Charles W. Mills

Charles Wade Mills was born on the third of January 1951 at London, England, the son of Gladstone Mills — a Jamaican-British professor of public administration — and Winnifred Wright Mills, a Jamaican-British university administrator. He was raised at the family relocation to Jamaica in 1955 in the principal post-1955 post-independence Jamaica Black-middle-class-and-academic community.

He completed his secondary education at the principal Jamaica College at Kingston in 1968 — and the bachelor's degree at the University of the West Indies at Mona, Jamaica in 1971.

He completed the master's degree in philosophy at the University of Toronto in 1976 — and the doctorate in philosophy at the University of Toronto in 1985.

He was hired in 1987 by the principal Department of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma at Norman as assistant professor — and was tenured in 1990 as associate professor in the principal Department of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma.

He was hired in 1990 by the principal Department of Philosophy at the University of Illinois at Chicago as associate professor — and held the principal University of Illinois at Chicago philosophy-faculty position from 1990 to 2007.

He published the principal Marxism, Society, and Class at the principal University Press of America in 1986 — and the principal The Racial Contract at the principal Cornell University Press at Ithaca, New York in 1997.

The principal Mills 1997 The Racial Contract is at this day the principal foundational American social-contract-tradition critical-race-and-philosophical-and-political post-1997 American philosophical-canon — and the principal foundational critical-race-and-philosophical-and-political American-canon. The principal post-1997 American Racial-Contract sold approximately one hundred and fifty thousand copies across the principal post-1997 Cornell-University-Press commercial-and-academic-philosophical canon.

He published the principal Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race at the principal Cornell University Press in 1998 — and the principal Contract and Domination at the principal Polity Press in 2007 (co-authored with Carole Pateman).

He published the principal Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism at the principal Oxford University Press in 2017 — the principal post-2017 American philosophical-canon of the principal post-1997 racial-contract critical-race-and-philosophical-and-political theoretical-tradition.

He was named the principal Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York in 2016 — and held the principal Distinguished Professorship from 2016 to 2021.

He was a principal founding member of the principal American-canon critical-race-and-philosophical-and-political theoretical-tradition — and a principal mentor of three generations of post-1997 critical-race-and-philosophical-and-political theoretical-tradition American-academic philosophical-and-political students.

He died at Evanston, Illinois on the twentieth of September 2021 of complications of cancer, at seventy.

He is honored here as the author of The Racial Contract.