Charles Mills:Race and/as Conspiracy

AZSANEÉ TRUSS

University of Pennsylvania, USA

Abstract

Political philosopher Charles W. Mills provided us with nuanced, integral conceptions of the foundational role of race and racialization in structuring our political realities. His work was fundamentally concerned with personhood and how hegemonic power structures facilitate the denial of full personhood on the basis of race. Mills’ theorization of race and racial subjugation has implications for a wide variety of fields, including media studies. This paper specifically reflects of how his work might help us understand the social construction of race as a conspiracy, providing media scholars with a necessary perspective that allows us to more thoroughly and accurately understand the media-based information practices and behaviors of Black Americans, among other marginalized groups.

Keywords

conspiracy, race, racial contract 

In 2021, we lost a prolific and luminous scholar of race and liberalism. Charles W. Mills, who was still writing books at the time of his passing, died at the young age of 70 on September 20, 2021. Mills was a London-born, Jamaican-raised, Caribbean American political philosopher whose perhaps biggest theoretical contribution was an invaluable reframe of our global political system(s), articulating how the realities of who has been and continues to be afforded rights by these political systems remains predicated upon white supremacist configurations of personhood. In his later works, he also challenged conventional understandings of key Marxist claims to further assert the centrality of race to the making of the modern world, applied his conceptions of race and radical theory to the Caribbean context to (re)trace his own intellectual lineage, and engaged in fervent critique of liberalism. Charles Mills was a trailblazer whose work reshaped the canon across academic fields. Within communication studies, Mills’ work helps us disrupt normative frameworks used to study conspiracy theorizing, particularly among Black Americans.

Mills’ intellectual lineage

There are debates as to whether Mills’ work officially exists within the political/theoretical tradition of Black Marxism, Black radicalism, or racial liberalism (or some combination of these schools of thought, as they are not necessarily discreet). However, Mills completed his doctorate in Marxism at the University of Toronto. Drawn to this philosophy as it spoke to his burgeoning political radicalism and his campus and community activism related to various progressive groups and Caribbean solidarity movements, Mills saw a degree in Marxism as a way to contribute to the political struggle in Jamaica. Yet he was initially hesitant to theorize race — and particularly blackness — in his work. While race is largely binary in the U.S. context, Mills’ identity as a “red man,” or a member of the “brown petty bourgeoisie and professional class” (Mills, 2010: 2), in the Jamaican context complicated his relationship to blackness. In the introduction to Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality. Race, Class and Social Domination, Mills writes:

[t]here are many ironies in my life, but certainly one of the biggest is that I should have ended up as a widely read “radical” black author on race when at home I would have been a privileged red man, and at [Jamaica College high school] a teacher’s pet who, had a class poll been taken, would surely have been voted high on the list of those least likely to rock the socio-political boat (Mills, 2010: 15).

Understanding his relative privilege at home, his early articles did not reflect what his work would become.

Mills’ turn toward race came amidst his “own blackening personal experience” brought about by controversy surrounding his hiring at the University of Illinois Chicago and the global decline of the socialist ideal, among other changes happening throughout the world (Mills, 2010: 2). Further, it was during this period that critical race theory was emerging as a framework. With all of this at the fore, Mills became interested in understanding how social and political philosophy had developed in such a way that neglected the theorization of race, particularly in a country where racism was such a fundamental part of its history (Mills, 2010).

As it developed further, Mills’ work became fundamentally concerned with personhood and opposing the denial of this status on the basis of race. Much in the intellectual lineage of Caribbean scholars such as Sylvia Wynter, C.L.R. James, and Aimé Césaire, his theorization of (sub)personhood traversed familiar philosophical terrain in new and inventive ways. His work pioneered new applications of traditional philosophical theories, simultaneously speaking to political philosophy and “postcolonial” — or perhaps more appropriately termed, decolonial — studies. The Racial Contract (1997), the book for which Mills is best known, was a critique and reapplication of the social contract, upending its assumed racial neutrality. In hindsight, Mills describes this work as taking the “Marxist way of approaching class and appl[ying] it to race” (Marx, 2010: 22, emphasis original), ultimately resulting in theory that can also be seen as existing within the realms of Black radicalism and racial liberalism —and likely postcolonial thought as well.

Mills’ later works were more explicitly focused on Black radicalism, particularly From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (2003), and racial liberalism, particularly Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (2017), while still drawing on this Marxist way of approaching race. Perhaps it is safest to posit that though no one group can claim Mills wholesale, his theoretical roots were deeply embedded within the Marxist tradition, which remained central to his scholarship and his academic career.

Mills and communication

Though he was primarily a political philosopher, Mills’ work has had a profound effect on the field of communication — particularly those of us who situate ourselves within critical cultural communication studies. As with any “critical” field of study, critical cultural communication seeks to understand communication and its relationship to systems of power such as race, particularly its ability to reinforce or undermine these. In a field where cishet, white masculinity remains the normative perspective from which scholars should conduct their research (Chakravartty et. al, 2018), reinscribing nuanced understandings of race is essential. Mills’ work, in particular, was pioneering, integrally disruptive, and has been foundational to how I conceptualize race within the context of communication, even if not initially intended to make a direct intervention in this theoretical space. His scholarship enables us to look at communication from a more critical and realistic perspective as it relates to race, making space for us to analyze the relationship between the two from a clearer and more nuanced vantage point, thus paving the way for new interventions in the field.

I personally came to the work of Charles Mills during the second year of my doctoral studies in a communication course titled “Racist in the Machine” taught by Professor John L. Jackson Jr. The course was focused on the potential relationship between race and conspiracy theories, exploring questions such as “(i) what kinds of dualisms organize racialist logics, (ii) whether conspiracy theories might be said to pivot on racialized understandings of difference and power, (iii) how people ground assertions of racial authority/authenticity, and (iv) the ways in which these inter-related themes are impacted by our decidedly new/social media moment” (Jackson, 2021). We reflected on the parallels and potential dependencies between the logics of race and those of conspiracy theories, considering how racialist logics might be foundational to conspiracy theorizing. Early in the semester, we read The Racial Contract (1997) to help us frame these conversations.

About halfway through the course, I began to consider a different angle from which to view the provocations Professor Jackson had set out for us at the opening of the semester — one which later became the foundations of my ongoing dissertation research. Mills’ elucidation of the manufacturing of race and its inextricable relationship with capitalist acquisition had colored my worldview in such a way that I could not help but to constantly consider how the primary purpose of racializing peoples was (and still is) to justify their subjugation and, of course, how this relates to conspiracy theorizing. While white supremacists frequently manufacture a sort of racialized oppression against white people in order to rationalize their conspiracy theories, Black folks are most often developing conspiracy theories about the very real, white supremacist, systemic oppression enacted against them.

As we discussed the fanaticism of many white supremacist conspiracy theorists (having just come off the heels of the January 6^th insurrection), I began to reflect on how this was vastly different from how a nuanced public discourse took place during that same time, positing Black folks were right in their belief in anti-vax conspiracy theories and thereby their hesitancy to get the then newly developed COVID-19 vaccine. Folks discussed how this was a result of our reasonable collective distrust in the American medical system, often referencing the Tuskegee syphilis experiment as a well-known instance of medical experimentation on Black bodies. Even more so, I thought about how I would characterize the ways in which the (mostly logical) Black folks in my life develop and propagate conspiracy theories, and how their theories often drew on critical understandings of the U.S.’s history of anti-Blackness. Reflecting on Mills’ reframing of the social contract as a Racial Contract, whereas he reveals how racial categorization and the designation of subpersonhood along racial lines has facilitated all manner of injustices, I began to consider, what if the social construction of race is, in and of itself, a conspiracy?

Race and/as conspiracy

In order to properly expatiate on this idea, it is important to first differentiate between conspiracy and conspiracy theory. A conspiracy, by definition, is a secret plot to do something harmful to exploit, marginalize, or otherwise oppress another person or persons. This term is most often discussed in its grandest sense, whereas the conspiratorial actors are governmental/state entities, corporations, or other institutions executing these plots in the pursuit of power. A conspiracy theory, building upon this definition, is a hypothesis or conjecture intended to uncover and expose such secret plots. This differentiation between conspiracies and conspiracy theories is important because real conspiracies have existed and, one can assume, continue to exist in secret today. As with any theory, conspiracy theories may or may not turn out to be true.  Even further, the extent to which theories are grounded in reality varies greatly, which can also be said for conspiracy theories.

By outlining a global Racial Contract, Mills (1997) illuminates a system of categorization which justifies and results in the colonization, exploitation, oppression, abuse, etc. of the subpersons it has created; “this state treats whites and nonwhites, persons and subpersons, differently, though in later variants of the Racial Contract it is necessary to conceal this difference” (83). He describes racialization as a way to create two distinct classes of (white) persons with full rights and privileges, and (non-white) subpersons who can then be exploited based on their less-than-human status. Bearing in mind the definition of a conspiracy, Mills’ description of a global racial contract can easily be understood as such, if not as a sort of conspiratorial framework which lays the foundation for the enactment of oppressive conspiracies against nonwhite folks framed as justifiable, if not necessary evils.

Further, in explicating the global Racial Contract, Mills provides us with a brief history of how race was socially constructed. Through this history, it becomes clear that its primary purpose was European subjugation of the “other.” According to Mills, the Racial Contract began forming when (Christian) Europeans began traveling to other parts of the world and finding people who looked different from them, spoke differently, lived differently, and had different religious/spiritual practices (heathens). The initial framework “was a theological one, with normative inclusion and exclusion manifesting itself as the demarcation between Christians and heathens” (1997: 21). Such religious differences, Europeans believed, called for violent “holy” crusades to convert these “heathens” to Christianity, and to a “civil” (read: European, later “Western”) way of life. When these indigenous peoples — whether they be indigenous Africans or (North, Central, or South) Americans— rejected a European religion and overall way of life, “a Eurocentrically normed conception of rationality made it coextensive with acceptance of the Christian message, so that rejection was proof of bestial irrationality” (Mills, 1997: 22). In practice, the mistreatment of these “bestial” sub-persons was then justified in the eyes of Europeans.

With the rise of secularism, Mills describes how the Christian/heathen dichotomy was strategically translated into other forms. Race “gradually became the formal marker of this differentiated status, replacing the religious divide (whose disadvantage, after all, was that it could always be overcome through conversion)” (Mills, 1997: 23). As such, nonwhite races came to be known as not-fully-human barbarians and savages, while whiteness demarcated full humanity.

From the beginning, this racialization was used to justify all manner of atrocities. With this Racial Contract as the foundation, two periods of violent European imperialism were constructed: “the colonization of the Americas, [from] 1492 to the 1830s,” including the transatlantic slave trade which also subjugated millions of Africans, “and the occupation of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific, [from the] 1730s to the period after World War II.” Since that time, whiteness — backed by imperial wealth, stolen land, and violently acquired power — has remained a marker of full personhood, while non-white people remain subjugated via more complex systems of oppression and exploitation; “the Racial Contract creates Europe as the continent that dominates the world; locally, within Europe and the other continents, it designates Europeans as the privileged race” (Mills, 1997: 33).

While Mills (1997) primarily explains the Racial Contract in terms of persons and sub-persons (Europeans and non-Europeans), he also discusses the construction of blackness as a co-constitutive and opposing frame against which whiteness exists: “Where slavery was practiced, as in the United States and the Americas, so that a sustained relation between races obtained, whiteness and blackness evolved in a forced intimacy of loath­ing in which they determined each other by negation and self-recognition in part through the eyes of the other” (Mills, 1997: 58). As such, blackness exists primarily as a Western construct (one which has since been exported globally), where one became black only after contact with/in relation to whiteness and the “white” people who embodied it. Mills incisively posits that “[i]n effect, materially, whites and blacks constitute two nations, the white nation being constituted by the American Racial Contract in a relationship of structured racial exploitation with the black (and, of course, historically also the red) nation” (1997: 38).

As slippery as “white” and “black” are as racial identifiers, the function(s) of whiteness and blackness in terms of power are quite clear. Whiteness is ontologically associated with all things innately moral, just, and good; to claim whiteness, or even a spectral proximity to whiteness, is to claim to embody the highest way of being — the norm and standard against which all lower ways of being exist (Morrison, 1992). To exist as white is to exist in a state of social and political righteousness that translates into a legitimate claim to anything seen as desirable or important, even if those things, places, spaces, beings, etc. do not necessarily belong to you, or if the means by which they might be acquired require the oppression of “others”. Blackness, conversely, is ontologically associated with all things bad, wrong, and immoral; blackness marks the lowest way of being, a way of being against which whiteness can assert its superiority and righteousness (Mills, 1997). To be black, or even black-adjacent, is to be cast as inherently lesser without any legitimate proof.

Put differently (and perhaps more plainly) racialized Blackness —particularly in the U.S.— was constructed solely for the purposes of categorization, then subjugation and exploitation justified by said categorization. As critical race theory has taught us, and as Mills points out, the subordinate status of non-white people has even been (and arguably continues to be) enshrined in law via slave codes, colonial native acts, Jim Crow laws, the U.S. constitution, and so on (Mill, 1997: 26). Within this broader conspiratorial framework of subjection, one can observe specific instances of racialized oppression and exploitation that can be understood as actual conspiracies. With this in mind, one can then begin to view the theorization of real anti-Black conspiracies as a completely logical practice. While the theories developed may not always be correct (though at times, they have been), Black Americans are often theorizing potential, and at times observable, enactments of anti-Black racism in our daily lives. These practices are rooted in a deep historical and embodied knowledge of centuries-long history of material oppression manifest as actual anti-Black conspiracies against Black people.

One interesting example of conspiracy/theory that can help us to differentiate the two, yet elucidates the validity of theorizing such nefarious plots, is the CIA-Contra-Crack Cocaine Controversy (U.S. Office of Inspector General Investigations Staff, 1998). In the 1980s and 1990s, many Black Americans circulated and believed in conspiracy theories that the U.S. government (or some governmental agency) was planting crack cocaine in their neighborhoods. Some hypothesized that this was an attempt to destroy the Black family, others saw this as a means of distracting and deradicalizing Black folks, some said it was for profit, and many theorized that this was a way to encourage crime in Black neighborhoods and the overincarceration of Black people. In hindsight, it is now known that the CIA did, in fact, profit from the trafficking of crack cocaine into Black neighborhoods; what was once conspiracy theory was later proven to be a real conspiracy. While concrete proof of other theorized motivations has yet to be seen, this specific instance of Black people theorizing what turned out to be a real conspiracy, based primarily on their lived realities and critical understandings of U.S. history, reflects the types of logic that are often inherent in Black folks’ conspiracy theorizing practices.

Reconfiguring and concealing the conspiracy

Following my reading of The Racial Contract, I turned to Mills’ Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (2017) to understand how ongoing white ignorance attempts to deny the existence of race as a conspiratorial framework. As he sets out to conduct an honest appraisal of liberalism and its largely unfulfilled promises, Mills promptly points out that if you “add together what [Italian philosopher Domenico Losurdo] calls the various ‘exclusion clauses’ of liberalism’s most celebrated manifestos, treatises, and declarations of human rights, you get a litany of oppressions rather than a list of emancipations” (Mills, 2017: xii). In facing the realities of conditional inclusion in liberalism’s promises of various rights and freedoms, we dispel the myth of liberalism as a political/societal ideal, as a bastion of equality. Referring back to The Racial Contract, Mills (1997) invokes philosopher Lucius Outlaw to remind us that “European liberalism restricts ‘egalitarianism to equality among equals’, and blacks and others are ontologically excluded by race from the promise of ‘the liberal project of modernity’” (56). Racial liberalism then, as theorized by Mills, is a more critical view of liberalism which acknowledges and elucidates the ways in which race and racism have historically penetrated normative liberalism, thus producing a consistent, though ever-transforming, racialized ideology. Although he encourages a temperate, principled rejection of liberalism that does not entirely throw the theoretical liberatory potential of this philosophy away, many of its fundamental claims — focused on liberty, the rights of the individual, consent of the governed, political equality, etc. — have simply never been realized for oppressed groups. In fact, the realization of these promises for some has most often meant the explicit absence of freedoms for others, and the insistent ignorance of this fact is, in part, what allows this absence to persist.

As I have posited that conspiracy theorizing among Black folks often draws on critical (more honest) histories which are often ignored by the dominant (white, wealthy, cishet, male) public, Mills points out that the only way to present liberalism as a triumph is via the systemic erasure of the histories of women, people of color, and the working class (2017: xiii); the reality of racial oppression as fundamental to the development of the “modern” world “has to be retroactively edited out of national (and Western) memory because of its contradiction of the overarching contract myth that the impartial state was consensually created by reciprocally respecting rights-bearing persons” (Mills, 2017: 39-40). This erasure facilitates the ongoing gaslighting of oppressed peoples, whereas those in power assert that the injustices which they (conspiracy) theorize as potentially taking place could not possibly exist, as they never did in the first place. Contributing to the blanket framing of conspiracy theorizing as mere delusion, even as Black folks attempt to uncover the sometimes-real anti-Black conspiracies underway, this sort of historical amnesia is a self-sustaining mechanism for racialized oppression. As such, it becomes necessary to recover the past, not only factually, but conceptually and theoretically as well (Mills, 2017: 39).

Further, Black Rights, White Wrongs reflects on the role of colorblind racism in maintaining the liberal status quo. Mills’ discussion of white ignorance, a “structural group-based miscognition” which takes the white male standpoint as a given (Mills, 2017: 49), makes plain the role that a colorblind racism plays in maintaining the status quo of racial liberalism. Though ignorance is perhaps too generous a term, as colorblind racism is a strategic measure which positions non-white (and particularly Black) people as equal to white people thus “negat[ing] the need for measures to repair the inequities of the past” (Mills, 2017: 63), “colorblind” white folks are able to position themselves as aligned with the principles of liberalism via the performance of egalitarianism. Such unwillingness to admit to the existence of racial bias, let alone to the idea that a systemic ideology of white supremacy structures our day-to-day realities in the West and particularly in the U.S., transmogrifies the historical erasure of racial injustice into an ongoing, constant expunging of the collective record, absolving dominant society of its responsibility to repair or cease any ongoing instances of systemic racialized oppression. And of course, this feigned innocence further pushes Black folks to question what secret plots exist just under the veneer of liberal colorblindness (see also: John Jackson’s (2008) Racial Paranoia). 

Future directions

In a field that is increasingly concerned with mis/disinformation, what media people consume to (in)form their beliefs, and how we go about changing people’s beliefs, it is integral to consider how culture informs these practices. Conspiracy theorizing is currently a key area of study in these areas, particularly focused on its deleterious effects on democracy. While this focus is understandable given the apparent link between conspiracy beliefs among bigots and the rise of fascism within the U.S. and abroad, centering white (supremacist) political subjects within the study of conspiracy theorizing mistakenly homogenizes these practices. An understanding of race as a conspiracy provides us, as media scholars, with a necessary perspective that allows us to more thoroughly and accurately understand the media-based information practices and behaviors —and meaning-making practices more broadly— of Black Americans, among other marginalized groups.

As fascism remains on the rise in the U.S. and globally, bringing with it policies banning critical race theory in schools, the stripping of abortion rights, blatant political and interpersonal attacks on trans people and their humanity, and efforts at systemically disenfranchising non-white voters, and so on, conspiracy theories continue to run rampant among both fascists and those who are persecuted by this fascism. While mainstream news outlets and many academics continue to center the far right, Mills’ work provides us with the critical history needed to allow us to take a critical look at conspiracy theorizing among Black Americans across the political spectrum. Much in the way that academics theorize various phenomena in efforts to explain aspects of our realities, conspiracy theories often function much in the same way; this vernacular form of theorizing attempts to make sense of some facet of the theorizer’s lived reality (Waters, 1997). Real conspiracies have, and presumably continue to, take place. Theorizing what conspiratorial plots might currently be underway, particularly when one is a part of a group who has historically been the target of such oppressive and exploitative schemes, is only logical.

Much in the way that Charles Mills was inspired by Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988), whereas she reframes the social contract theory of civil society as one which is fundamentally dependent upon the subjugation of people based on their gender, I aim to consider what might be revealed by a collective reframing of other systems of oppression — cis-heteronormativity, patriarchy, white supremacy, Christian hegemony, etc.— as the foundations of ongoing conspiracies. While my current work focuses on conspiracy theorizing among Black Americans, I anticipate that broadening this perspective to understand these practices among other oppressed groups will also prove theoretically productive. Instead of investigating these practices in a vacuum of feigned “neutrality”, which adopts the standpoints of those in power and assumes their benevolence, Mills has inspired me to ground myself in a critical understanding of the origins of race as a concept, leading me to consider the often-conspiratorial realities of marginalized peoples to conceptualize their conspiracy theorizing more honestly.

References

Chakravartty, P., R. Kuo, V. Grubbs, and C. McIlwain (2018) ‘#CommunicationSoWhite’, Journal of Communication, 68(2): 254-266. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy003

Jackson Jr, J.L. (2008) Racial Paranoia: The Unintended Consequences of Political Correctness. New York: Civitas Press, 2008. 

Jackson Jr, J.L. (2021) Syllabus for Racist in the Machine. Fall 2021, University of Pennsylvania.

Mills, C.W. (1997) The Racial Contract. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press.

Mills, C.W. (2010) Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality: Race, Class and Social Domination. Mona, Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West Indies Press.

Mills, C.W. (2017) Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Morrison, T. (1992) Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Harvard: University Press.

Waters, A.M. (1997) ‘Conspiracy theories as ethnosociologies: Explanation and intention in African American political culture’, Journal of Black Studies, 28(1): 112-125.

Azsaneé Truss is a thinking artist and Ph.D. Candidate in Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, researching the role of multimodal forms in subversive and liberatory knowledge production processes. 

Email: azsanee.truss@asc.upenn.edu