphysics eourses,
diseussions of personal identity eould incorporate a seetion on racial
identity, and the "metaphysical" significanee in a racially-structured so­
ciety of being a member of race Rl as against race R2 (or the implica­
tions for one's self-eoneept of diseovering one is "really" raee R2 rather
than race Rl). Epistemology courses with a subsection on standpoint
theory could include material on race as well as gender, and "natural­
ized" epistemology/cognitive psyehology discussions eould eonsider the
pervasiveness as a mental phenomenon of white cognitive dysfunction
and self-deeeption on matters of race, and its necessitation by living in a
situation of privilege based on systematie racial oppression. Histories,
and contemporary surveys, of political philosophy should ineorporate
writings from blaek thinkers, with the necessary theoretical introduetion
that would make the problems that they are addressing, and their differ­
ing perspeetives, intelligible to white students. Similarly, reeent debates
from "eritical raee theory" eould be used to supplement standard presen­
tations in philosophy of law, tracing the peeuliar trajectory of blacks'
status as rightsholders in the U.S. Aesthetics courses could examine the
238
CHARLES MILLS
historical challenge of articulating a black aesthetic. In philosophy of
religion, the specific problems addressed by a black theology could be
added to the usual set of the mes. The blaek tradition of " signifying" eould
be explored for its possible repereussions for mainstream philosopy of
language. Finally, philosophy of scienee eourses eould look at the history
of " scientifie racism," and what this says about the social determinants of
scientific investigation, and, analogously, philosophy of history courses
eould look at Aryanism , and its impaet on the fabrication of the historieal
reeord.
White students who take sueh eourses would not only ha ve an incen­
tive for finding out more about the blaek experience; they would have
been provided with a better philosophieal insight into their own reality,
insofar as "whiteness" and "blaekness" have reciproeally (though not
equally or harmoniously) determined eaeh other.24 B laek students would
be given the reeognition currently denied by illusorily general abstrae­
tions, that pretend to a representativeness they do not in faet aehieve.
The ultimate aim would be to transform the diseipline so that the eyes of
the former are opened, and the eyes of the latter do not glaze oyer, both
visions eonverging on agreement about the real nature of the world we
are living in and how its problems ean be addressed.
Appendix
(1
give below a rough outline of the eourse and the readings
1
aetually
used, followed by so me afterthoughts based on the experienee of teaeh­
ing the eourse. This is prescriptive only in the very general sense of indieating
what 1 think some promising approaehes and interesting subjeets are; obvi­
ously there are many other topics whieh eould be explored, and other
sourees which eould be used. An exeellent source of ideas and materials is
the APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience.)
Week 1 :
Introduetion: the Afriean-Ameriean existential eondition
Readings: Exeerpts from:
Ralph Ellison, In visible Man (1 952; rpt. New York: Vintage Books,
1 972)
W.E.B. Du B ois, The Souls 01 Black Folk (1 903 ; rpt. New York: New
Ameriean Library, 1 969)
Weeks 2-3 :
Racism: theory, praetiee, institutionalization
Readings: Faet sheet, exeerpts from St. Clair D rake, Black Folk Here
and There, voI. 1 (Los Angeles: U CLA Center for Afro-Ameriean
Studies, 1 987)
NON-CARTESIAN SUMS
239
Week 4:
Philosophy in general; African-American Philosophy in particular
Readings: Lucius Out1aw, "African, African American, Africana
Philosophy," The Philosophical Forum 24: 1 -3 (Fall l992-Spring 1 993)
Week 5 :
Race and identity
Readings: Langston Hughes, "Passing," from The Ways ofWhite Folks
(1933; rpt. New York: Vintage Classics, 1 990)
Naomi Zack, "An Autobiographical View of Mixed Race and
D eraci nation," APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black
Experience, 91:1 (Spring 1 992)
Weeks 6-7:
Personhood, sub-personhood, respect
Readings: Excerpts from:
Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H.J.
Paton (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1964)
Samuel Clemens, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Norton Critical
Edition, 2nd ed. (1962; rpt. New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1 977)
Wi lliam Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust (1948; rpt. New York: Vintage
International, 1991)
R ichard Wright, "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow," in Henry Louis
Gates, ed., Bearing Witness: Selections from African-American
Autobiography in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon
Books, 1991)
Laurence Thomas, "Self-Respect: Theory and Practice," and Bernard
B oxill, "Self-Respect and Protest," both in Leonard Harris, ed.,
Philosophy Born of Struggle: Anthology of Afro-American
Philosophy from 1 91 7 (Dubuque, Iowa: KendalllHunt Publishing
Co. , 1 983)
Week 8:
Carnal al i enati on
Readings: Excerpts from The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin
Color Among African Americans (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovi ch, 1 992) by Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, Ronald Hall
Vi deo: School Daze (1988), dir. Sp ike Lee
Week 9:
Race, color, and sexual relati onships
Readings: Excerpts from:
The Color Complex
Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism in America (1966; rpt. New York:
Grove Press, 1988)
Video: Jungle Fever (1991 ), dir. Spike Lee
240
CHARLES MILLS
Weeks 10-1 1:
Black feminism
Re adings: Excerpts from:
Michele Wallace, Invisibility Blues: From Pop to Theory (London and
New York: Verso, 1 990)
Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness,
and the Politics of Empowerment (1 990; rpt. New York and London:
Routledge, 1991)
Week 12:
The "underclass"
Readings: Excerpts from: William Julius Wilson, The Truly
Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1 987)
B ill E. Lawson, ed., The Underclass Question (Philadelphia: Temple
University Press, 1 992)
Weeks 13-14:
Strategies for black liberation
Re adings: Excerpts from Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth
Century ed., August Meier, Elliott Rudwick, and Francis L.
B roderick, 2nd ed. ( 1 965; rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1 971)
"The Aírican-Ame rican existential condition:" some of the black
women accused me oí sexism for choosing two males as representative oí
that condition, and 1 now (shamefacedly) agree that a black female voice
should be included, for example a selection from the proliíic writings oí
bell hooks. " Racism:" 1 think the important thing to convey to white
students in particular is that it was routine, structural, and legally-sanc­
tioned; the "sanitizing" oí U.S. history in many high school textbooks
means that there is often no real appreciation of the way slavery and then
Jim .Crow shaped national consciousness. Videos such as the Eyes on the
Prize series might be useful as an educational tool here. " Race and
identity:" 1 should mention that Naomi Zack now has a book out on the
subject, Race and Mixed Race (Philadelphia: Temple University Press,
1 993) . "Personhood, sub-personhood, respect:" the students seemed to
have had problems with the Faulkner selection, perhaps because of the
difficulty of the prose, and in future 1 would try some other text to depict
a racist moral consciousness. " Race, color, and sexual relationships:"
ne arly thirty years after its publication, Hernton's underground classic
Sex and Racism in America remains a controversial (and, of course,
pre-íeminist) text that, though 1 think it contains genuine insights, may
be found inappropriate by some (indeed many will probably j udge it
wiser to steer away from this topic altogether). "The underclass: " a
discussion of the political implications of rap music, particularly " gangsta
rap," would be an obvious way of linking black popular culture to socio-
NON-CARTESIAN S UMS
24 1
political analysis. "Strategies for black liberation: " 1 should point out
that though Black Protest Thought is very valuable for the historical
sources, it is now somewhat dated, and should be supplemented with
more recent material. Finally, let me emphasize once again that this was
meant to be an introductory course for students with no or little back­
ground in philosophy, designed to be accessible and to pique students'
interest to go further, which is why 1 aimed at a mixture of philosophy
articles and more popular material. A more advanced course could make
greater use of j ournal publications.
Notes
Support for writing this article was provided by the Institute for the Humanities,
University of Illinois at Chieago.
1. See, for example: Leonard Harris, ed., Philosophy Born 01Struggle: Anthol­
ogy 01 Alro-American Philosophy Irom 1 91 7 (Dubuque, Iowa: KendalUHunt
Publishing Co., 1983); two speeial issues of The Philosophical Forum , fifteen
years apart, on Afriean-Ameriean Philosophy, 9:2-3 (Winter 1 977-Spring 1 978)
and 24: 1 -3 (Fall 1992-Spring 1 993); Bernard BoxiIl, Blacks and Social Justice , rev.
ed. (1 984; rpt. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & LittIefield, 1 992); Howard
MeGary and BilI E. Lawson, Between Sla very and Freedom: Philosophy and
A m erican Sla very (Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1992): Bill Lawson, ed., The Underclass Question (Philadelphia: Temple Univer­
sity Press, 1 992); Kwame Anthony Appiah, 1n My Father's House: Alrica in the
Philosophy 01 Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); Laurenee
Mordekhai Thomas, Vessels 01 Evil: American Slavery and the Holocaust (Phila­
delphia: Temple University Press, 1 993); Cornel West's The A merican Evasion 01
Philosophy: A Geanealogy 01 Am erican Pragmatism (Madison: University of
Wiseonsin Press, 1 989), Race Matters (Boston: Beaeon Press, 1993), Keeping
Faith: Philosophy and Race in A merica (New York and London: RoutIedge,
1993), and many other works; and the reeently-launehed (Fa1l 1991) A PA News­
letter on Philosophy and the Black Experience. (This listing is, of course, meant to
be representative rather than exhaustive.)
2. The total population is also still very small. An Oet. 1 993 database supplied
by Lueius OutIaw gives the figure of 89 "Blaek philosophers in [North Ameri­
ean] higher education," which is less than 1 pereent of the total of 10,645 phiIoso­
phers Iisted in Arehie Bahm's Directory 01American Philosophers 1 994-95, 17th
ed. (Bowling Green, Ohio: PhiIosophy Doeumentation Center, 1 993), p. 479.
3. For so me reeent thoughts on this subjeet see Howard MeGary, "PhiIosophy
and Diversity: The Inclusion of Afriean and Afriean-American Materials," and
Char1es L. Griswold, Jr., "Attraeting B laeks to Philosophy," A PA Newsletter on
Feminism and Philosophy, 92:1 (Spring 1993), pp. 51-55, 55-59.
4. The charaeterization comes from David Hoekema, former editor of the
A PA Proceedings and A ddresses.
5 . Thomas Wartenberg, "Teaehing Women PhiIosophy," Teaching Philosophy
1 1 : 1 (Mareh 1988), pp. 15-24.
6. See, for example: Mary Briody Mahowald, ed., Philosophy 01 Woman: An
Anthology 01 Classic and Current Concepts, 2nd ed. ( 1 978; rpt. IndianapoIis:
Haekett, 1983); Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought (Prinee-
242
CHARLES MILLS
ton: Princeton University Press, 1 979); Diana H. Coole, Women in Political
Theory: From Ancient Misogyny to Contemporary Feminism (Brighton, Sussex
and B oulder, Colorado: Wheatsheaf and Lynne Rienner, 1988).
7. Further research since the initial draft of this paper has made me more
cautious about the truth of this statement. 1 now think that the European idea of
"wildness," which evolves from the medieval concept of the "Wild Man" to
become, in the "Age of Discovery," a general trope for representing the " uncivi­
lize d" "savages" of the nonwhite world being subj ugated by European colonial­
ism, may require more examination as a conceptual precursor of racism, in which
case (depending in part on how you define your terms) racism is more theoretically
central to the tradition than it might frrst appear. See Edward Dudley and Maximil­
lian E. Novak, eds., The Wild Man Within: An Image in Western Thought from the
Renaissance to Romanticism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972) .
Note that in three of the classic social contract theorists-Hobbes, Locke and
Rousseau-it is taken for granted that Native Americans have n o civilization,
being deemed to be in a "state of nature" rather than part of civil society.
8. Here are some of the most frequently cited passages: Aristotle's views on
" natural slaves" in The Politics, not, of course, aimed at Africans, but ideologi­
cal1y very important for the ammunition that they gave both to Spanish coloniz­
ers in j ustifying their treatment of Native Americans, and later to Southern
anti-abolitionists in the 19th century U.S. debates on slavery; Hume's footnote in
his essay " O f Natio nal Characters" j udging that "the negroes, and in general al1
the other species of men" are " naturally inferior to the whites;" Kant's comment
in "Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime" that "a clear
proof that what [someone] said was stupid" was that "this fellow was quite black
from head to foot;" Mill's pro-colonialist exclusion in On Liberty of "barbari­
ans," " those backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered
as in its nonage," from the class of human beings for whom "despotism" was not
legitimate. Some examples from figures less central to the analytic tradition:
Hegel's contemptuous description of sub-Saharan Africa in the Introduction of
The Philosophy 01 History; Marx and Engels' occasional remarks, usually in the
correspondence rather than the theoretical works, about "niggers," and frequent
defence of European colonialism and civilization against "barbarian nations;"
and, somewhat more obscure, Voltaire's endorsement in "The People of Amer­
ica " of polygeny, the view that blacks were a separate species. D oubtless an
industrious researcher could turn up a lot more embarrassing material, but my
point is that in philosophy it is not comparable in volume or salience to the
writings about women, and could not plausibly be argued to be a prime deterrent
of black philosophical interest. (For two excellent secondary sources, to which 1
am indebted for most of these references, see Thomas F. Gossett's Race: The
History 01 an Idea in America [1963; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1965] and
Winthrop D. Jo rdan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro,
1550-1812 [1968; rpt. New York: W.W. Norton, 1977 ] . For an analysis, see chapter
2, "A Gene alogy of Modern Racism," of Cornel West's Prophesy Deliverance
[Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1 982] .) Since possible misunderstanding of my
claim is easy here, 1 should expressly say that 1 am neither taking the historical
significance of a passage to be in proportion to its length (because of the stature
of Aristotle and Hume, their comments had tremendous authority and impact),
nor implying that most philosophers' taciturnity on this subject means that they
were not racist. The point is merely to show the disanalogies within philosophy
between anti-woman and anti-black prej udices; the latter is manifested more in
strategic silences and inconsistencies than explicitly racist theorizing. (But see
the previous note for a qualification of this claim.) Similarly, in John Immerwahr
NON-CARTESIAN
S UMS
243
and Miehael Burke's useful article on how a eourse in early modern philosophy
(Deseartes, Leibniz, Spinoza, Loeke, Berkeley, Hume, Kant) might be diversified
so as to be sensitive to raee, they cite little in the way of aetual racist statements
by the authors: see "Raee and the Modern Philosophy Course," Teaching Phi­
losophy 16:1 (Mareh 1 993), pp. 21-34.
9. D avid Brion D avis, The Problem 01 Slavery in Western
New York: Oxford University Press, 1 988), pp. 1 08-109.
Culture
(1966; rpt.
10. See, for example, Lorenne M.G. Clark, "Women and Loeke : Who owns the
Apples in the Garden of Eden?," in The Sexism 01 Social and Political Theory:
Women and Reproduction Irom Plato to Nietzsche (Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1 979).
1 1 . John Rawls,A Theory 01Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1 971); Robert Noziek, A na rchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basie Books, 1 974).
12. See, for example, the special issue of
ralism in philosophy, 14:2 (June 1 991 ) .
Teaching Philosophy
on multicultu­
1 3 . David Walker, Walkers Appeal (1829); C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins:
Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed. (1938; rpt. New
York: Vintage Books, 1963).
14. For a classie eritique, see Melville J. Herskovits, The Myth olthe Negro Past
( 1 941 ; rpt. Boston: Beaeon Press, 1990).
15. D avis, pp. 223 , 248 .
16. Ralph Ellison, lnvisible Man (1952; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1 972) .
17. Ellison, pp. 3-4.
18. E l I ison, lnvisible Man; Riehard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper &
Row, 1 940); James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes 01 a Native
Son ( 1 96 1 ; rpt. New York: Vintage International, 1993); John A. Williams, The
Man Who Cried 1 Am (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1 967); bell hooks, Ain 't 1 a
Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1 981 ) .
19. Antonio Gramsci, Selections Irom the Prison Notebooks, e d . and trans.
Q uintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith (New York: International Publishers,
197 1 ) .
20. W. E. B. D u Bois, The Souls
Ameriean Library, 1 969), p. 45.
01 Black Folk
(1903; rpt. New York: New
2 1 . The main souree for the statisties was Andrew Haeker's very informative
(New York: Charles
Seribner's Sons, 1992).
Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal
22. In faet the debate was so interesting that 1 was subsequently inspired to
write a paper on the subjeet: see my " D o Black Men Have a Moral Duty to
Marry Black Women?," Journal 01 Social Philosophy 25:2 ( 1 994), pp. 1 3 1 -53 ..
23. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Writing 'Race ' and the Difference It Makes,"
Introduction to Gates, ed., "Race, " Writing, and Difference (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1 986).
24. See, for example, Toni Morrison's claim that white American literature is
shaped by an unacknowledged response to "a dark, abiding, signing Africanist
presence: " Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary lmagination (Cam­
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Charles W. Mills, Department 01 Philosophy, University ol Illinois at Chicago,
Chicago, Illinois 60607- 7115, USA