Race, Justice and American Intellectual Traditions by Stuart Rosenbaum

Author:Stuart Rosenbaum
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

Mills on Rawls

Mills pulls no punches when discussing Rawls’s account of justice . Rawls is straightforwardly racist, according to Mills, and is so because of his willingness to locate his concern with justice fully within the classical Western intellectual tradition. That Western intellectual tradition is, in Mills’s and in my own view, thoroughly racist. John Stuart Mill and Milton Friedman are only two of the thinkers who supply roots for Rawls’s racism . Mills becomes in this essay one of those others I earlier mentioned on whom we depend to reveal contents of our psyches that may otherwise remain hidden to ourselves. We depend on each other not only for many social and personal needs, but also for insights into the contents of our own psyches.

Western political—and social, moral, epistemological and metaphysical—theory assumes European, white supremacy. Western political theory, whether in Hobbes, Locke , Mill or Rawls is deeply—and imperceptibly to Western psyches—racist.

For five centuries and more, European colonialism subjected the native peoples of the entire globe to conquest and domination. That domination rested on a presumption of European—and “white”—cultural, moral and metaphysical superiority. This presumption was for centuries, and remains largely unquestioned; it was a given for all European psyches, and was embedded in all European cultures as much as was the idea that monarchs were God ’s representatives on earth or as was later the Enlightenment idea that reason was an authoritative source for knowledge about morality and society.

This cultural situation did not acknowledge—did not even recognize—in its colonialist appropriations of native lands and peoples any racist intent. The racism of those European cultures Europeans themselves simply could not conceive, since the “inferiority” of conquered and dominated native peoples was undisputed even in their imaginations. Political and moral theory—as well as other modes of theory—were rooted in assumptions of European, and white, superiority. And those assumptions were hidden from their/our own psyches.

(An interesting analogue of the racism hidden in European psyches is the anthropocentricism hidden in all modes of explanation prior to the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. During prior centuries Aristotelian-style teleological explanation just was explanation, and it modeled goal-directed explanations of human behavior. Thus, each basic element in Aristotle ’s “table of elements” had a “natural place” in the universe where it belonged and a simple, single desire to get there in the most direct way possible. This Aristotelian anthropocentricism changed definitively during the seventeenth century, culminating in the Newtonian physics that made Aristotelian teleology no longer scientifically reputable. After Newton, scientific explanation became utterly detached, impersonal and “objective,” involving only matter in motion and the mechanical laws that govern that motion.)

John Stuart Mill , along with his European intellectual fellows, could not see their racism . Racism did not exist for them. Mill and his fellows did see social scaffolding, but they did not see native peoples as falling anywhere on the scaffold they and their European colleagues sought to rationalize. Native peoples were “other,” uncivilized, barbarians , and these native peoples included Africans, Indians, Native Americans and others.

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