Charles Mills on Racism
by This is an essay critiquing Charles Mills and his book “The Racial Contract”. It is concerned with the Eurocentric view that history has taken, and how that has centered itself specifically around the white man. It comes from a standpoint that European world domination was more luck than genetics, and that it may be more of a human characteristic than a racial one.
Whether or not we choose to accept it now, it is true that everyone on this earth is of posterity to genocidal murderers. To prove this to yourself you must ask a crucial question; how many of your direct relatives were killed before they reached sexual maturity? Once you attain the answer it seems trivial, but you can see that quite obviously every one of your direct ancestors must have made it to sexual maturity or else you would not be here (Hitchens 2007). This certainly shows that we have always descended from the winners of battles, the genocidal maniacs, and the immoral con-men since they were the ones to survive and thus pass on their genes. This is certainly no more evident than in the case of the “race” of “white” people that mostly came from Europe. The people that come from ‘Western-Europe’ tend to have a condescending perspective with a true belief that the White domination of the world occurred because of White racial superiority. Charles Mills labeled this belief “Euro-diffusionism”, adopting the term diffusion from cultural anthropology which suggests that cultures intermingled and influenced each others internal structure. This has been a fundamental tenet in much Western (and according to it’s own doctrine, the only true) intellectual tradition. This essay will focus primarily on Charles Mill’s conception of “Euro-diffusionism” and his attempt to debunk it, with reference to two anthropologists one of antiquity and another contemporary. Finally I will suggest that there is more to this self-centered perspective than an attitude, that we might be able to reduce it to psychological predispositions. I will conclude by explaining why debunking “Euro-diffusionism” was important for Mill’s argument of the Racial contract.
The theory of cultural diffusion was semantically coined by the anthropologist Alfred L. Kroeber in his 1940 work Stimulus Diffusion, but the meat behind the theory can be traced much further back (Kroeber 1940). Sir Edward Tylor is one of the most infamous anthropologists of the 19th century and a proponent of this idea of cultural diffusion, meaning that he believed that most of the cultures that held similar traits did so because of some kind of pre-historic contact. Antagonists such as Richard Andree were proponents of the competing view called parallelism where cultures all over the world underwent the same cultural evolution in identical stages. Tylor agreed that for certain aspects of culture and in certain areas this may be true, but mostly because of similar living conditions and similar available resources. Richard Andree believed that “psychic unity” was proof of parallelism, since many beliefs such as life after death have been found in many regions. Tylor replied that dreams correctly explain why many societies believed in life after death, since the dead ancestors can be seen in the dreams of the living. Since dreams are ubiquitous, it explains very well why a belief in life after death would be as well (Lowie 1937).
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