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Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:02.822)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Linda Alkoff. She is the professor at Hunter College and Graduate Center City University in New York and co -director of the Mellon Public Humanities and Social Justice Program. We're talking about her article in Critical Philosophy of Race called The Life of Charles Mills, Radical Philosopher Extraordinaire. Dr. Alkoff, it's a joy to have you today.
Linda Alcoff (00:30.636)
Happy to be here.
PJ (00:32.88)
Dr. Alkoff, kind of an incredible moment to be able to write this. Why is Charles Mills important? Why do we need to learn about him? And why were you a great pick to write about that?
Linda Alcoff (00:50.19)
Well, he had a lot of interlocutors and fans and people who use his work. So I was just one of many, but he and I were close friends for 30 years at least and sort of grew up together. We started out as this...
untenured assistant professors when we first met working in some similar areas and started a conversation. So I knew him. We were, you know, he knew my family, my kids, my husband. I knew some of his family. So I knew the context that he grew up in and that influenced
some of his ideas. so that's what I tried to write about because when you read his work, he does have some autobiographical thoughts and reflections in some of his essays, but he, I think needs to be read in the context of his particular...
individual experiences in history, political experiences in particular, in a way that I think he's often not. So I wanted to sort of correct the record and give my take on how some of his major contributions to the methodology of political philosophy came about. So, you know, I think he just is so important because
He not only develops an analysis of race and racism and colonialism, but he gives us a different take on the methodology of political philosophy. His argument was that when he came to the United States in the late 80s and discovered that
Linda Alcoff (03:10.456)
philosophy graduate students, philosophy graduate students did not think, at least where he was teaching, they did not think that racism was still a problem or they didn't really understand how structural it was in the history of the United States political institutions and political thinking. And so he,
He was astounded at this. And so he began to think methodologically, what is going on in political philosophy such that we can put questions of racism and colonialism to the side? So I think that those methodological interventions he made are the ones that will have a very lasting, I hope, a very lasting effect on philosophy going forward.
PJ (04:09.858)
Absolutely. So what are some of those misconceptions that you feel like you're correcting? What do you think people often get wrong when approaching his work?
Linda Alcoff (04:21.506)
Well, he's famous for this concept of the epistemology of ignorance. And I think there's other people who are also developing it, like Nancy Tawana around the same time, but Charles has a particularly good articulation of it as a situation in which it's not that you lack knowledge, it's that you are knowing in a certain way.
that curates what you're paying attention to and what you're considering and reflecting about. So the epistemology of ignorance is to look at what are those epistemic practices that keep us in our bubbles and keep us from seeing sometimes what's right in front of our face or really thinking about it. And that idea.
is very much connected to his analysis of white ignorance, which he wrote a lot about. It's certainly, know, white ignorance is like the paradigm case. It's not the only case of it, but it is kind of a paradigm case of the epistemology of ignorance. And you can see it in opinion polls, which have changed and improved in
my lifetime and Charles' lifetime, but are still indicative of certain misconceptions. So the epistemology of ignorance idea that he developed came out, it was very much connected to the problem of white ignorance that he was interested in, but it wasn't only connected to white ignorance. It also, I think the first formulation of it,
comes from his work on what happened in left social movements in the Caribbean that he was involved in. He was involved in the Workers' Party of Jamaica that was a Marxist -Leninist party when he was a young man. And he had the hope, as many did, that
Linda Alcoff (06:46.858)
there could be a pan -Caribbean coalition, sort of like the European Union, which you could have regional cooperation and social democracy or socialism across the domain. And in that way, the formerly enslaved nations and formerly colonized countries could pool their resources and...
negotiate more effectively with the rich countries of the global north. So there was this, he was in Jamaica, but he was thinking about and talking to people in other parts, especially as a black Caribbean, English speaking Caribbean, but they also were thinking about, at one point he had the aspiration, he wanted to learn French, Spanish, Portuguese, along with his English, because he wanted to learn all the Caribbean languages.
He didn't totally succeed, but he worked on it. But so he was in conversation and in political collaboration with activists across the Caribbean. And Grenada had a socialist president who was elected, Maurice Bishop, by popular claim, who was very popular and widely supported.
PJ (07:47.942)
Ha ha ha.
Linda Alcoff (08:14.37)
voted into office and his presidency ended in catastrophe. it was before the United States invaded Grenada, which people might recall, there was actually an internal fight within Grenada that led to the assassination of Maurice Bishop by the political movement.
some of the political movement that had gotten him into power. And this was shocking to everybody. so Charles went and he interviewed members of the New Jewel movement in Grenada about their reasoning. Like, how did this happen? How did this colossal mistake happen?
And he began to develop his notion of epistemology of ignorance there as well. So I'm arguing it's a wider problem than just white ignorance. It's something that we need to think about as forms of elitism. That's the problem that he found in the Marxist -Leninist movement in Grenada.
And he used that to critique some tendencies that were also happening in Jamaica in which the people who could wield the theory would determine strategy and tactics and the agenda and the goals of the movement. And people who hadn't gone to college and were part of the movement were really just followers. They weren't seen as having knowledge. But of course, the
The tradition of resistance in the Caribbean is long standing and it's across class and it's widespread. That's what's so inspiring. That's why we all know about, you know, Jamaican music everywhere around the world because it has had a really inspiring record of resistance, cultural resistance. But the cultural resistance was also politically informed, right? It was also
Linda Alcoff (10:31.948)
And you see it in the language, you see it in the slang, you see it in the dance and the music, and you see it in the politics. So there was knowledge to be had from all classes in Jamaica, in Grenada, Charles believed. And that knowledge was being stifled by a certain elitism that cultivated a kind of ignorance. So I...
I don't trust my own ideas and assumptions. And I silenced them. then, you know, all of that knowledge is lost to the movement. So I wanted to add that in because he did a huge amount of work on that throughout the 1980s. And he continued to think about those issues later on.
as a corrective to some of the negative tendencies. It wasn't all of Marxism, obviously. There's lots of democratic forms of Marxist movements, but in some forms of the Marxist movements that were still strong in the 1980s.
PJ (11:50.9)
lot of the work I do in this podcast is I'm trying to bridge these kind of interdisciplinary gaps. and I understand that the idea of like, this is a universal human thing, maybe perhaps I should say a common human epistemological practice, where we talk about, have to find some kind of way to filter information, right? We're constantly assaulted with way too much information. Something as we learn as children's, like this is not.
We don't see the cube, we like, or we see a cube instead of seeing all the flat surfaces at once, we categorize it, we lump it together, that sort of thing. So if I'm understanding you correctly, I just want to make sure I'm on the right track here. It is a common, and this isn't to say that it's the right thing. It's just as, or that it doesn't need correction. It's just, it's a common human thing to filter out things that are actually harmful or to filter out or filter out things in a way that's harmful.
And so this is, it's not just a white ignorance thing, though that is kind of, right now the preeminent example, it is a common human practice to filter out things that leave us blind to things that harm us or those around us. Is that another way of thinking about this?
Linda Alcoff (13:08.896)
Yes, I think that's true, but I would make one additional point, which Charles made as well, which is that when you're kind of on top of things, you can glide along without knowing a lot of stuff. You don't really need to know what your servants think of you, because who cares?
PJ (13:27.344)
Yeah. Yep.
Linda Alcoff (13:37.912)
They don't like you, you can get another one. But when you're a servant, you know, as many people have written about this, including Du Bois, you have to know how your masters think, their belief system, their foibles, their fears, their needs.
And you also have to know your own and the people that you are close to. So you don't have the luxury of being as ignorant as some people do. So ignorance can be a kind of a luxury that isn't distributed terribly, you know, equally. And that's not to say it doesn't break down in any simplistic way by class or by race or gender. But there is a...
a way in which sometimes we can be insulated from the impact of our ignorance, whereas other people may not be insulated from the impact of their ignorance. They could really get into trouble if they don't understand, you know, what's going on.
PJ (14:52.87)
To take a really classic example, think everyone would understand it's part of the reason why the prince and the pauper is so, is kind of universally beloved, right? This idea of a prince and the like doesn't know how to bathe himself, like, clothe himself, how to feed himself. has to learn all these really basic things that's like, how do you not know how to do that? But that's just a, you know, that...
You get to choose what you want to learn about when you can just tell someone else to do something for you. And that's just one side of it. I understand that there's a tremendous amount of privilege that comes with that too. And it's very punitive, right? To those around you, but not to yourself. So if I'm ignorant of someone else, but I'm on top and I do something that makes their life very hard, that's going to be more common if I'm on top.
Linda Alcoff (15:48.109)
Yeah.
PJ (15:48.23)
Whereas if you're below, you know, so.
Linda Alcoff (15:52.878)
I think that's true, but I think it's also true what you said earlier that we do have a tendency to want to avoid painful topics, painful information, just death. I I teach existentialism. The kids sometimes, they don't want to talk about death. Sometimes at 19, they really do want to talk about death.
PJ (16:21.751)
Hahaha
Linda Alcoff (16:22.87)
I'm very surprised. mean, because most of time we don't talk about death. We don't talk about dying. We don't talk about death. naturally, who wants to? But of course, the existentialists argue that actually it can really improve your life.
PJ (16:40.092)
Well, I love that too, that sometimes they really want to talk about it. I think it's sometimes you get a 19 year old who's like, it's easy to talk about death because obviously that happens to other people, right? Talking about epistemological ignorance right there. So you mentioned this in passing, well, not in passing, but you kind of listed it out. Can you talk a little bit more about those everyday
Linda Alcoff (16:50.094)
you
Linda Alcoff (16:54.637)
Right.
PJ (17:09.574)
practices of cognitive resistances that Charles, that Dr. Mills would have learned in Jamaica. How do you see like the music show up, the dance, the slang, and of course the politics. I mean, I think you touched on that a little bit more, but I'd love to hear how those everyday things show up in his work.
Linda Alcoff (17:32.246)
Yeah, there's this, he wrote a whole paper on this slang concept that I'd never heard of from Jamaica called smaditizing. it, it, it's a, you know, it's just kind of a very common kind of word that's used among, you know, all classes of people. And it, the way he
explains it is that it really gestures at one's in the social world, one's subjective status in the social world as philosophers would talk about it. that oppression wasn't just denial of material goods, it wasn't just economic, it wasn't just about how much money or land you have, it was also about whether or not you're seen as a person.
in a full sense. And that's another concept that Charles develops. It's very famous of being a sub person. There's persons in European modernity, and then there's sub persons, almost persons, not full persons. In the philosophical sense of personhood, meaning that you have the power to
govern yourself, you know, which is a very important idea in European modernity is self -governance is the way in which Europe overcame ideas of aristocracy and monarchy was through ideas of self -governance. So that concept of personhood was central to political philosophy to argue that democracy was possible, democracy was feasible because all persons have the capacity for self -governance. We have the capacity to reflect.
to not just go for the quick outcome, but to actually control ourselves, reflect on ourselves, and govern ourselves. And we can do this collectively, and we can do this in political form. But not everybody was seen as capable of that. So all kinds of racist ideas characterized numbers of
Linda Alcoff (19:56.554)
of peoples in the world as really incapable of self -governance because they were overly emotional, because they relied on intuitions, they didn't have the intelligence, they didn't have the self -control, they didn't have the capacity for virtue. All women, you know, mostly were put into this category. So, so, smanetizing was this concept that was like used in, in slang.
in Jamaica and he, you know, really unpacked it. really focused on it, unpacked it and saw it as an indication of a certain knowledge, a conceptualization of a kind of sub -person status, that smanatizing was to assert one's personhood, right? It was to make visible one's full personhood as a subject with their own views and their own agency.
So he used that, I think both, epistemologically to sort of go against elitist ideas that you have to go to college to understand how social oppression works. Actually, you don't need to go to college to understand how social oppression works. Although, it's great to be able to go to college now and study it, which wasn't the case when I was in college, initially, or Charles too much.
PJ (20:53.068)
you
Linda Alcoff (21:20.258)
But the knowledge was there and also the resistance was there, the form of resistance. And that we, college professors, have something to learn from that, which he did. He went on to develop his concept of sub -personhood from that concept.
PJ (21:40.986)
I'm really glad I was going to ask you about somatitisin and I'm glad you said it first because I had no idea how to say it. that's one. Thank you. Also, really, definitely something I would love to take away from this is I love having better vocabulary for this sorts of that the idea of encapsulating the struggle for personhood in one concept.
is very helpful. So thank you for that.
Who would you say, you kind of mentioned Du Bois, who were some of the biggest influences? You know, even you're talking about it was hard to find people to study or hard, it wasn't like you had classes, critical race classes when you first started out. And so who were some of the biggest influences on Dr. Charles Mills?
Linda Alcoff (22:36.64)
Well, know, probably, you know, one of the biggest was actually Karl Marx. He wrote his dissertation on Karl Marx's theory of ideology. went to University of Toronto to get his PhD in philosophy because they had two Marx's on the faculty that he worked with, both of them. And, you know, Marx
was also thinking a lot about social oppression in a broad sense. And he was thinking also methodologically about how to change economics and how to change political theory so that certain things like alienation and exploitation would become visible and we could pinpoint it, we could name it. So Marx, think, was a huge influence.
Charles wrote his dissertation on ideology because that issue was so important to answering the question of why we haven't made progress more quickly because of the ways in which ideologies infect our theoretical work and our philosophical work and our ideas.
across the public domain. Mark, so I think he, when he decided to shift from working on class primarily to working on race primarily, he wrote in one place that he wanted to think like Marx though, the way Marx thought about class. Marx did not think class was a natural kind. know, classes weren't...
given by God, they weren't part of nature, they were produced under certain very particular political and economic conditions, they had a historical time frame, and that's the way Charles thought about racial identities. They weren't natural kinds, they were created under very specific conditions, and they were, you know, historical. And so he, he
Linda Alcoff (24:59.566)
used Marxist methodology, but he also had many influences. He actually, when he sort of realized in the late 80s that the political philosophy of the Anglo -American world was not going to be a place where he was going to be able to theorize racial oppression or colonial oppression. It just wasn't on the agenda.
There wasn't a terminology. There wasn't a discussion. There wasn't a debate. There weren't competing theories. It really wasn't on the map. He started reading history and political theory and sociology and other disciplines. And so he was influenced by a lot of the historians.
who were changing the map of like Eugene Genovese, who were bringing slavery to the fore of US history and also the economy of the global north. A number of historians were doing that to sort of show how integrated
practices of slavery and colonialism were to the developing modern economies. So he was very influenced by people outside of philosophy as well. And then, you know, he started to read in a serious and, you know, very systematic way the work of the great liberal theorists, Kant and Rawls and
and started to engage in a tug of war with them, which he continued through his life. So to draw out what he thought were actually wonderful ideas of self -governance and of justice, but that had some huge gaping holes that suggested methodological problems that he wanted to point out and to...
Linda Alcoff (27:27.768)
develop so that we could use what is good about their work, but really, you know, we had to go right to the roots to start from a different place. So his last book, which is not out yet, but it is being revised because he it in almost a complete manuscript. It's being revised by his literary editor.
who was his former student at Northwestern. The name of that book I wanted to tell you is White Leviathan. Well, he's taking it from Hobbes, right?
PJ (28:10.193)
No.
PJ (28:13.804)
Yes. Yeah, I'm not referencing Hobbs, but yes, that does. that's a little close to home.
Linda Alcoff (28:17.997)
Yeah.
Well, it's not it's I mean, but he's using you know, he's using he thinks the concept is very useful and constructive to think about like the whole large apparatus that we are working inside of and with but he's he's looking at the history of European modern liberal political theory as You know one that really is
theorizing from within what is actually a white love biathlon. It's not actually the whole thing. And that's how they formulate, you know, some of their arguments. So that's going to be the title of the book.
PJ (29:04.88)
Yeah. I'm really glad you brought that up. That's great. I'll definitely keep an eye out. Maybe Dr. Jeffords would be willing to come on when the book comes out. That would be fun. But you've mentioned a couple of times now, and I think you've definitely explained it a little bit, but can you talk a little bit more about his focus on political methodology and how he was able to create his own methodology and what he
felt he was correcting with that.
Linda Alcoff (29:36.408)
Well, I think the epistemology of ignorance is important to focus not just on knowing well, but also knowing badly. Now in epistemology, this is a big topic, like why there's so much fake news and deep fakes and how these things get circulated. So there's a lot of focus on.
PJ (29:46.928)
Hahaha!
Linda Alcoff (30:02.924)
bad epistemic practices and not just normatively positive epistemic practices. But the other methodological breakthrough that I think he really helped along was this move from ideal theory to non -ideal theory. And again, he wasn't the only one thinking about this. Onora O 'Neill did some excellent work critiquing abstraction and political philosophy that Charles
made use of and knew about and wrote about and some other people. But the idea is that political philosophers, like you think about Plato, are thinking about what are asking the question, what would a just society look like? But they're not asking what would our society look like if it was just, but just, you know, imagining a completely
decontextualize, know, some non -specific, you know, just conglomeration of, you know, individuals thrown together in a particular place and time without any history, without any particular groups of people who are contending with each other in the space. know, there's no historical background. There's no...
realism to the way in which Plato asked the question, what is a just society? And Rawls replicates that largely in his theory of justice that came out in 1970 and Kant replicates it. this idea that we can abstract away our particular
challenges to try to create democratic and just societies that our particular challenges that we have because of history and, you know, histories of colonialism, etc., can just be set aside and we can still formulate the generic generalized norms of justice and of relations and democracy. And so
Linda Alcoff (32:32.058)
He argues this is why political philosophy skipped over these problems and we're not addressing race and that if you start from non -ideal conditions, so in other words you start from the real world because the real world is decidedly non -ideal.
PJ (32:56.602)
Last time I checked, yes.
Linda Alcoff (32:57.902)
It causes you to ask different kinds of questions and you know, I I know that because I do Latin American philosophy I'm originally from Latin America. I'm an immigrant This was a standard practice in the whole tradition of political philosophy in Latin America Simone Bolivar after winning
the independents from Spain in the early 1800s, you know, asked the question, how can we create a democratic society that includes the formerly enslaved who have been denied education and traumatized, the indigenous people who have been displaced from their land and subject to genocide,
And then these European settlers who are also here, many of whom came, you know, for reasons of economic desperation themselves. They weren't doing so well in Europe. So these are the three groups. so Bolivar asked the question, how do we create a democracy given these groups? How are we going to create a shared
sense of political purpose. And Jose Marti, you the other great political thinker, who's Cuban guy, writing in the later part of the 1800s, does the same thing. Jose Vasconcelos, Juan Carlos Mariachegui, does the same sort of question. What, what,
is our owed to the enslaved, what are our owed to the indigenous? Should we all try to make amalgamation? Should we have separate land rights for the indigenous? That's what Mariottike argued. So you get very different conceptions of justice than you have if you take the polity made up of abstract individuals with no history and no particular
Linda Alcoff (35:19.838)
grievances and claims and conditions that pose challenges to our coming together in a shared workable participatory as participatory as possible democracy. not so he he does a critique of ideal theory and then he develops a methodology for doing non -ideal theory and that has just swept
social theory today. It's not hegemonic, not everybody is doing non -ideal theory, but a lot more people are doing non -ideal theory today. And I think it's going to have a lasting impact in the topics that we address, but also the solutions. Because the solutions in the ideal abstract world are not
necessarily going to be the solutions that work and then in the non -ideal conditions. So the norms of governance, the norms of political participation, the norms of social interaction are impacted by. So I'll just give you one other applied example. When we talk about things like affirmative action or
PJ (36:42.182)
Yeah.
Linda Alcoff (36:46.662)
sometimes called reverse discrimination or positive discrimination. In Europe it's called different things, which is the idea that you try to correct for past discrimination and if you have two candidates of equal qualifications for a job and one of them is from a
group of people that have been unfairly kept out of a particular profession, you give the job to that person rather than you give the job to the other person. So it's not about ignoring qualifications. this policy, affirmative action, has been debated for 50 years. And it's been some very good work on it. what it has to...
The way we have to make the argument in places like the United States and Europe is we have to say, well, know, liberalism says treat all the people the same. But in just this one instance, this was temporary period under these very constrained conditions, we're going to deviate from the abstract universal norms that we know to be true. And so that puts affirmative action, you know, on the back foot.
So it's always like having to prove something that it's not as unjust as it looks from liberal universal ideal theory. And so by starting from non -ideal conditions, you know, we can think about what do we want here? We want a society in which we have common interests in which we get along instead of.
fighting with each other in which we feel have a sense that there's justice for all and there's a possibility of, you know, of working together productively. So we all have an interest in overcoming the non -ideal conditions in our societies. Maybe we're not gonna get all the way to the ideal, but overcoming those, it's not just that some groups
Linda Alcoff (39:08.194)
have an interest in overcoming non -ideal conditions. Right? It's all of us have an interest in overcoming non -ideal conditions. So you can still get a sense of collectivity and commonality and common political norms and ethical norms that take into account everybody. It's not a zero sum game. It's not where you're taking from some and then messing up those people that you're taking from and then giving it to others who are then exalted. It's actually...
You're still thinking about the whole. You're still thinking about how to create a workable polity. But you sometimes may use things like affirmative action to get there.
PJ (39:55.12)
Yeah, even as you were talking about this, there's the solution aspect. There's also, as you talk about ideal theory, it's very easy when you create this ahistorical ideal to allow your personal or your own very narrow cultural preferences to slip in. And I love that you started with Plato because as you're talking about Dr. Mills,
and your own work talking about his use of dance and music and slang. And of course, what do we see in Plato? Plato's, you know, like, well, you know, the only kind of music you can have is military music. And the only kind of dance is for like fighting. And then all the rest of it, you kick out and all the poets too. it's like, you're like.
It's really, it feels more like a Play -Doh thing, you know, like than a, than a just society thing, right? Like it's like, because if you avoid this kind of pure ideal, like you get, you, you start having to talk to actual people and you have to compromise and then you're like, that was just me being weird. You know, that's, I don't know if that makes any sense, but that's, that's something I latched onto.
Linda Alcoff (41:10.252)
No, the Republic was like a fascist document. I wrote an undergraduate paper making that argument, which was crazy. But know, the myth of the metals? Come on. There's gold people, silver people, and brass people. Your livelihood is forever determined in this way? Yeah. mean...
Plano was a mixed bag, like most of our great philosophers. He actually was more egalitarian on gender issues than many people later than him. So there's things to learn from all of these people, but the republic is not exactly democratic.
PJ (42:02.144)
man, no, definitely, definitely not. I want to be, respectful of your time, but, sorry, I got, I don't know why that really, that really got me. kind of like, before we wrap up here, I did want to ask you, obviously heavily influenced by Karl Marx.
PJ (42:28.025)
How do you What do you think about dr. Mills views on liberalism?
Linda Alcoff (42:36.566)
Yeah, we didn't always agree.
PJ (42:38.236)
I was actually asking to explain it. If you want to talk about your own disgustings with him, that is okay. I was not looking up to bring up beef between you and Dr. Mills.
Linda Alcoff (42:50.638)
think a lot of us, you know, wanted to go with him and toward the non -ideal approach all the way and were concerned. But I think, you know, I think what Charles wanted to do was he wanted to, he wanted to correct the record on the history of liberalism for one thing and say that
The fact that it was never extended to women, people who were colonized subjects and so forth, that wasn't just a small piece of it. That wasn't just a deviation. There are certain ways in which the concepts and the methods like abstraction and idealization.
created the conditions for those exclusions. So he wanted to argue that the sort of exclusion clauses were really substantive, but he also wanted to argue that liberalism, and this was his argument against a lot of postmodernists and some of the radical critics of liberalism.
He wanted to also argue that liberalism was not hardwired to be racist. wasn't, there wasn't a preordained logic of liberalism that
PJ (44:39.772)
There wasn't an ideal liberalism.
Linda Alcoff (44:42.314)
Yeah, that was always in every formulation going to end up with all these exclusion clauses for all these groups of people. So he thought that there were elements of liberalism, even in Kant and Rawls, that could be drawn from and that were important to draw from. he remained.
very much influenced by a Marxist tradition and a social approach to individuals and historical approach. But he thought that we needed to include the protections of individual liberty and the recognition of individual self -governance that liberalism developed.
He thought there could be a kind of reformed liberalism or transformed liberalism that would be a part of a new political theory that could help us find a way forward. he didn't need to stay only inside the sphere of liberalism. He drew from
the socialist tradition and communitarian traditions. He's very influenced by Du Bois, but he did not think that, and I think he's right about this, because I think that philosophical theories are historical and dynamic.
and organic and changing and subject to different interpretation. It's kind of like, this may be a weird analogy, but Christianity, right? If you think about Christianity, which is a tradition that I'm inside of and that I have a lot of respect for, but it has generated some of the worst violence and genocides and wars and destructions in history.
Linda Alcoff (47:02.882)
of our sectors of the world and also has elements that go absolutely against all of those things. it's the way in which it's interpreted and the way in which it's wielded isn't completely determined by the text itself. Although I think, you know, there's a lot of
Jesus's teachings that are pretty unambiguous, but they get misconstrued. So I think liberalism is like that. think liberalism, he saw liberalism certainly as like that as a great tradition that had a lot of positive elements, but those are always subject to interpretation and they're always subject to analysis of
who they apply to, how they apply under these conditions. so he saw liberalism as open rather than closed. It's not that Kant was getting it wrong. It's that Kant formulated it in a certain way, but there are pieces of Kant's arguments for self -governance that
can be accepted and developed in a way that doesn't have the exclusion clauses.
PJ (48:41.34)
And we haven't mentioned it, at least I don't think we have, but a lot of what we're talking about is contained in Dr. Mills' book, The Racial Contract. So for those people who aren't familiar with Dr. Mills, if you're looking for the formulation of this, in a lot of ways you're looking for that book. Would that be correct?
Linda Alcoff (48:51.958)
Yes.
Linda Alcoff (49:02.124)
Yeah, that was his first book. he, it's a wonderful book to teach. It's a wonderful book to read, because it's, it's, it's fast. And he gives you like this global sort of history to really help you understand how we how we got in the world that we got and he begins to develop these, these ideas of the subperson.
of non -ideal theory, of cosmology of ignorance, he doesn't flesh them out. in later works, Black Rides, White Wrongs, and other books, he fleshes out those ideas. But those ideas are in the racial contract. You'll see them in the racial contract.
PJ (49:52.358)
So is that a good place to start or is there something? Okay. It is a good place to start. Yeah.
Linda Alcoff (49:57.421)
So I think so.
PJ (50:00.028)
One, let me say thank you for coming on today. For our audience, besides reading your article introducing us to Dr. Mills, besides reading the racial contract, what is something that you would encourage our audience to read or to do or to think about this week? What's one takeaway they can, after listening to this episode, that they can have to kind of meditate on the rest of this week?
Linda Alcoff (50:31.2)
this week? How about this year?
PJ (50:33.59)
Yeah, I mean, yeah, but something to really focus. mean, obviously, I I'm not saying like, you know, we can think about this one thing, but only for the week, but something that they can kind of extra special, know, I'm trying to doubt that. I'm trying to play a special emphasis, not downplay what you're saying. I'm sorry.
Linda Alcoff (50:56.75)
think coming off of the book, The Racial Contract that you introduced, what he's really doing in that book is giving us a transnational approach. So it's not about racism just in one country. It's really looking at a transnational global system, interconnecting ideas that justify colonialism. so, and I think so.
I think that's one idea I've been trying to develop as well, is this idea that racism needs to be thought about in relationship to a much larger sense of...
Linda Alcoff (51:42.082)
connections between nations, regions of the world, the ways in which we think about traditional versus advanced societies, the ways in which we think about where, why is the global north the richest area of the world today? How did that come about? So I think Charles gives us that wider perspective because he
He was transnational himself, having lived and having grown up in Jamaica till he was in his mid -twenties, lived in Canada for 10 years and then the United States and then traveling all over the world to put racism in that larger context I think is very important.
PJ (52:32.358)
Dr. Alcoff, it's been an absolute joy having you on today. Thank you.
Linda Alcoff (52:36.066)
Thank you for having me, PJ. Good luck with the program.