DSJ: Concerning white supremacy, I was struck by how bold the first sentence of The Racial Contract is: “White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.” You wrote these words at the peak of the liberal international order in the 1990s. How provocative a thesis was your claim of white supremacy at the time, especially within philosophy?
CM: I would say that it was so provocative, so deviant from the conventional mainstream philosophical wisdom, that even now, nearly a quarter century later, it is still beyond the pale of acceptance. It’s imperative to appreciate the deep influence of race in modernity not merely on everyday cognition but on supposedly rigorous theorization in the academy. Race shapes the development of such modern academic disciplines as sociology, political science, anthropology, criminology, International Relations theory, and many others, as well as older disciplines from the premodern period like philosophy and history. The casual and near-ubiquitous assumption of white racial superiority, biological and/or cultural, distorts all of them.
In the postwar, nominally postcolonial period, when saying such things in public is no longer politic (all those newly empowered Black and brown citizens and newly independent Black and brown nations who might be offended), a massive retroactive cleanup job thus has to be undertaken. An academy that was white supremacist not merely in its demography but in its content has to reinvent itself. “Race,” when it is even acknowledged, is reconceived of as personal prejudice, disconnected from social structure, political domination, and the methodological frameworks of official academic investigation.
So despite the (one would think) obvious and undeniable history, in the US, of the domination of whites over Blacks and Native Americans, or the global hegemony up to World War II of Europeans, “white supremacy” becomes a taboo phrase. It denotes a reality that can no longer be admitted. Happily, revisionist work is now being done in all these subjects to expose this historic cover-up and lay the foundations for their systematic rethinking (though philosophy is the laggard, perhaps because it’s the most conceptually challenged of all).
DSJ: The success of the Black Lives Matter movement, especially since the murder of George Floyd, demonstrates that charges of white supremacy are increasingly accepted by many mainstream white liberals. What do you make of this development, especially since it would be easy for some to see it merely as a reaction to the rise of Trump? Your work has long associated it with a failure of liberalism itself.
CM: I think, as earlier mentioned, that there’s a pivotal ambiguity in how the term is understood: white supremacy as a racist ideology supporting white racial domination and white supremacy as a system of white racial domination. It’s easy for mainstream liberals to condemn the former, and to criticize President Trump for failing to do so unequivocally. But the sense of the term I’ve focused on in my work is really the latter. And that’s far more controversial, because my argument in The Racial Contract and throughout my work is that you can have an ongoing system of white domination in the absence of an overtly white-supremacist ideology and overt rules of de jure subordination.