Race is everywhere and pretending not to see it only does more damage than good. This book delves into the work of Charles Mills and how his underlying philosophies of race still play out in today’s economic, educational, political and sociological arena. Charles Mills left a legacy of philosophical racial analyses needed to better understand race, racism, whiteness, and white supremacy worldwide. From the Racial Contract to global issues of colonial whiteness and epistemological racial ignorance, Mills’ theories still resonate in the research that race scholars conduct today. Needless to say, despite his passing, Charles’ work lives on. To honour Mills’ scholarship, this book draws on interdisciplinary studies (e.g., sociology, political science, Black studies, and education) to excavate the racial landscape of the U.S. post Trump, Anti-CRT bans, #BLM, and global racial reckonings. Within this volume prominent scholars of race worldwide and, from a variety of disciplines, discuss Mills’ theories as applied to contemporary discourses of race, whilst also offering very personal vignettes that best illuminate who Charles was to us all. Essentially, the man behind the theories. Filled with both deep theoretical analyses and personal stories of Charles, this book will liven the spirits, hearts, and hope for racial justice and those who work endlessly towards it. This book is a key resource for scholars, researchers and practitioners in the fields of education, sociology, political science, racial and ethnic studies, development studies and philosophy. It was originally published as a special issue of the journal Race Ethnicity and Education.

The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged "contract" has shaped a system of global European domination: how it brings into existence "whites" and "non-whites," full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence. The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state. As this 25th anniversary edition—featuring a foreword by Tommy Shelbie and a new preface by the author—makes clear, the still-urgent The Racial Contract continues to inspire, provoke, and influence thinking about the intersection of the racist underpinnings of political philosophy.

Liberalism is the political philosophy of equal persons, yet liberalism has denied equality to those it saw as black sub-persons. In Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, political philosopher Charles Mills challenges mainstream accounts that ignore this history and its current legacy in the United States today.

Contract and Domination offers a bold challenge to contemporary contract theory, arguing that it should either be fundamentally rethought or abandoned altogether. Since the publication of John Rawls's A Theory of Justice, contract theory has once again become central to the Western political tradition. But gender justice is neglected and racial justice almost completely ignored. Carole Pateman and Charles Mills's earlier books, The Sexual Contract (1988) and The Racial Contract (1997), offered devastating critiques of gender and racial domination and the contemporary contract tradition's silence on them. Both books have become classics of revisionist radical democratic political theory. Now Pateman and Mills are collaborating for the first time in an interdisciplinary volume, drawing on their insights from political science and philosophy. They are building on but going beyond their earlier work to bring the sexual and racial contracts together. In Contract and Domination, Pateman and Mills discuss their differences about contract theory and whether it has a useful future, excavate the (white) settler contract that created new civil societies in North America and Australia, argue via a non-ideal contract for reparations to black Americans, confront the evasions of contemporary contract theorists, explore the intersections of gender and race and the global sexual-racial contract, and reply to their critics. This iconoclastic book throws the gauntlet down to mainstream white male contract theory. It is vital reading for anyone with an interest in political theory and political philosophy, and the systems of male and racial domination.

In From Class to Race, Charles Mills maps the theoretical route that brought him to the innovative conceptual framework outlined in his academic bestseller The Racial Contract (1997). Mills argues for a new critical theory that develops the insights of the black radical political tradition. While challenging conventional interpretations of key Marxist concepts and claims, the author contends that Marxism has been 'white' insofar as it has failed to recognize the centrality of race and white supremacy to the making of the modern world. By appealing to both mainstream liberal values and the structuralism traditionally associated with the left, Mills asserts that critical race theory can radicalize the mainstream Enlightenment and develop a new kind of contractarianism that deals frontally with race and other forms of social oppression rather than evading them.

Social Justice Education for Teachers: Paulo Freire and the Possible Dream is a book that will help teachers in their commitment to and praxis of an education for social justice. The book traces the reception of Freire’s ideas in the USA, Canada, Latin America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and Australia and provides some glimpses of topical yet seminal interventions in the philosophy of education, including studies of the relationships between Freire and Rousseau, Freire and Dewey, or Freire and Gramsci.

Offering a wide variety of philosophical approaches to the neglected philosophical problem of ignorance, this groundbreaking collection builds on Charles Mills's claim that racism involves an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance. Contributors explore how different forms of ignorance linked to race are produced and sustained and what role they play in promoting racism and white privilege. They argue that the ignorance that underpins racism is not a simple gap in knowledge, the accidental result of an epistemological oversight. In the case of racial oppression, ignorance often is actively produced for purposes of domination and exploitation. But as these essays demonstrate, ignorance is not simply a tool of oppression wielded by the powerful. It can also be a strategy for survival, an important tool for people of color to wield against white privilege and white supremacy. The book concludes that understanding ignorance and the politics of such ignorance should be a key element of epistemological and social/political analyses, for it has the potential to reveal the role of power in the construction of what is known and provide a lens for the political values at work in knowledge practices.