From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism

From Class to Race: Essays in White Marxism and Black Radicalism. By Charles W. Mills. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2003. 312p. 75. 00 cloth, 26. 95 paper. The author of the influential The Racial Contract (1997) has gathered together a provocative collection of his essays. These disparate papers do not form an argument for an overarching thesis. Nor do they converge on a single theme, for example, the need to shift away from a focus on class toward race, as the title might suggest. Rather, the essays reveal the recent changes in Charles Mills's philosophical interests, away from core problems in orthodox Marxism toward the project of developing a critical race theory. One constant throughout is Mills's attempt to demonstrate that the methods of analytic philosophy are not inherently “bourgeois, ” as many radicals have supposed, but can be usefully applied to problems that concern leftists. Yet unlike much of analytic philosophy, these essays are never boring but instead are generously laced with the author's characteristic biting sarcasm and bold humor.