Abstract

This essay argues that Charles Mills’s normative vision for racial justice—a reformed, race-attentive liberalism—is fundamentally self-undermining because it embraces the liberal property form. Specifically, I show how Mills’s insistence on the practical utility of the property form for racial justice ignores both W.E.B. Du Bois’s signal warning about the reactionary power of propertied interests and how the hegemony of Lockean liberalism is a key mediator of racial/colonial domination in the United States. The essay first shows how Mills’s anti-racist, social democratic liberalism relies on and legitimizes a property rights framework. I then analyze Du Bois’s critique of liberal abolition-democracy during Reconstruction, surfacing how white propertied interests constantly threaten progressive gains and social democratic change. Building on Du Bois, I argue that Mills’s reformed liberalism, by preserving the property form, places racial justice on an inherently unstable foundation while also excluding struggles for Indigenous sovereignty. Finally, I question Mills’s pragmatic argument for restricting racial justice to a reformed liberalism. Mills’s “Black radical liberalism” is not as straightforwardly practical as he suggests because of the deep historical hold of Lockean, rather than Kantian, liberalism. Here, I excavate how hegemony around Lockean liberalism in the United States has been periodically reconsolidated, looking at the interwar and Cold War context as well as the deeper influence of Locke on US constitutionalism. Ultimately, against a politics that restricts racial justice to a social democratic horizon, I contend that it is necessary to challenge the liberal property form in the pursuit of racial justice and Indigenous sovereignty.