Materializing Race w/ Dr. Charles W. Mills

Africa World Now Project

We are currently living in an age where poverty and disease are big business. In a world where race and class produce and reproduce ways of interacting. This process has found ways to attach itself to our very construction of individual and group realities, therefore entrenching conscious and unconscious acts of racism as being natural and/or universal occurrences.

We live in a world where racial diversity is misunderstood as ideological diversity…a constructed reality where the ascription of power is imposed on old ideas of identity and re-incorporated in new forms of marginalization. This holds true, despite any claim of post-this-or-post-that…that is made by dominant discourses.

W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1903 in Souls of Black Folk that:

“THE PROBLEM of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line, —the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea”

Today, in the 21st Century, we are still confronted with this color line, which is exacerbated by a symbiotic relationship with the drive to secure material wealth at rates that often rival the height of the age of imperialism, where the total control of Africa as well as other resource rich lands were dominant behavioral expressions in geopolitics. Prophetically, in his later writings, as W.E.B Du Bois is known to do, expands or situates his conceptualization of the color line into being intimately linked with class formations.

In the Preface of the 1953 Edition of the Souls of Black Du Bois argues that:

“I still think today as yesterday that the color line is a great problem of this century. But today I see more clearly than yesterday that back of the problem of race and color, lies a greater problem which both obscures and implements it: and that is the fact that so many civilized persons are willing to live in comfort even if the price of this is poverty, ignorance, and disease of the majority of their fellowmen; that to maintain this privilege men have waged war until today war tends to become universal and continuous, and the excuse for this war continues largely to be color and race.”

Often ignored by the sympathetic democratic rhetoric of liberals, are the racialized consequences of massive poverty and cultural displacement integral to the globalizing project of democratization (a euphemism for the unbridled proliferation of capitalism).
Within this environment, the meanings of race are constantly re-configuring itself as various forms of exclusion built upon the consequences of enslavement, colonialism, and imperialism are perpetuated and refined.

Today: We will dive deeper into understanding race. What we will hear next is Charles W. Mills describe how race was materialized with the advent of modernity. He argues that capitalism is racialized, and white supremacy was interwoven within it from its origins.
Charles W. Mills is a Caribbean philosopher from Jamaica. He is known for his work in social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender, and race.
He is currently Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the City University of New York’s Graduate Center. He is the author of numerous books on race and political theory, including The Racial Contract (1997), Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (1998), and the forthcoming Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (2017).

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the Native/Indigenous and Afro Descendant communities at Standing Rock, Venezuela, Brazil, Colombia, Kenya, Palestine, South Africa, and Ghana and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all peoples!

Enjoy the program