CHARLES WADE MILLS (1951-2021)

Charles Wade Mills was a notable Caribbean-American political philosopher and distinguished professor. He was born in London on January 3, 1951 to Jamaican parents, Winnifred and Gladstone Mills, who were both pursuing their graduate degrees in the city. The couple returned to Kingston shortly after his birth. He spent his childhood growing up in Jamaica and reading books. In 1971, Mills received his bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of the West Indies and taught physics at the University of Technology, Jamaica and, later, at Campion College in Jamaica. He then received his master’s and doctorate degrees in philosophy at the University of Toronto in 1976 and 1985 respectively.

In 1987, Mills began his academic career as an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oklahoma. From 1990 to 2007, he held a position at the University of Illinois in Chicago (UIC) and was recognized as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. While there, Mills reshaped the canon of political philosophy when he published his seminal work, The Racial Contract, in 1997. In it, Mills argued that the political concept of a social contract was actually a racial contract. The social contract theory had emerged during the Enlightenment period to explain how people consented to surrendering some of their freedoms in exchange for the protection of other rights. This, as Mills contended, was due to the assumption of white dominance and was established at a time when Europeans dominated the enslavement of black people. The book won worldwide acclaim and received the Myers Outstanding Book Award for the study of bigotry and human rights in America.