This week’s slidesHAP 09 — White Supremacy
Read with the three histories in view. For each reading ask: what is the fact and its evidence (History 1); what theory turns the evidence into support (History 2); what conception had to be in place for the question to arise at all (History 3).
Readings
- Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Cornell University Press, 1997. (Introduction; Chapter 1)
- Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford University Press, 2007. (Chapter 1) — also free at Project Gutenberg.
- Mills, Charles W. “White Ignorance.” In Sullivan & Tuana (eds.), Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance. SUNY Press, 2007: 13–38; reprinted in Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs (Oxford, 2017), ch. 4 — Oxford Scholarship Online via Howard Library. no open copy — in the meantime: MIT OpenCourseWare handout on Mills’s “White Ignorance” (open, CC licence); Bain, “Mills’s Account of White Ignorance: Structural or Non-structural?” (2023, open on PhilArchive); and the “epistemology of ignorance” pages of The Racial Contract, ch. 1.
Further reading
- Mills, Charles W. Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race. Cornell University Press, 1998.
- Mills, Charles W. From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism. Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. (Google Books preview) — with Slack, “From Class to Race and Back Again: A Critique of Charles Mills’ Black Radical Liberalism,” Science & Society 84 (2020) — open access, which sets out the book’s argument before disputing it.
- Fricker, Miranda. Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing. Oxford University Press, 2007. no online copy — for testimonial and hermeneutical injustice in outline, open access: “Feminist Social Epistemology,” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (§ on epistemic injustice).