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WHITE TIME

The Chronic Injustice of Ideal Theory1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 July 2014

Charles W. Mills
Charles W. Mills*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, Northwestern University
*
Corresponding author: Professor Charles W. Mills, Department of Philosophy, Northwestern University, 1880 Campus Drive, Kresge 2–335, Evanston, IL 60208. E-mail: c-mills@northwestern.edu
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Abstract

The racialization of space is the subject of a huge body of literature, most recently in George Lipsitz’s (2011) How Racism Takes Place. But less has been done on the ways in which time could be racialized. Inspired by provocative treatments of the subject in writings by Michael Hanchard (1999) and Lawrie Balfour (2011), I suggest in this paper that we need to explore the workings of a “White temporal imaginary” analogous to Lipsitz’s “White spatial imaginary,” which likewise serves to protect White racial privilege from the threatening encroachments of racial justice. Using Eviatar Zerubavel’s (2003) Time Maps as a jumping-off point, I argue accordingly for the recognition of a “White time,” a “sociomental” representation of temporality shaped by the interests and experience of the White “mnemonic community.” The concept is obviously one of potentially very general usefulness, but in this essay I seek to apply it specifically to the dominant discourse on justice in political philosophy, as framed for the past forty years by John Rawls’ ([1971] 1999c) “ideal theory.” The relevance to the postracial theme of this issue is that, because of the peculiarity of philosophy as a discipline, it can claim it was always, or always-already, postracial, dealing as it ostensibly does with the (timeless) human condition as such. By making ideal theory—the normative theory of a perfectly just society—central to the conceptualization of social justice, by never exploring how radically different actual societies are from the ideal of society as “a cooperative venture for mutual advantage,” an exclusionary sociohistorical framework is established that makes the Euro-time of the West—abstracted out of the West’s relations of domination over people of color—the Greenwich Mean Time of normativity, while the alternative non-White temporality of structurally unjust societies requiring rectificatory racial justice remains a subject permanently untimely.

Keywords

Ideal TheoryRawlsianismRacial JusticeRacial TimeWhite Mnemonic CommunityTime MapsPhilosophy and PostracialityRectificatory Justice
Type
Race in a “Postracial” Epoch
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , Spring 2014 , pp. 27 - 42
Copyright
Copyright © Hutchins Center for African and African American Research 2014 

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