BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS, Ep 17: “White Bear” with Charles Mills

I’ve been teaching “White Bear” in my courses for more the last 6 years or so, and I count it among the Top 5 Most Interesting Black Mirror episodes, in no small part because there are so many interesting philosophical questions that the episode both depicts and inspires. I thought long and hard about who I wanted to invite to talk about “White Bear” for Black Mirror Reflections— because, let’s be honest, there are SO MANY different approaches one could take to deciphering what goes on in it– but Charles Mills ended up in the Number 1 spot of every list of possible guests I made. I could not possibly exaggerate how much of an influence he has had on my own development as a philosopher, and I am so glad he agreed to this conversation!

Dr. Charles W. Mills is a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He works in the general area of social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender, and race. He is the author of over a hundred journal articles, book chapters, comments and replies, and six books. His first book, The Racial Contract (Cornell UP, 1997), won a Myers Outstanding Book Award for the study of bigotry and human rights in America.  His second book, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell UP, 1998), was a finalist for the award for the most important North American work in social philosophy of that year.

Other books are: From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003), Contract and Domination (co-authored with Carole Pateman) (Polity, 2007), which brings the sexual and racial contracts together, and Radical Theory, Caribbean Reality (University of the West Indies Press, 2010). His most recent book is Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (Oxford UP, 2017). 

You can listen to our conversation in its entirety here:

Here at BLACK MIRROR REFLECTIONS, we assume that everyone is already committed to read more, write more, think more, and be more… so here’s a helpful list of links to thinkers, technologies, books, and articles referenced in this episode:

• Lex talionis and retribution (an animated explanation, with Kant!)
• Susan Schneider, Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence (2009)
• John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (1971)
• John Rawls, Justice as Fairness: A Restatement (2001)
• Charles Mills, “Ideal Theory as Ideology” (Hypatia, 2005)
• Retributive Justice (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
• Amy Louise Wood, Lynching as Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America, 1890-1940 
• Ellen E. Jones, “From mammy to Ma; Hollywood’s favourite racist stereotype” (BBC, 2019)
• Layla Eplett, “Not Gone With The Wind: The Perpetuation of the Mammy Stereotype” (Scientific American, 2015)
• Elizabeth Perez, “Black Mirrors: Reimagining Race, Technology, and Justice” 
• Ruja Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Codes for the New Jim Crow (2019)

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