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Dawes, S., & Saha, A. (2025). Charles W. Mills and Media Theory. Media Theory, 9(2), 201–208. https://doi.org/10.70064/mt.v9i2.1278

Charles W. Mills and Media Theory

SIMON DAWES
Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ) – Paris Saclay, FRANCE

ANAMIK SAHA
University of Leeds, UK

Abstract

This short article introduces the special section, ‘Charles W. Mills and Media Theory’. It considers the contribution that Mills’ thought – on the relations between race and class, on the significance of race, whiteness and ignorance for understanding liberalism, and on the potential of liberalism to be made more radical, redistributive and egalitarian – for work on media and communication.

Keywords

Charles W. Mills, ignorance, liberalism, Marxism, media, race, white supremacy

While there has been a long-standing tradition of research into race within media and communication studies, particularly in the Anglophone world, it has become more prominent in recent times. For some time, there has also been a preoccupation with exploring the links between media and neo/liberalism (see Phelan & Dawes, 2018), and increasingly with racial neoliberalism (Bhattacharyya, 2020; Goldberg, 2009; Shilliam, 2020) and neoliberal diversity policies (Saha, 2018). For those steeped in the British Cultural Studies tradition (Carrington, 2010; Saha, 2018; 2021; Titley, 2019), the work of Stuart Hall (Gilroy and Gilmore, 2021), Paul Gilroy (2001), bell hooks (1989) and Richard Dyer (1999) remains the most generative source, particularly for its understanding of the making and circulation of race, and intersecting dynamics of gender and sexuality in popular culture, recognised as a key terrain in the struggle over hegemony. In the US, recent works (Benjamin, 2019; Brock, 2020; Noble, 2018; Towns, 2022) draw mainly on influences across social and cultural theory that have tackled race and racism specifically in the context of American slavery and its legacy (du Bois, 1903; Mills, 1997; Harney and Moten, 2013; Robinson, 2021).

Charles Wade Mills (1951-2021) was significant for foregrounding race, racism and white supremacy as prisms through which to confront the histories and theories of Ancient Greek philosophy, Marxism, liberalism and the Enlightenment, as well as the biases and blindspots of his own discipline. Mills was born in the UK and raised in Jamaica, an undergraduate student there and a postgraduate student in Canada before pursuing an academic career primarily in the field of political philosophy in the US (where he later gained citizenship and went on to describe himself as Caribbean-American). Although often presented as having moved from an earlier focus on Marxism, historical materialism and class (his PhD thesis had been on the concept of ideology in Marx and Engels) towards more of a concern with race and intersectionality, as well as Black radicalism and racial liberalism, and thus a shift from ‘red to black’ and away from the left, his entire oeuvre can be seen as concerned with opposing the non-recognition of persons. Indeed, his theoretical roots were deeply embedded within the Marxist tradition (Truss, this issue), while race and class (as well as other aspects of identity and power) are entangled throughout his work – particularly in Contract and Domination (2007), in which he explored with Carole Pateman the intersections of race, gender and power – although the focus clearly shifts from class to race in his work as he focuses more on ‘adding colour to whitewashed liberalism’ (Sullivan, 2017).

In his first book, The Racial Contract (1997), he followed the lead of Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988), as well as of feminist critics of liberalism more generally, in demonstrating how the exclusion of certain groups (people of colour as well as women) was, rather than being something that liberalism should be praised for having gradually overcome, actually a constitutive part of liberalism’s social contract (see also Losurdo, 2011). And rather than the selective distribution of freedoms and rights being a contradiction of liberalism, or rather than highlighting the gap between the reality of liberalism in practice and the noble intentions of liberal theory, he showed how liberal democracy and Western political thought were instead designed to exclude such groups. In From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (2003), Mills argued that not only did liberalism ignore the history of racial inequality while espousing universalist values; it was actively complicit in masking such forms of inequality.

In terms of race and white supremacism, for Mills these were similar to patriarchy in the sense that they explained structural inequalities and referred to the transfer of wealth and opportunities from people of colour to whites, as well as how whiteness acts as an unspoken prerequisite for full personhood; processes which were sometimes manifested as personal prejudice or extreme forms of violence, such as the Ku Klux Klan, but which were not reducible to individual acts or illiberal politics. Underlying centuries of colonization, genocide, slavery and indenture, this involved expropriation, enslavement and colonial contracts that codified inferiority on the bodies of those racialized as non-white (Tate, this issue); a history that is as ignored by most accounts of the development of Western modernity as it is still influential on the world today.

Criticising the whiteness of his discipline and the uncoincidental neglect of issues of race in American political philosophy, he also developed throughout his writing (see, for example, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, 2017), the concept of the epistemology of ignorance to account for the ways in which white people learn not to see the racism inherent in their own privilege and the situatedness of their own perspective. Indeed, for Mills, white supremacy is just as much a political system and just as constitutive of the modern world as aristocracy, socialism and libertarianism. However, as an explanation for the “domination by which white people have historically ruled over and, in certain important ways, continue to rule over nonwhite people [it] is not seen as a political system at all’ (Mills, 2007[1997]: 1-2), with students being unlikely to ever encounter a course or even a text on the concept.

In the context of the contemporary resurgence of far-right nationalism, white supremacy, populist reactionary politics and anti-Enlightenment thought, whereby the protections of liberal rights and freedoms (albeit not as universal as claimed) can no longer be taken for granted (Mills, 2018), Mills sought ways for liberalism to be reclaimed and reformed in more radical, redistributive and egalitarian ways. In part this involved recognising that society is “fundamentally rooted in white supremacy rather than as a basically fair system with some relatively minor cases of disadvantage that still need to be addressed” (LeBron, 2018), and turning attention away from the (“white”) Enlightenment to multiple Enlightenments; the Black Enlightenment among them. Mills argued that the global experience over centuries of racial subordination, whereby blacks were denied the status of full human equals to whites, generated a form of ‘black light’ (similar to W.E.B. du Bois’s concept of ‘second sight’) that gave black people a metaperspective which enabled them to see through white cognition as well as the contradictions of supposedly inclusive liberalism (Mills, 2018). This entailed a process of simultaneously making visible the subjects (i.e. black people) made invisible by liberalism, and returning the gaze upon White Enlightenment thought itself to reveal the racial particularism and self-blinding vision of its claims to universalism and illumination (Mills, 2018). In Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (1998), for instance, he demonstrated how liberalism erased the political history and experiences of black people throughout both colonial and postcolonial periods. In setting out his view of what a reformed liberal theory could look like, he proposed the concept of ‘black radical liberalism’, an “attempt to thread the needle between a mainstream (white) liberalism, its radical (white) critics, and the Black perspective they had both neglected” (Slack, 2022), albeit at the expense of abandoning an alternative approach along the lines of Black Marxism (see Robinson, 2021).

In Surya Parekh’s contribution to this section, however, he challenges Mills’ own (widely accepted) account of this burgeoning preference for liberalism over Marxism, and critiques Mills’ tendency to dismiss too easily white Marxism and a problematically reductive view of class. Similarly, Linsey McGoey (in this section) criticizes the effectiveness of Mills’ account of white ignorance, the unqualified application of which, she argues, risks undermining the cross-racial, cross-class emancipatory movements that Mills advocated for. Particularly so at a time when the far-right is exploiting the idea of the “left behind” white working class while liberal media seek to explain white violence against asylum seekers as “legitimate concerns” in majority-white countries, and when in other countries non-white dominator privilege, such as Hindu nationalism in India, is also on the rise.

At the same time, Mills’ consideration of how whiteness works to erase (and make impossible to perceive) white privilege remains helpful for understanding contemporary political debates about the extent to which “anti-white racism” is the real racism today, as well as for understanding the historical role of the “black face of white supremacy” (Kehinde Andrews in Sudan, 2023), and how non-white politicians in majoritarian-white countries can get away with passing laws that would be more widely criticised as racist if passed by white people. For scholars such as Shirley Tate (this issue), Mills’ work remains useful for thinking through how ‘racial affective economies’ (Tate, 2012; 2014; see also Brock, 2020) work to operationalise the racial contract through everyday such micro-practices as well as more macro relations of domination and hegemonic power structures.

While much research into media and communications continues to be conducted from a cishet, white, masculine normative perspective (Chakravartty et. al, 2018; Ng et al, 2020), nuanced theorisations of the social construction of race, how people are racialised into classes of persons and subpersons, and the historical as well as contemporary significance of white supremacy, are essential for developing alternative visions of media practice, design and use (Brock, this issue). A self-reflexive look at how we as researchers approach our objects of study, adopting a critical perspective that aims to avoid the feigned “neutrality” that merely adopts the standpoints of those in power and assumes their benevolence (Truss, this issue), is also paramount. At a time when critical race theory and associated research is under attack around the world, this becomes increasingly difficult and all the more important.

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Simon Dawes is Maître de conférences (Senior Lecturer) at Université de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines (UVSQ) – Paris Saclay, France. He is the author of British Broadcasting and the Public-Private Dichotomy: Neoliberalism, Citizenship and the Public Sphere (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and Critiquing British Culture: Contextualising the Culture Wars (Intellect, forthcoming), as well as co-editor (with Marc Lenormand) of Neoliberalism in Context: Governance, Subjectivity and Knowledge (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019) and (with Annette Hill and Joke Hermes) of Media Imaginaries (Intellect, forthcoming). He is also the founding editor of Media Theory and the editor-in-chief of French Cultural Studies, and currently writing a book on free speech polemics, Media Freedom Events (Intellect, forthcoming).

Personal website: https://smdawes.wordpress.com/
Email: simondawes0@gmail.com

Anamik Saha is Professor of Race and Media at the University of Leeds. His research explores race, media and cultural production, focusing on how racialised people experience and contest racism in the cultural industries. He is author of Race and the Cultural Industries (2018), The Anti-Racist Media Manifesto (with Francesca Sobande and Gavan Titley, 2024) and Race, Culture and Media (second edition, 2025). He also edits European Journal of Cultural Studies.

Email: A.Saha@leeds.ac.uk

Conflicts of interest
None declared

Funding
None declared

Article history
Article submitted: 15/12/2025
Date of original decision: 15/12/2025
Revised article submitted: 15/12/2025
Article accepted: 15/12/2025