Book Review: Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, by Charles W. Mills

• DOI: 10.1177/0090591717750345
• Published date: 01 October 2018
• Date: 01 October 2018
• Author: Ainsley LeSure
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Political Theory

2018, Vol. 46(5) 801 –829

© The Author(s) 2017

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

journals.sagepub.com/home/ptx

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism, by Charles W. Mills.

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.

Reviewed by: Ainsley LeSure, Politics, Occidental College, Los Angeles, CA, USA

DOI: 10.1177/0090591717750345

Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism is a select col-

lection of Charles W. Mills’s work that specifies and extends many of the

claims he introduced in his immensely influential book, The Racial Contract

(1997). In fact, chapter ten, “The Whiteness of Political Philosophy,” grap-

ples with the irony that even though the book was widely read and well

received, it did not have the impact one might expect on how political phi-

losophers theorize racial justice. Mills takes the reception of his book within

philosophy, as well as mainstream characterizations of actual liberal society

as essentially egalitarian and liberal-democratic, as indicative of the exten-

sive obstacles that must be overcome to realize racial justice. In Black Rights/

White Wrongs, Mills specifically addresses the prospect of racial justice

within the liberal tradition. Though he acknowledges that racial justice need

not be realized through the liberal tradition, he affirms that it can. Distancing

himself from other critics who would forsake the liberal project altogether

(xvi), Mills suggests that liberalism fails to realize its promise because a

hegemonic version of it—which he calls racial liberalism—has not been suf-

ficiently deracialized (xiv–xv).

Deracializing liberalism, for Mills, requires acknowledging the full impact

white domination has had on the making of the modern world; that is, theoriz-

ing racial justice vis-à-vis non-ideal theory. Yet, mainstream political philoso-

phy, working within the tradition of social contract liberalism that John Rawls’s

work revived, strictly adheres to ideal theory—“the reconstruction of what a

perfectly just society would look like” (140)—and in so doing, fails to recog-

nize the impact of white domination. Specifically, the problem with liberalism

in its Rawlsian incarnation is that it represents the ideals of liberalism as if they

have actually been implemented in reality. Mills explains, “Despite the long

history of racial subordination of nonwhites (Native Americans expropriation,

black slavery and Jim Crow, Mexican annexation, Chinese exclusion, Japanese

750345PTXXXX10.1177/0090591717750345Political TheoryBook Reviews

book-review2017