Charles W. Mills

Mills was diagnosed with metastatic cancer in May 2021. He died of cancer in Evanston, Illinois, on September 20, 2021.

Mills was John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy at Northwestern University, before his appointment as Distinguished Professor at Graduate Center, CUNY, in August 2016. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2017. He gave the Tanner Lectures on Human Values in 2020.

In a 2014 publication, Mills stated, "I was a citizen of a small Third World country, Jamaica, which owed its very existence to … oppressive international forces." As of October 2020, Mills was an American citizen.

Over his career, Mills published six books and over 100 articles. Shannon Sullivan argues that Mills's oeuvre can be understood through the concept of smadditizin, a word Mills used in the title of a 1997 article. Sullivan, quoting Mills, describes smadditizin as "the struggle to have one's personhood recognized" [emphasis in original]. She argues that, no matter whether he embraced Marxism, Black radicalism, or racial liberalism, Mills's work opposed the non-recognition of persons. According to an obituary in CBC News, Mills is regarded as a pioneer in critical race theory and the philosophy of race. Philosopher Christopher Lebron described him in The Nation as a "black Socrates".

Mills's book The Racial Contract (1997) won a Gustavus Myers Outstanding Book Award for the study of bigotry and human rights in North America. The Racial Contract posits that the social contract is really a contract based on the notion of white domination. According to Jamelle Bouie, the work argues that "classic contractarian theories", such as those proposed by "Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant", "were built on an assumption of white racial domination, a racial contract, so to speak".

Mills received a BSc in physics at the University of the West Indies in 1971 and an MA and PhD in philosophy from the University of Toronto in 1976 and 1985, respectively. His dissertation was titled The Concept of Ideology in the Thought of Marx and Engels. He endorsed historical materialism until the 1990s. While at the University of Toronto, Mills helped to unionize teaching assistants.

Mills taught physics in Kingston from 1971 to 1973 at the College of Arts, Science and Technology, and from 1976 to 1977 at Campion College; he later taught philosophy at the University of Oklahoma (1987–90) and the University of Illinois at Chicago (1990–2007) where he was a UIC Distinguished Professor.

Charles Wade Mills (January 3, 1951 – September 20, 2021) was a philosopher who was a professor at Graduate Center, CUNY, and Northwestern University. Born in London, Mills grew up in Jamaica and later became a United States citizen. He was educated at the University of the West Indies and the University of Toronto.

Charles Wade Mills was born on January 3, 1951, in London, England, to Winnifred and Gladstone Mills. His parents were graduate students in London and moved to Kingston, Jamaica, shortly after he was born. He grew up in Kingston.