The Counterpublic Papers vol. 7 no. 4

October 04, 2021

White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory, or even advanced, texts in political theory. A standard undergraduate philosophy course will start off with plato and Aristotle, perhaps say something about Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli, move on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Marx, and then wind up with Rawls and Nozick. It will introduce you to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism, representative government, socialism, welfare capitalism, and libertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political thought and runs the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years. And this omission is not accidental. (Mills, 1997, p.1)

I took my first political science course 34 years ago this semester with Arlene Saxonhouse, one of the most prominent political theorists of her generation. I’m pretty sure if I looked hard enough at my parents house I can find my notebook—my mom keeps those things. I didn’t deal with Rawls until grad school (when I took either Saxonhouse or Don Herzog’s grad seminar), but we wrestled with all of the other texts. Although a number of the theorists we wrestled with either explicitly or implicitly dealt with slavery and land dispossession, we never talked about any of these issues in class explicitly. Chales Mills (who passed away two weeks ago) was the first political philosopher of my era to tackle this absence explicitly.

As Mills notes—the above passage is the first paragraph of The Racial Contract, this was not accidental. Nor was it incidental to the field’s creation. Indeed the literal erasure of white supremacy—was essential.

Mills was most decidedly not “our black Socrates” as my colleague Chris LeBron noted in 2018. (Some years ago sports journalist Ralph Wiley—who also died way too soon—responded to the question “Who was the Tolstoy of the Zulus?” by answering “Tolstoy was the Tolstoy of the Zulus.”) But he was our Charles Mills.

I think this piece (and Michael Dawson’s interview) neatly situates Mills in a larger history. It also does something that people who know Mills understand but something readers who don’t know him might not. It notes how warm and open Mills was. He was as open (and wryly hilarious) as he was brilliant.

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The Atlantic’s Emma Green interviewed Ryan Williams, the head of the Claremont Institute last week. The Claremont Institute is one of broader set of “conservative” foundations responsible for the ideas produced by the Trump tendency, including the most recent idea that he in fact won the election (and should've seized the state on January 6). I place the “conservative” in quotes to drive home the idea that this is what they call themselves as opposed to what they are.

During the interview, Green asks a question about pluralism:

Green: This picture you’re painting of unity around a certain set of ideas, principles, and beliefs about the nature of man and God doesn’t feel accurate to the founding conditions of the United States. America was founded as a place where people who had really out-there ideas could come and live peaceably in geographic proximity to one another, eventually governed under a shared constitution. Lots of religious radicals were involved. America was founded on the principle that people needed to tolerate one another, but no more.

How is that different from today, when we are continuing to experience turmoil over who we are and what we believe and what our orientation as a nation should be?

Williams: Well, most of the Founders of America were Christians. There were radicals, to be sure. But there was much more consensus back then on what human nature is—on monotheism, broadly speaking, but really Christianity as well.

Of course, Maryland was a bunch of Catholics who wanted their own place. But there was much more consensus on what government ought to do: to secure the blessings of liberty and natural rights. First among them was freedom of conscience—your freedom to worship as you see fit. I would reject your assertion that pluralism ruled the day in the founding. Pluralism is a term that comes up much later in the American tradition, meaning that the regime is indifferent to the types of groups that are in the country. I don’t think the Founders would have maintained that at all. They thought natural rights were the possession of human beings across the globe, but the conditions for securing good government and protecting those rights were often unavailable. It took a certain bit of luck and civilizational tradition and learning and philosophy to get there.

In many ways, the miracle of America was to solve the problem that had plagued Western Europe for so many years, which was that every religious difference was an existential political difference that led to civil war and misery and depredation. With Madison and Jefferson leading the way, we solved the political-theological problem—that’s the fancy term from Leo Strauss. They solved it well enough that we could all live together as fellow citizens.

I’m teaching two courses this semester. Black Politics in the Jim Crow era, and American Racial Politics. I decided a few years ago to divide Black Politics into a two course sequence probably because I’d knew Adolph Reed would split them. I start the course with Du Bois’ classic The Souls of Black Folk, then compare Du Bois against himself (the conclusion of The Philadelphia Negro), against his chief “rival” (Booker T. Washington), and then with/against Anna Julia Cooper and then respectability reformists.

But after those weeks, I go a bit backward, to the 1890s and the black populist moment. This is when we see two different moves. On the one hand we see post-Reconstruction attempts to remake the federal government in order to better address the needs of working constituencies, and then on the other we see the neo-confederacy pushback with aggressive attempts to end (rather than just game) black votes. In 1890 Representative Henry Cabot Lodge drafted a bill that would have the goal of turning back increasing attempts in the south to disfranchise black voters by strengthening the federal government’s role. The bill passed the house, but died in the Senate as a result of the filibuster. Jamelle Bouie recently wrote about Lodge’s 1893 attempt (which died also) in order to make a larger argument about contemporary democracy.

Michael Perman’s Struggle for Mastery: Disfranchisement in the South 1888-1908 wrestles with this period. In 1890 Senator James Z. George wrote about what he called “the great problem”:

Our situation is without parallel in human history” for “hitherto free government has succeeded no where, except among homogeneous peoples willing for and capable of harmonious political co-operation.” Yet, he continued, “the aspirations” of “our race” to “self government”: have been impeded by the presence of a race which, though possessing many virtues and many excellent qualities have [sic] never yet developed the slightest capacity to Crete, to operate, or to preserve constitutional institutions.” Especially deplorable therefore was the situation in Mississippi, where “the incapable race” constituted a majority that was actually increasing. Throughout the South, “the men of both races are equal in political rights—made equal by a law beyond change or repeal by our action alone.” (Perman, p. 22)

I think the term that better describes the “conservatives” may be the Neo-confederacy. And that a straight line can be drawn from the arguments made by Sen. George and the arguments made both by Williams and by contemporary Republicans. (Critics of the Lodge Bill called it the “Lodge Force Bill”. Most critics of attempts to regulate elections rely on the concept of force.)

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Later today (Tuesday) I plan to go to campus to purchase Ron Daniels’ What Universities Owe Democracy. There’s actually a pretty interesting relationship between Hopkins (and the post-Civil War growth of American universities in general) and the excision of white supremacy from political theory (and political science). I’ll talk about that a bit next issue.