We Need Charles Mills More Than Ever
SHIRLEY ANNE TATE
University of Alberta, CANADA
Abstract
This article uses a no reply racist email I received in 2023 as its point of departure for thinking through the importance of The Racial Contract in theorizing about contemporary ‘post-race’ racism’s cultural life because of the prevalent discourse that Black people can be racist too. It looks at the continuing presence of willful white ignorance on anti-Black racism and the tenacity of global white supremacy’s impact on lines of sight societally and in the academy using understandings from Charles Mills’ (1997) The Racial Contract and his 2007 chapter ‘White ignorance’ on white supremacy, whiteness, racialization, bodies, and epistemologies of ignorance. The discussion of the email reflects some of the impact of Mills’ ideas on my own work within Racism Studies and Cultural Studies. As someone from Stuart Hall’s Black British Cultural Studies tradition who draws on Mills’ work in my meditations on anti-Black racism and white supremacy, I illustrate the generative nature of his work within these (sub)disciplines by also including my own work on institutional anti-Black racism’s affects as part and parcel of the workings of the Racial Contract. This locates racial affective economies within the Contract itself as the glue that binds white ignorance and white supremacy on issues of race and racism even in the face of its refutation.
Keywords
Antiracism, Ignorance, Contempt, Hate, Fear, White Supremacy, Anti-Blackness
Introduction
I had the pleasure of meeting Charles Mills for the first time at a Caribbean Philosophical Association conference at the University of Miami. Being a bit star struck and a very reserved person, I could not simply say ‘Hello, how are you? I am Shirley Tate and I am a fan of your work. It’s so very nice to meet you’. Not difficult, I know, but I only just managed to smile. That was as far as my mouth and frozen thoughts would go. We met again many years later when Charles came to the University of Leeds for a Black Philosophy conference at which I was also a speaker. I had invited him as well to give a talk in the Centre for Ethnicity and Racism Studies of which I was then the Director. On the day of his talk, he walked to my office from his hotel. We chatted about how he was, how he was finding Leeds, and who might be his audience. He changed out of his trainers to his shoes and ate the rice and peas and chicken that he wanted for lunch which my PhD student had bought for him from the food shop in Chapeltown. He was totally low maintenance, down to earth, very open, very generous, had a ready smile, a wicked sense of humor, and it was nice to listen to another Jamaican accented voice in a department where I was the only one. Needless to say, the room was packed for his talk, standing/sitting on the floor room only. The door had to remain open so that others lined up in the corridor could listen. Intellectually, personally and politically it was a wonderful, empowering couple of hours as he took us through the Racial Contract and why it mattered, black ink marker flowing across the white board, rapid fire questions to the audience, disarming smile always ready to hand. Charles, we still need your wisdom now, more than ever.
When I opened my emails in December 2023, as I started my work day, the impact of the words landed hard in my gut: ‘If you are actually unable to recognize the inherent racism in your “work”, then you truly are the racists’. As the lead collaborator of a network on decolonization and antiracism in universities in settler colonial states I received this racist hate NO REPLY email through the network website’s ‘contact us’ page. I want to use these words as the location from which to begin my exploration of why we still need Charles Mills’ wisdom. I specifically look at why The Racial Contract (1997) still matters to Racism Studies and Cultural Studies, and is necessary knowledge if we are to equip ourselves with the tools we need to struggle against those who think that antiracism, decolonization and social justice transformation have no place in society or academia. I dwell on three things from the email that my eyes were drawn to and that still stick in my mind: “work”, ‘inherent racism’ and ‘you truly are the racists’. In this dwelling I want to think through The Racial Contract’s impact on our lines of sight, knowledge systems and the affective economies (Ahmed, 2004) of anti-Blackness which undergird white supremacist power. First, I look at Mills’ Racial Contract for its insights on ‘inherent racism’ and ‘you truly are the racists’ to speak back to the fear generated by white supremacist anonymity. I then move to thinking about “work” – the scare quotes themselves – as the location of contempt and hate of Black generated theory and Black women’s bodies. Last, I look at white supremacy’s lines of sight as I continue to flesh out contempt of Black generated theory and bodies. I conclude by returning to Mills’ legacy and its place in Blackened thought/sight/consciousness to counter white supremacist hegemony as being, knowledge, power and affect. Let us now move to refusing fear.
The Racial Contract, ‘inherent racism’ and ‘you truly are the racists’: Refusing fear
For Mills (1997), we live in a world built on the global Racial Contract instantiated from 1492 to the 1830s with New World conquest and colonization and from the 1730s to after World War II with the occupation of Asia, Africa and the Pacific. European conquest, Indigenous genocide and dispossession, enslavement and indenture were underlain by, simultaneously reinforced, and reconstructed racial moral and legal codes. These codes were part of the expropriation contract, the enslavement contract and the colonial contract which codified inferiority on the bodies of those racialized as non-white through Indian laws, enslavement codes, and colonial ‘native’ acts. European humanism meant that only white Europeans were human in ‘Europe proper, the colonial greater Europe, and the “fragments” of Euro-America, Euro-Australia etc’ (Mills, 1997: 29-35). What became clear to Mills is that colonialism was integral to the rise of Europe and that
[…] the Racial Contract is calculatedly aimed at economic exploitation. The whole point of establishing a moral hierarchy and juridically partitioning the polity according to race is to secure and legitimate the privileging of those individuals designated as white/persons and the exploitation of those individuals designated as nonwhite/subpersons. Globally, the Racial Contract creates Europe as the continent that dominates the world, locally within Europe and the other continents, it designated Europeans as the privileged race [… with a] tendency to privilege some set of internal variables and correspondingly downplay or ignore altogether the role of colonial conquest and African slavery (Mills, 1997: 32-33).
With this as an understanding of global white supremacy and domination extending from who counts as human to economy, law, psyche, culture, and beyond, we can go back to the anonymous emailer and ask, who is truly racist and where is inherent racism located? If Europe is created as the dominator of the world, the place from which the world was colonized, enslaved, murdered, dispossessed, who is truly racist and where is inherent racism located? If non-Europeans were codified as racialized others/subpersons and this was a global enterprise in the after-life of which we still live because of coloniality (Quijano, 2000; Kelly, 2000; Wynter, 2003), who is truly racist and where is inherent racism located?
No amount of race evasiveness (Frankenburg, 1993), attempts to make anti-Black racism disappear into thin air (Gordon, 1997), colour-blindness (Boñilla Silva, 2021), claims to being ‘post-racial’ (Goldberg, 2015), denial of responsibility for colonialism, and refusal of reparations/reconciliation in white moves to innocence (Wekker, 2016; Tuck and Yang, 2012), can erase the fact that anti-Black racism is a system/structure/psyche/politics/culture of global white domination and supremacy. Can you still not answer the question who is truly racist and where is inherent racism located? Or do you merely refuse to acknowledge your white racism, your white supremacy, your responsibility for the anti-Black world which you have created and continue to create through that peculiar discourse that ‘Black people can be racist too’? This discourse is part of the contemporary 21st century white supremacist-constructed Racial Contract ‘bad faith’ of anti-Black racism to avoid the responsibility for creating a human/humane world (Gordon, 2022; 1995).
For Lewis Ricardo Gordon (2022), anti-Black racism manifests bad faith both in institutions and the individuals who create them. We are pressured to reject the racism that we see so we confuse individual racists with the system of racism that supports them. We no longer live in a world, for example like that of the 17th century, in which racists are treated as normal or rational. Instead, we live in a world of racists without racism because to aver otherwise would make us seem retrograde, clinging to an unfortunate past.
The Racial Contract refuses the rejection of the anti-Black racism that we see because to do so is to be disempowered by the structure of white domination from which anti-Blackness springs. Instead, the Contract insists that anti-Black racism is political, moral, and still here. Anti-Blackness is visible because it requires rigorously policed racial hierarchies so that those ‘intrinsically high’ or ‘endemically wretched’ remain in their racialized locations (Gordon, 2022). Mills (1997: 9) talks about this racialized hierarchy as the white worlding of the world seen in white culture/nations/economy/morality/psychology.
Both globally and within particular nations, then, white people, Europeans and their descendants, continue to benefit from the Racial Contract, which creates a world in their cultural image, political states differentially favoring their interests, an economy structured around the racial exploitation of others, and a moral psychology (not just in whites but sometimes in nonwhites also) skewed consciously and unconsciously toward privileging them, taking the status quo of differential racial entitlement as normatively legitimate, and not to be investigated further (Mills, 1997: 40).
Who is racist now?
For Indigenous, Black and People of Color, we must remember that we can also be signatories to this contract of white supremacy and domination hoping that we might get some benefit even while it is clear that we will not. We lack the essential ingredient of white skin, however that is interpreted globally and locally, in order to benefit. Our cooptation into white supremacy must end. We must continue to investigate its operationalization even when it attempts to make itself invisible – as in the anonymous email message – in institutions, virtual and other spaces.
The Racial Contract produces distinctions in the norming and racing of space at the macro-level of continents/countries, the local level of cities/neighborhoods, and the micro-level of bodies (Mills, 1997: 42-44). The ‘micro-space of the body [is] in a sense […] the foundation of all the other levels’ (Mills, 1997:51) of norming and racing which has two main dimensions – the epistemological, and the moral. ‘The Racial Contract demarcates space, reserving privileged spaces for its first class citizens [with] a “racial social geography” maintaining separation [of] physical space [whilst] white traversals of space are imprinted with domination’ (Mills, 1997: 49-52). The Racial Contract’s white/whitened world is pervasive, very visible even as it tries to become invisible in its representation of humans and sub-humans. It is made visible because ‘one could distinguish moral/legal, cognitive, and aesthetic dimensions of this racial norming [where] the white body [becomes] the somatic norm [and nonwhites are given] partial membership in the epistemic community [if] nonwhites show themselves capable of mastering white Western culture’ (Mills, 1997: 55-62). The Racial Contract constructs race itself, bringing into being ‘white people’ as a racial group, maintaining whiteness and global white supremacy by law (Harris, 1993; Mills, 1997), racial exploitation, and white domination through ‘social, political, cultural, and economic privilege based on the legacy of conquest’ (Mills, 1997: 72). Domination continues even though ‘the expropriation contract, the slave contract, the colonial contract has written itself out of formal existence [but] there is tension between continuing de facto white privilege and […] formal extension of rights’ (Mills, 1997: 72). This tension arises as the Racial Contract is rewritten ‘to create different forms of the racial polity’ which it erases from certain spaces as irrelevant for ‘European and Euro-world development’ (Mills, 1997: 72-74). ‘Membership requirements for whiteness are rewritten over time, with shifting criteria prescribed by the evolving Racial Contract’ (Mills, 1997: 80) within
[…] the racial, or white supremacist state, whose function inter alia is to safeguard the polity as a white or white dominated polity, enforcing the terms of the Racial Contract […] and, when necessary, facilitating its rewriting from one form to another […] the state established by the Racial Contract is by definition not neutral, since its purpose is to bring about conformity [through physical violence and ideological conditioning] to the terms of the Racial Contract among the subperson population […] it is an exploitation contract […] The coercive arms of the state then – the police, the penal system, the army – need to be seen as in part the enforcers of the Racial Contract (Mills, 1997: 82-83).
It is no surprise that a white supremacist sent me this race hate email because they refuse to recognize their own racism and instead accuse me of racism. Mills (2007: 28) would ask that we note the passage of ‘whiteness [from] race, then now [to] racelessness.’ This is ‘an equal status and a common history in which all have shared, where white privilege [has been] conceptually erased’. Its conceptual erasure means ‘that it cannot be perceived’. Therefore, it can be claimed now that ‘the real racists are the blacks who continue to insist on the importance of race’.
As well as this willful reinterpretation of racism, white supremacists have been ideologically conditioned to hide behind anonymity to exert psychological violence in order to silence antiracists. Sorry, it did not work. White supremacists should think about how their clinging onto the Racial Contract and its white domination politics, culture and society which never was, make them less human as they use the Racial Contract’s ‘depersonizing conceptual apparatus through which whites learn to see nonwhites and also, crucially through which nonwhites must learn to see themselves […] to accept subpersonhood’ (Mills, 1997: 87-88). Just so you know I refuse to be made into a subperson through your words. Your words cannot hurt me. The racist is you, not me. You are unable to see your own white supremacy and anti-Black racism because of your inculcation into a whiteness which you never question, challenge or want to change, because you continue to benefit.
If we think about white supremacy and domination as global, creating racial geographies as it worlds the world through superiority/inferiority, how would it be possible for me as a descendant of African enslaved people to be racist? If we read through Mills’ words, I cannot be put into a box of ‘anti-white racist’. ‘Inherent racism’ belongs to white supremacists. Being ‘truly racist’ belongs to white supremacists. Racism cannot be ascribed to me. I will not accept it. I will not become a Black woman signatory to the Racial Contract. You could be a colleague, a student sitting in my class, an administrator whom I have never met. You can continue to hide behind computers sending race hate messages trying to make me afraid through the violent cloak of anonymity and its threat, ‘I could be next to you and you wouldn’t know. I can do you harm’. I do not fear you.
Speaking fear brings us to Frank B. Wilderson III’s (2010) and André Brock’s (2020) ‘libidinal economies’, or what I have called ‘racial affective economies’ in my work (Tate, 2014b; Tate, 2012) drawing from Sara Ahmed’s (2004) affective economies. I have found in my own work thinking through the operationalization of the Racial Contract that racial affective economies are necessary in theorizing the daily micro-practices of its politics of subjugation and sub-personhood alongside domination and personhood. This is so because affects such as fear, hate, contempt and even white supremacist ‘love’ of its own projections of blackness (cf. Tate, 2020) continue to animate and texture anti-Black racism. Racial affective economies are ‘infrastructure, invisible to our perceptions just like the materials and processes we pass by or utilize everyday – until a rupture occurs’ (Brock, 2020: 10). The anonymous racist email being discussed here and its violent spreading of fear is one such rupture. Another could be being excluded by colleagues. I need not go on. I want now to move towards thinking about the place of racial affective economies in the Racial Contract. I will do that through looking at white hate of Black intellectual, pedagogical and affective labour – derided in the email as “work” – because it lays bare the traffic in white supremacist epistemologies of ignorance within university and society.
“Work”: White hate of Black bodies and theory
English is my second language, so I had to learn about scare quotes in my Jamaican primary school. Beyond direct quotations, they are interesting English language grammatical devices. When we talk, we do them with our fingers. Placed around “work”, they draw attention to it as inaccurate, casting doubt on its facticity. Thus, the intellectual, pedagogical, and affective labor that I have given and continue to give as an academic is discounted in that one scare quoted word – “work”. Scare quotes racially norm space (Mills, 1997: 40). “Work” produces a normative white corporeal, social, and knowledge geography animated by ‘racializing assemblages’ (Weheliye, 2014), ‘racial affective economies’ (Tate, 2014b; Tate, 2012), spaces of Sylvia Wynter’s (1994) ‘No Humans Involved’ (NHI), and my idea of ‘No Theory Involved’ (NTI); that is, Black academics do not produce theory.
“Work” also calls up the white supremacist idea that African enslaved people were lazy and would not work unless coerced. That their labor, brutalization, immiseration and deaths did not contribute to European and Euro-world wealth, rapid industrialization and colonial endeavors. Nor did enslavement contribute to individual European families’ transgenerational wealth. Ergo, the white supremacist individual and nation thinking, policy and practice is that no reparations are needed for enslavement as a crime against humanity irrespective of the findings of the Brattle Report (2023). Although an underestimation, Brattle quantifies harms in the Americas and the Caribbean during chattel enslavement inflicted on 19 million people over four centuries ($77-108 trillion), and continuing post-enslavement harms ($23 trillion) with a total of between $100-131 trillion owing in reparations from former enslavers and colonizers (Brattle Report, 2023).
“Work” carries a racial affective economy undergirding institutional anti-Blackness which aligns ‘some subjects with some others and against other others’ (Ahmed, 2004: 117). Those racialized as white are interpellated into whiteness as a global system of domination through “work” and its affective attachments of violent filiation, anti-Blackness, anti-antiracist aversion, and landscapes of white supremacist hate. Peter Hadreas (2016: 2-3) shows the systemic, institutionalized power of hate that enables signatories of the Racial Contract to remain superior, through generalization and either/or opposition. This makes groups of people into subhumans necessarily worthy of harm and blame. Political propaganda like ‘the culture wars’ and the opportunity hate provides for avoiding self-doubt, fear and humiliation help hate to spread (Hadreas, 2016). The structure of feeling (Wilderson, 2010; Williams, 1984; 1977) of anti-Black hate in the Western Hemisphere/globally is textured by white supremacy where blame for their hate shifts to the hated (Hadreas, 2016). This shift is in the email’s attribution of ‘truly racist’ to all antiracists and myself as a Black woman because we don’t really understand racism.
Anti-Black racism and anti-Black woman hate, or misogynoir (Bailey and Trudy, 2018; Noble and Palmer, 2022), has been honed over centuries through the colonial machine of Indigenous genocide and dispossession, white settler colonialism, enslavement and indenture. That is, through Mills’ (1997) expropriation contract, slave contract and colonial contract. Misogynoir is not individualized or a result of isolated incidents. It is institutionalized, systemic, normalized, hegemonic, racialized gender domination, and threat/fear of the possibility of violence to maintain the imperialist white supremacist hetero-patriarchal-cis-ablist-capitalist status quo (hooks, 2012; Tate, 2022).
Mills (1997) acknowledges that colonial and contemporary neoliberal capitalism are significant in racism, impacting power, place, psyche and space. Contemporary neoliberal capitalism frames how governance works and our everyday lives. Harms from hate emerge in crimes, incidents, speech and micro-aggressions based on perceptions of identity. Neoliberal capitalist space ‘galvanizes hate [impacting] people’s lives physically, socially, psychologically and interpersonally’ (James and McBride, 2022: 22). Zoë James and Katie McBride (2022: 23) continue, ‘hate behaviours are felt most within the precariat […] wherein people’s lives are defined by precarity and insecurity. It is within this space that non-white, non-heterosexual, non-cis-gender, disabled, non-Christian, poorer people have been pushed [because of] the determinist organizing principles of colonial capitalism [serving] neoliberal capitalism’s interests’.
I do not disagree with this assessment but, based on my experience of misogynoir societally and institutionally as a Black middleclass professional, I think that a racialized gender class analysis provides nuance here. That is, even as middle class, race and gender in interaction means that I am precariously located societally and institutionally because of misogynoir. At any time I can be the victim of racism solely because of the skin I live in and my “work”. Vulnerability is possible irrespective of claims to being ‘post-race’ and even after #BLM 2020 because of the ‘connections between visibility and situated vulnerability for those targeted on the basis of identities of ‘race’ and faith, sexuality, transgender and disability […] intersecting differences historically (re)produced as threatening to prevailing social orders’ (Clayton et al, 2022: 98). Those scare quotes on “work” are a response to antiracists and myself as perceived threat to white supremacy.
The hypervisibility of sub-personhood results from the interaction between bodies and racialized material spaces (Mills, 1997) and circulating racial affective economies of hate (Clayton et al, 2022). The email makes us remember anti-Black and anti-antiracist hate’s global reach virtually. Who ‘becomes subjected to [the white supremacist gaze] and how visibility is framed is both the product and basis of power relations that reinforce boundaries of value’. Thus, Black and antiracist ‘action […] is overly visible as it is excessively noted’ (Clayton et al, 2022: 99). The excessive noting of my “work” could have been from a colleague or student, or from a stranger in New Zealand or Scandinavia. As Daniel Byman (2022: 2) reminds us, transnational white supremacy ‘is widespread and deeply enmeshed in the [mainstream] politics of the United States, Europe and other parts of the world’.
Affects like anti-Black hate circulate (Brennan, 2004; Gutiérrez Rodríguez, 2010; Tate, 2014a; 2014b) between bodies and signs (Ahmed, 2004). Like the white supremacist Aryans discussed by Sara Ahmed (2004), the emailer revels in a delusion where the work of racialized others is concealed in a fantasy that it is the white subject who “built” the white Euro world. This aligns myself and all others involved in decolonizing and antiracist “work” as the hated racists. “Work”, ‘inherent racism’ and ‘you truly are the racists’ positively attaches the emailer and other white supremacists in a fantasy of white citizens being under threat and being injured from the “work”, knowledge systems and the bodies of those who are ‘truly racist’ because they cannot see the ‘inherent racism’ in their “work”. The movement between these words as signs produces a racial affective economy that erases white supremacy and is ‘social and material, as well as psychic [and …] shapes the surfaces of bodies and worlds’ (Ahmed, 2004: 120-121). It does this through affects like hate, contempt, and fear, while the name ‘racist’ ‘sticks’ (Ahmed, 2004) to the bodies of racialized others and antiracists through the adverb ‘truly’. The racial affective economy set in train through shaping, naming and sticking reminds us of Wilderson III’s (2010: 7) libidinal economy, ‘linked not only to forms of attraction, affection, and alliance, but also to aggression, destruction, and the violence of lethal consumption’. As a structure of psychic and emotional life – that is, a ‘structure of feeling’ – libidinal economy is ‘a dispensation of energies, concerns, points of attention, anxieties, pleasures, appetites, revulsions, and phobias capable of both great mobility and tenacious fixation’.
This tenacious fixation is why we must dispense with the idea that Black people can be racist too. Instead, we should recall that we are still within coloniality’s global struggle for intersectional Black life because of white supremacy’s ‘conglomerate of sociopolitical relations that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and non-humans’ (Weheliye, 2014: 5-6). As with Mills’ (1997) sub-person, the white look of racial dissection (Yancy, 2008) produces Black scholars and Black theory only as its negated psychic projection. Sylvia Wynter (1994) already spoke about this when she likened policing’s ‘no humans involved’ to the precarious positioning of Black Studies in the United States. I would add ‘no-theory-involved’ (NTI) because of the contempt/hate for Black theory and bodies in the lines of sight in “work”.
Contempt/ hate: White supremacist seeing
Contempt and hate both share comparison, generalization and the development of either/or categories. For Macalester Bell (2013), contempt is the act of despising based on assessments of persons and groups (Ngai, 2010). A personal baseline for comparison means anyone falling below that will face withdrawal or aversion (Bell, 2013). Active and passive contempt are directed towards their target (Bell, 2013). Passive contempt produces disattendability (Bell, 2013; Ngai, 2010; Tate, 2013). Active contempt responds with consistent attention and action. The email was an active response to the perceived threat of antiracists who are ‘truly racist’. Contempt and hate are not mutually exclusive (Bell, 2013) and keep the Racial Contract in place.
To my mind, Mills’ (1997: 109) work on the Racial Contract produces a socio-diagnostics (Gordon, 1997) of white supremacy. He calls this ‘a racial standpoint’ producing an ‘alternative moral and political perception of social reality’. For him, the Racial Contract ensures and enables ‘white seeing’ through establishing and normalizing whitened lines of sight. Such lines of sight silence racism, and through white supremacy’s global ‘epistemologies of ignorance’ also marginalize/erase knowledge not seen as its own (Mills, 2007). Epistemologies of ignorance are a structural and systematic lack of sight aimed at ensuring that whiteness is protected; for example, through the white supremacist culture wars against Black thought, and teaching intersectionality, racism studies, Black history and the history of enslavement in the United States and the United Kingdom. Thus, for Shannon Sullivan and Nancy Tuana (2007: 2), epistemologies of ignorance mean that antiracism in epistemological, social and political analyses must involve ‘tracing what is not known, […] 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 our knowledge practices’. As such, we should attend to the ‘processes of the production and maintenance of ignorance’.
This antiracist paying attention is necessary because for Mills (2007: 13), white supremacy’s ignorance is ‘militant, aggressive and not to be intimidated […] not at all confined to the illiterate and uneducated but propagated at the highest levels of the land, indeed presenting itself unblushingly as knowledge’. In this knowledge, Black people are always already known by whiteness as stereotype because of its ‘racialized social epistemology’ (Mills, 2007: 17; Gordon, 1997; Tate, 2020). This white ignorance is a ‘systematic misperception […] “the construction of their inner eyes, those eyes with which they look through their physical eyes upon reality” [… as the] white delusion of racial superiority insulates itself against refutation’ (Mills, 2007: 18). Mills (2007: 19) asks that we develop ‘second sight’. This means we must understand ‘what it is about whites and the white situation’ that makes them view Black people wrongly. We must understand how they see ‘through identifying white blindness and avoiding the pitfalls of putting on these spectacles for one’s own vision’. Avoiding the pitfalls of white/whitened vision is important to remember politically because ‘blacks can manifest white ignorance too’ (Mills, 2007: 22).
For Wynter (1994: 44-45), this Black manifestation of white ignorance is birthed through the disciplinary canons that inculcate white supremacist ‘inner eyes’ because of their ‘racial standpoint’. She warns that these inner eyes continue to see humanness, North Americanness and Euro-worldness as only white and middle-class. She asks that we become cognizant of our own responsibility for making those inner eyes. As Black academics we must think about the white ignorance within our consciousness (Mills, 2007: 19). We must remember that in ‘whatever discipline that is affected by race, the “testimony” of the black perspective and its distinctive conceptual and theoretical insights will tend to be whited out. Whites will cite other whites in a closed circuit of epistemic authority that reproduces white delusions’ (Mills, 2007: 33-34). These delusions maintain white lines of sight.
Mills’ work has aided my thinking on racial affective economies, where affects such as fear, contempt and hate keep the Racial Contract’s knowledge systems in place. In my article, ‘I can’t quite put my finger on it: Racism’s touch’ (2014a), I look at hate, disgust and contempt within universities and societally for Black bodies and Black generated theory. This ‘racial feeling’ (Holland, 2012: 39) circulates within the psychic lives of institutions. Affects articulate and circulate racism’s touch through what Brennan (2004) calls ‘the transmission of affect’ (Tate, 2014a). Thinking with Mills (1997; 2007), I insist that ‘negative affects emerge within the epistemology of ignorance produced by the racial contract and have affective and career consequences for racialized others’ (Tate, 2014b: 2475). The Racial Contract’s negative affects facilitate institutional and societal anti-Blackness as a rational act aimed at removing Black bodies and theory to the margins of intellectual and social life or erasing them completely (Tate, 2014a). When active erasure is impossible contempt’s disattendability occludes Black bodies and theory (Tate, 2014b; Ngai, 2005).
Mills’ Racial Contract refuses the diminishing of white supremacy, the facilitation of white innocence and its willful forgetting of anti-Black racism through the 21st century shift to ‘unconscious bias’. As I show, unconscious bias is conscious. It is linked to epistemologies of ignorance that attempt to make systemic, structural, institutional, and individual racism outside of racists’ control through the preface un (Tate and Page, 2018). Drawing from Mills (1997; 2007) again, we can say that unconscious bias is a technology of racialized governmentality to keep the status quo of whiteliness – defined by George Yancy (2015) as a social, psychological and phenomenological reality for white people – and white supremacy in place (Tate and Page, 2018). Unconscious bias recentres the coloniality of white power, legitimating whiteliness through the epistemologies of ignorance on racism where Black people can be racist too (Tate and Page, 2018). This mis-seeing and erasure of white supremacy and racism as white problems result from willful and sustained collective amnesia about Empire, colonialism, enslavement and indenture (Mills, 2007). The racist hate email is an example of white supremacist willful mis-seeing – white lines of sight – on matters of racism.
Conclusion
The discussion shows the impact of Mills’ foundational thinking in The Racial Contract on my approach to race and anti-Black racism, encompassing as it does the global/local racial norming of space, the construction of sub-persons and white supremacy during colonialism as well as its continuation during coloniality, and white epistemologies of ignorance. My analysis of racism dwelling on the email’s words, ‘inherent racism’, “work” and ‘you truly are the racists’, questioned the veracity of the claim in ‘post-race’ racism’s cultural life that Black people are racist too. This interrogation enabled a diffusion of the power of the white-induced fear produced by that anonymity aimed at destabilizing ontological security.
I engaged with illustrating the capacious and resonant quality of Mills’ work within the sub-disciplines of Racism Studies and Cultural Studies through using my own work on institutional anti-Black racism’s affects as part and parcel of the workings of the Racial Contract. Affects were excluded from his meditations on racial norming as global white supremacist enterprise, though he included moral/legal, cognitive and aesthetic dimensions. In the discussion, I centered affects like fear, hate, contempt, as an important part of the way in which anti-Blackness and misogynoir maintain white supremacy through racial norming of bodies and spaces. I also extended this norming through looking at Mills’ epistemologies of ignorance dictating what counts as knowledge and producing white supremacist inner eyes even in those racialized as Black. For me, racial affective economies are an integral dimension of the contract itself. Affect is what attaches its signatories to its promise of supremacy and privilege. Affect is the glue that binds white ignorance and white supremacy on issues of race and racism even in the face of its refutation.
What can be said about Mills’ scholarly legacy in Racism Studies, Cultural Studies and more broadly in countering white supremacist hegemony as being, knowledge, power and affect? What Mills has always made clear is the need to engage Blackened sight, Blackened thought (Gordon, 2022) and Blackened consciousness (Sharpe, 2015). We need to employ Blackened sight/thought/consciousness as a counter-hegemonic strategy that resists the denial of racism and white supremacy as global problems. We need to resist the white lines of sight being inculcated by existing Eurocentric knowledge systems. We need to speak back to anti-Black contempt and hate and see that racial affective economies continue to texture all our lives. We need to move against the erasure of colonialism as something in the distant past which no longer matters and coloniality as non-existent, because they are only the construction of antiracist and decolonial scholars. We need to resist white induced fear because that creates Black signatories to the Racial Contract. This is what The Racial Contract shows us. This will be part of Mills’ lasting legacy to Racism Studies and Cultural Studies theorizing of/on race, anti-Black racism and white supremacist hegemony as being, knowledge, power and affect.
Rest in power, Charles. Respec!
References
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Shirley Anne Tate is Professor and Canada Research Chair Tier 1 in Feminism and Intersectionality, Sociology Department, University of Alberta and Honorary Professor, CriSHET, Nelson Mandela University, South Africa.
Email: shirleya@ualberta.ca
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