Smadditizin' with Charles W. Mills

This is a memorial essay on how the life and work of Charles W. Mills influenced my development as a Black philosopher. Employing Mills’s use of the Jamaican creole term smadditizin’—meaning “becoming recognized as somebody in a world where, primarily because of race, it is denied”—I trace how Mills helped me become a human self myself. Inspired by using his books as texts in courses I taught, and working with him in the Radical Philosophy Association, I learned what it means to be an engaged philosopher. This essay also explores the controversy surrounding radical Black liberalism as a means for attaining personhood. Finally, I defend Mills as a canonical radical philosopher who never wavered from his fierce anti-colonialist, anti-white supremacist, and anti-capitalist stances

Aesthetics · Creole language · Epistemology · Liberalism · Linguistics · Meaning (existential · Personhood · Political science · Politics · Race (biology · Sociology · White (mutation · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Gender Studies · Law · Philosophy