Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Racial Contract, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Global White Supremacy
Racism in Philosophy
Cognitive Distortion and White Ignorance
Racism’s Historical Evolution
Summary
Analysis
Mills explains that philosophers really talk about three kinds of social contracts: political, moral, and epistemological. Political contracts describe how people form society and a government. Moral contracts explain how people agree on laws and moral norms for their society. Epistemological contracts set out certain rules for thinking.
Mills breaks the racial contract down into political, moral, and epistemological agreements because these are the three levels at which the contract’s signatories define themselves as a community. Those who agree to the racial contract (white people) view themselves as moral and rational citizens. In contrast, those excluded from the social contract (non-white people) are defined as non-citizens, amoral or immoral subpersons, and incapable of rational knowledge.
Themes
In the racial contract’s epistemological contract, participants agree to classify themselves as “white” and therefore fully human. They categorize everyone else as “nonwhite,” subhuman, and therefore exempt from the rules for human society that the political and moral contracts outline. In a nutshell, the racial contract is white people’s agreement over how to control nonwhite people’s “bodies, land, and resources.”
When Mills describes the epistemological dimension of the racial contract, he points out that “white” and “nonwhite” aren’t natural or preexisting categories. Rather, they are social constructs, or concepts formed by collective agreement. Those who make the racial contract define themselves (and their in-group) as white and use this arbitrary category as the basis for banding together and exploiting other groups for their own benefit. This is an epistemological contract because it’s an agreement to understand the world in a certain way.
Themes
The racial contract’s epistemological contract also affects its political and moral contracts. Politically, traditional social contract theory imagines “abstract raceless ‘men’” establishing the state. Meanwhile, the racial contract theory shows how white people use race to seize and preserve power. In the traditional contract theory, people leave the state of nature and become civilized when they form society. But in the racial contract, certain people identify themselves as civilized white people, while defining everyone else—non-white people—as “savages” or “barbarians” who live in a state of nature and need white people to civilize them. Based on this division, white people create white supremacy: a political organization that facilitates and upholds their power, privilege, and control over non-white people.
The racial contract isn’t just a modification of the social contract, in which the “abstract raceless ‘men’” who form society happen to be white supremacists. Rather, it’s fundamentally different because it shows that people divide themselves politically when they form society (into white citizens and non-white “barbarians”). In Mills’s model, the formation of society is inherently coercive, not inherently consensual. By showing how the opposing concepts of civilization and the state of nature can be used to justify one racial group dominating another, Mills begins to show how the social contract (as an idea) is itself part of the racial contract (as a historical fact).
Themes
The racial contract also includes a different moral contract. Most traditional contractarian theorists view the moral contract as people’s attempt to write down and enforce a preexisting, objective morality, usually based on the principle of freedom and equality for all human beings. However, the racial contract reserves natural freedom and equality for white men. These white men view non-white people as subhumans incapable of respecting natural law and therefore not subject to it.
As in the social contract, the signatories to the racial contract make an agreement to recognize and protect one another’s rights—but only while agreeing not to recognize or protect other people’s rights. So just as white people define themselves as a political and racial community through the racial contract, they also define a set of moral values—freedom and equality—that’s limited to their own in-group.
Themes
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Finally, the racial contract also transforms the traditional social contract’s epistemology, or view of knowledge. Traditional theories are based on the idea of natural law, which could be defined as the objective reason and morality that God gives to humanity, or just as people’s natural self-interest. In traditional social contract theories, the contract forms around this natural law: in order to become full members of society, people must commit to seeing natural law as the “correct, objective interpretation of the world.”
Mills argues that there is an epistemological contract underlying the racial contract because he sees that forming a society requires agreeing on a basic worldview. In particular, people must agree on basic assumptions about where human rights and freedoms come from, how the world is structured, and what the purpose of society is. This is part of why Mills thinks philosophy is so important: it helps identify and shape people’s fundamental assumptions about the world. In turn, he thinks the social contract theory teaches people false assumptions about the world.
Themes
Similarly, under the racial contract, people must consent to a specific way of viewing the world in order to join society. But this worldview is a set of distortions and misinterpretations that support white people’s belief in white supremacy. Ironically, these collective distortions prevent white people from truly understanding the society they have built. Instead, they see “a racial fantasyland” where non-white people are not full humans but rather racist caricatures like Caliban, Shakespeare’s animalistic Native character from The Tempest. Literature and pop culture help white people impose these distorted fantasies on the world—and these fantasies enable slavery, colonialism, and genocide.
Ignorance is a powerful tool for the racial contract, which deceives its signatories into believing that they are merely agreeing to the social contract. In other words, it encourages them to convince themselves that they’re participating in a fair and equal society, and that non-white people are justly excluded from this society because they are inferior. But in reality, they are participating in an oppressive society, in which they gain privileges by excluding non-white people. The racial contract’s fantasies and mythologies about non-white become a self-fulfilling prophecy: white people believe that the fantasies are true and force non-white people to fulfill those fantasies. Then, they point to this as evidence that the fantasies were right in the first place.
Themes
