Dancing with Charles: A man, scholar, legacy

Abstract

Scholars like Leonardo (2009) or Yancy (2006) regularly apply, otherwise, dance with Charles Mills’ concepts like the Racial Contract (Mills 1997), epistemology of ignorance (Mills 2007), and white Marxism and Black Radicalism (Mills 2003). By extension, when other educational scholars apply Leonardo or Yancy they inadvertently dance with Charles too. Partner dancing, such as bachata, is about a continual ebb and flow between dance partners, taking turns leading and following. So, whether directly engaging Charles’s conceptualization like the Racial Contract or entangling with his work vis-à-vis scholarly concepts derived from his original conceptualization we, as scholars, continue to dance with Charles, letting him lead at times, following at others. Essentially, Charles’s scholarship and his legacy never skip a beat in the academic cadence of educational research on race, ethnicity, and education. This piece pays homage to his legacy.

Keywords:

• Racial Contract
• race
• whiteness
• justice

Special Note

To my colleague, mentor, and friend, thank you for all you have done. Please rest in peace now; we will take it from here.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. I purposely use Charles not out of disrespect. Instead, ‘Charles’ is how I often referred to him in our personal communique and I want readers to know the man behind the Mills scholarship.

2. Marco Polo is a video chat app https://www.marcopolo.me/.

3. See the first two lines of his chapter ‘White Ignorance’ in Sullivan and Tuana’s (2007) Race and Epistemologies of Ignorance.