Mills on Class in Relation to Race

Charles Mills began his career as a Marxist but at a particular point shifted to a focus on race, deliberately leaving behind an explicit concern with class, though implying that both class and race (along with gender) constitute distinct, interacting, domination systems in society. I argue that Mills’s permanent contribution to political theory is to see white supremacy as a sociopolitical order with its own character and logic, but that his specific account of race and white supremacy is faulty because class processes are internal to the racial domination system, and “racial injustice” already incorporates some aspects of class injustice. Thus Mills fails to recognize that white supremacy can fail to benefit and indeed can positively harm some white people. More generally, he fails to theorize class as a pervasive domination system. This argument does not reduce race to class, as Mills was correct in criticizing Marxism for (sometimes) doing. Some aspects of race do not concern class, while others do. Mills also fails to consistently articulate the specific normative character of current racial injustice, misleadingly conflating it with the “subperson” view of Black people dominant in the earlier colonial, slavery, and Segregation periods of white supremacy. For example, people of color now are accorded (if sometimes imperfectly) a panoply of rights denied in those earlier periods, and for Mills denial of rights is a core criterion of subpersonhood. The current period, better characterized by the idea of “racial disrespect” than “subpersonhood,” involves a form of wrongfulness much more similar in character to contemporary class injustice than the sub-personhood period did. Mills thus gives a misleading picture of the severity of class injustice in relation to racial injustice; they are much more similar than he says. And he also fails to recognize that racial injustice also incorporates forms of class injustice.