Theorizing Racial Justice

In his last major work, prominent critical race theorist Charles W. Mills offers a searing analysis of the shortcomings of liberal political ideology. With a focus on John Rawls, the pre-eminent liberal political philosopher of the last 50 years, Mills critiques the faults, failures, and inadequacies of liberalism, highlighting its fundamental inability to address white supremacy on a global scale. Along with his intellectual respondents in the volume, Mills asserts the limits of Rawls' class-based principles, particularly within systemically racist societies like the United States, with unprecedented clarity. Through an intersectional exploration of contemporary culture and politics, Mills and the contributors instead emphasize the necessity of a historically corrective racial analysis in the pursuit of true social justice, urging readers to move not only beyond Rawls, but liberalism at large.

Charles W. Mills was a Britain-born, Jamaican-raised Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY who earned his Master's and Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Toronto. A vanguard philosopher of race, Mills published six books and over 100 articles throughout the course of his multi-decade career. In critique of philosophy's failure to address systemic racism and racial justice at large, Mills notably pioneered a theory of Black radical liberalism. Volume Editor Elizabeth Anderson is a John Dewey Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy and Women's Studies at University of Michigan. She specializes in moral, social and political philosophy, feminist theory, social epistemology, and the philosophy of economics and social sciences.