Charles W. Mills makes visible in the world of mainstream philosophy some of the crucial issues of the black experience. Ralph Ellison's metaphor of black invisibility has special relevance to philosophy, whose demographic and conceptualized "whiteness" has long been a source of wonder and complaint to racial minorities.

Mills points out the absence of any philosophical narrative theorizing and detailing the centrality of race to the recent history of the West, such as feminists have articulated for gender domination.