On September 21, Charles W. Mills, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center passed away. What followed underscored the immense impact that he had on scholarship and the people who write that scholarship. Countless individuals took to Twitter with notes of mourning, statements of tribute, and fond narratives of their encounters with Charles. In an academic world that is increasingly professionalized and professionalizing, Charles represented a unique kind of friendship and comradery that was possible in academic life.
As an undergraduate at Northwestern University, I had the privilege of witnessing these admirable qualities firsthand. Anyone who attended a lecture, sat in a seminar, or watched a presentation by Charles knew that he was a first-rate teacher. Master of the handout, he confidently strode into the room with a stack of papers that promised to summarize the lecture and readings in an extraordinarily accessible way. He bragged about his ability to compose a useful handout. It was the handout that ultimately swayed the audience at the infamous 2012 Political Union debate, handing Mills a slim victory over Prof. Barnor Hesse.
Part of what made Charles such an enthralling teacher was his willingness to speak to broad philosophical and theoretical debates. His aspiration to retrieve liberal thought by imagining a radical liberalism, made most pronouncedly in his 2017 Black Rights/White Wrongs, feels downright inspiring in a time largely defined by racial pessimism and filled with pressures to specialize one’s research to defend against intellectual encroachment. I once asked him over lunch why he remained committed to reworking the liberal tradition instead of finding critical resources elsewhere. And while his reply could betray the pragmatism of an aging academic–asking “have you ever tried to explain Derrida to a random person on the street?”–his smile betrayed a deeper commitment. Charles aimed to be accessible and he wanted to engage the public in a language that could reach a broad audience.
From his early work on Marxist philosophy to his seminal text, The Racial Contract, to the numerous essays on the philosophy of race, Charles had an uncanny ability to articulate how racial and class ideologies ordered liberal democracies in a digestible way. Charles Mills was a central figure in the project of mainstreaming the study of race and racism in philosophy. His scholarship demands that we attend to the ways that whiteness shaped the development of Western political thought. As his student, I was convinced that race, class, and gender were central categories of political thinking, but Charles’s intellectual influence went deeper than mere recognition of that fact. I learned that ideas are malleable; and systems of thinking are never homogenizing or uniform. I came to see the utility in wrestling with ideologies and repurposing their core commitments for the ends of racial justice. Charles instilled in me a love of reconstructing arguments, the value of engaging political thinking derived from a range of political persuasions, and the courage to imagine a more just world.
Charles also had an unparalleled sense of humor. He loved the movie “Trading Places” and held a showing every time that he taught Marx and Marxism. Charles believed that comedy was a potent tool for social change. In nearly every class he brought up second wave feminist slogans like ‘sleeping with men is sleeping with the enemy,’ admiring the way that feminists dismantled patriarchal logic with quippy phrases. He was well-known for several one-liners that, once tried and true, became fixtures of his teaching repertoire. He frequently turned his comedic powers on the overwhelming whiteness and maleness of the academy: “I used to say that the only thing whiter than the APA was Antarctica, but now, with climate change, even Antarctica is darker!”
Perhaps the quality that most made Charles an endearing figure and wonderful mentor was his down-to-earth disposition. Never one for excessive displays of power or prestige, Charles enthusiastically engaged every person with whom he crossed paths. It did not matter if you were an endowed faculty member, an undergraduate student, or an irascible questioner in the audience. I always wondered, how could someone so successful remain so grounded? That unparalleled ability to connect with others resulted from his choice to interpret his success as a mix of extraordinary luck and ordinary effort. He fondly recalled that GA Cohen once told him that he was “the only man to ever prove me wrong” in his often-overlooked article “Is it immaterial that there’s a ‘material’ in ‘historical materialism’?” In the same breath he laughed and remembered how he sat sweating for countless hours in a cheap, attic-level flat one particularly hot summer in Toronto to produce the material that generated the article. The stories of success never stood apart from the effort, the sacrifice, and the humorous self-deprecation.
Charles Mills was a renowned scholar, a prolific author, and a caring mentor. His legacy will be enduring, not only in the articles and books that he produced, but also in the generation of philosophers and political theorists that he mentored and trained, expanding the critical study of race and racism. For so many of us Charles was a towering intellectual figure and a warm and kind friend. He was a fierce scholarly force and an unrepentant jokester. A man who could give the Tanner Lecture in Human Values and a professor who could be seen fast-walking down Foster Street, trying to catch the next purple line train. May these complicated dualities inspire us all to think bigger and love deeper as students, teachers, scholars, and peers.
Larry Svabek
Larry Svabek is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Chicago. He received his B.A. from Northwestern University where he was a student and mentee of Charles.
