Abstract

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.