Black Rights / White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism by Charles W. Mills is a welcome contribution to the burgeoning field of philosophical and historical reflection on liberalism as a racial and imperial political philosophy. It joins such recent scholarship as Jennifer Pitts’s A Turn to Empire and Duncan Bell’s Reordering the World in showing that liberalism was far from a tradition sweeping away “the darkness and irrational social hierarchies of the ancien régime.” Much like his hugely influential 1997 work The Racial Contract, Mills’s Black Rights / White Wrongs (henceforth BRWW) contends that race historically penetrates “into liberalism’s descriptive and normative apparatus so as to produce a more-or-less consistent racialized ideology” (xv). Far from celebrating the abstract theoretical principles vivified by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century white male statesmen and intellectuals (and their twentieth-century Anglo-American inheritors), Mills argues that liberalism’s actual track record runs the spectrum from justifying...
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July 2020
Book Review|
August 07 2020
Review: Black Rights / White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, by Charles W. Mills
Black Rights / White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism
, by Charles W. Mills. New York
: Oxford University Press
, 2017
. 304 pp. $29.95 (paper). ISBN: 9780190245429.
Jared Loggins
Jared Loggins
Brown University
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National Review of Black Politics (2020) 1 (3): 440–443.
Citation
Jared Loggins; Review: Black Rights / White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, by Charles W. Mills. National Review of Black Politics 7 August 2020; 1 (3): 440–443. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/nrbp.2020.1.3.440
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