On September 28, 2021, the Jamaican-American philosopher Charles W. Mills passed away. As the many tributes from his students, colleagues, and collaborators showed, Mills was known as an immense intellect and generous soul who forced philosophy to reckon with its racist past, and unquestionably changed the discipline for the better. Working in the wake of Mills’s The Racial Contract, this article enacts a double reveal. In the process of adopting and extending Mills’s philosophical interventions…
Read moreOn September 28, 2021, the Jamaican-American philosopher Charles W. Mills passed away. As the many tributes from his students, colleagues, and collaborators showed, Mills was known as an immense intellect and generous soul who forced philosophy to reckon with its racist past, and unquestionably changed the discipline for the better. Working in the wake of Mills’s The Racial Contract, this article enacts a double reveal. In the process of adopting and extending Mills’s philosophical interventions as a model, we also reveal an implicit pedagogical technique in his work. This is a technique not just for reading theoretical texts on one’s own, but also as a class. This article is a story of a project (at the University of Toronto) that read and adopted Mills’s pedagogical technique. Philosophy today is so much better because of the brilliant fire of Charles Mills. In this paper, we seek to honor and carry on Mills’s spirit through an assignment we call “The Mills Move.”
