Quotes by Charles Mills

“European humanism usually meant that only Europeans were human.””

“on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made.””

“Go ye, who rest so placidly upon the sacred Bard who had been young, and when he strung his harp was old, and had never seen the righteous forsaken, or his seed begging their bread; go, Teachers of content and honest pride, into the mine, the mill, the forge, the squalid depths of deepest ignorance, and uttermost abyss of man's neglect, and say can any hopeful plant spring up in air so foul that it extinguishes the soul's bright torch as fast as it is kindled!””

“Yes. It took four men, all four ablaze with gorgeous decoration, and the Chief of them unable to exist with fewer than two gold watches in his pocket, emulative of the noble and chaste fashion set by Monseigneur, to conduct the happy chocolate to Monseigneur's lips. One lacquey carried the chocolate-pot into the sacred presence; a second, milled and frothed the chocolate with the little instrument he bore for that function; a third, presented the favoured napkin; a fourth (he of the two gold watches), poured the chocolate out. It was impossible for Monseigneur to dispense with one of these attendants on the chocolate and hold his high place under the admiring Heavens. Deep would have been the blot upon his escutcheon if his chocolate had been ignobly waited on by only three men; he must have died of two.””

“White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.””

“L'HorlogeHorloge! dieu sinistre, effrayant, impassible,Dont le doigt nous menace et nous dit: "Souviens-toi!Les vibrantes Douleurs dans ton coeur plein d'effroiSe planteront bientôt comme dans une cible;Le plaisir vaporeux fuira vers l'horizonAinsi qu'une sylphide au fond de la coulisse ;Chaque instant te dévore un morceau du déliceA chaque homme accordé pour toute sa saison.Trois mille six cents fois par heure, la SecondeChuchote: Souviens-toi! - Rapide, avec sa voixD'insecte, Maintenant dit: Je suis Autrefois,Et j'ai pompé ta vie avec ma trompe immonde!Remember! Souviens-toi, prodigue! Esto memor!(Mon gosier de métal parle toutes les langues.)Les minutes, mortel folâtre, sont des ganguesQu'il ne faut pas lâcher sans en extraire l'or!Souviens-toi que le Temps est un joueur avideQui gagne sans tricher, à tout coup! c'est la loi.Le jour décroît; la nuit augmente; souviens-toi!Le gouffre a toujours soif; la clepsydre se vide. Tantôt sonnera l'heure où le divin Hasard,Où l'auguste Vertu, ton épouse encor vierge,Où le repentir même (oh! la dernière auberge!),Où tout te dira: Meurs, vieux lâche! il est trop tard!””

“The white delusion of racial superiority insulates itself against refutation. Correspondingly, on the positive epistemic side, the route to black knowledge is the self-conscious recognition of white ignorance (including its blackfaced manifestation in black consciousness itself). Du Bois prescribes a critical cognitive distancing from “a world which yields [the Negro] no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world,” a “sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others.”27 The attainment of “second sight” requires an understanding of what it is about whites and the white situation that motivates them to view blacks erroneously. One learns in part to see through identifying white blindness and avoiding the pitfalls of putting on these spectacles for one’s own vision.28 So””

“For what people of color quickly come to see”

“Where is she? Living or dead, where is she? If, as he folds the handkerchief and carefully puts it up, it were able with an enchanted power to bring before him the place where she found it and the night-landscape near the cottage where it covered the little child, would he descry her there? On the waste where the brick-kilns are burning with a pale blue flare, where the straw-roofs of the wretched huts in which the bricks are made are being scattered by the wind, where the clay and water are hard frozen and the mill in which the gaunt blind horse goes round all day looks like an instrument of human torture”

“sickness, ignorance, and want, were the lords in waiting on the saintly presence”