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
Although contemporary philosophers generally use social contract theories as a thought experiment, rather than an actual historical explanation for the formation of society, Mills argues that the racial contract is real and historically verifiable. It wasn’t a one-time agreement, but rather the product of Europeans exploring and conquering the rest of the world, starting with Christopher Columbus. Accordingly, whereas the social contract only explains the formation of individual nation-states, the racial contract explains the global political, economic, and social order.
Mills hopes that the racial contract will explain the last 500 years of global history by contextualizing how and why Europeans subjugated and exploited the rest of the world for their own benefit. Although this was a long-term process rather than a true contract made in any individual moment, it has created deep and enduring imbalances in power, wealth, and status in the present day.
Themes
Over time, Europeans consolidated their power through a variety of legal, political, and theological texts that collectively served as a kind of contract. These include, for instance, proclamations from the pope, laws about the status of white and non-white people, and public debates about the ethics of colonialism. These texts established hierarchies of human value based on religion, geography, and culture, which were eventually combined into the simplified concept of “race.”
Here, Mills defines the racial contract as a legal agreement made up of many separate writings and decisions made by numerous people over a long period of time. He also touches on the idea that race is an arbitrary way of categorizing people—one that overly simplifies other characteristics like what people believe, where they live, or which cultures they belong to.
Themes
Europeans began legally categorizing non-white as inferior status by defining people’s rationality—and therefore their human rights—based on their willingness to accept Christianity as objective truth. For instance, Spanish conquistadors announced to Native Americans that the pope divinely ordained Spanish rule over the Americas. This meant that anyone who didn’t accept Spanish rule didn’t have human rights, so could be legally killed or enslaved.
In the first phase of colonialism, Europeans used religion to divide people, essentially categorizing Christians as human and non-Christians as subhuman. This was a convenient justification for conquest and slavery, since deeming Native people as inferior meant that it was morally acceptable to exploit or kill them.
Themes
During the Enlightenment, Europeans replaced this religious distinction between human believers versus subhuman nonbelievers with a scientific distinction between white humans and non-white “entities who are humanoid but not fully human.” Based on this distinction, Europeans developed different legal strategies for exploiting different groups of people in different parts of the world.
The Enlightenment was a 17th- and 18th-century intellectual movement that saw the rise of philosophy and science (as opposed to religion) as ways of understanding the world. However, the racial distinction between humans and subhumans did not fade away during this time: it only took another form. This provides important context for Mills’s critique of Enlightenment thought, as it was sometimes used to further the divide between racial groups and perpetuate the idea that non-white people are “not fully human.”
Themes
Get the entire The Racial Contract LitChart as a printable PDF.
For instance, in what Mills calls “the expropriation contract,” white lawyers and judges argued that native peoples were incapable of having property rights or forming true nations, like animals, so their land belonged to white people.
The expropriation contract, which justified the theft of native people’s lands, is the basis for how land and property is distributed in the modern era. Those lands were never returned, and Europeans and their descendants have continued to profit off of them since they were initially colonized.
Themes
In “the slavery contract,” courts gave white people the legal right to hold Native American and African people as slaves, because it was widely believed that non-white people were inferior and needed to be civilized through slavery.
Similarly, the slavery contract legally justified slavery through religious and philosophical arguments. This enabled white people to profit off of enslaved people’s labor for several centuries. Since the wealth stolen by white slaveowners has never been returned to the descendants of the people who created it, the slavery contract is partially responsible for the vast inequality between white and non-white people in the Americas today.
Themes
Finally, in “the colonial contract,” European thinkers and governments gave themselves the right to rule the rest of the world by claiming that white people were inherently superior. By contrast, they claimed that non-white people were naturally inferior and therefore incapable of forming democratic societies.
The colonial contract primarily applies to European and American imperial rule in Africa and Asia. It’s based on the same logic as the expropriation and slavery contracts: European nations legally justified colonialism by arguing that white people are inherently superior on biological, religious, cultural, and/or moral grounds.
Themes
Europeans set up dual systems of government based on these contracts (or collections of laws, philosophical writings, and court opinions). In these dual governments, non-Europeans were subject to a different set of laws because they were “a separate category of beings.” Therefore, racism is not just an unfortunate anomaly in European history: rather, it’s the foundation of European culture, including the Enlightenment’s humanistic philosophy. This philosophy was fundamentally based on the principle “that only Europeans were human.”
The racial contract founded white supremacist society much like a constitution founds a government: it laid out the basic principles and constraints for the society’s formation. One of these basic principles was dividing people into different categories of humanity based on race, which allowed a deeply divided and unequal society to form. In turn, this arrangement is responsible for the modern-day inequality between white and non-white people around the world. As racism was one of the basic principles in the formation of society, Mills believes that it’s wrong for other philosophers to claim that it’s only an anomaly or deviation from the Enlightenment political ideal of equality. As he points out here, these Enlightenment ideals were really restricted to a small part of humanity (white people).
Themes
However, most philosophers still ignore how slavery and colonialism fundamentally shaped European art and philosophy. In reality, for the white European and American public, white supremacy was viewed as common sense until the mid-1900s. Although the white public hesitates to recognize it, this racist common sense is still the basis of modern political institutions and global power structures.
Mills critiques European and American philosophy by showing that, beyond ignoring racism, these schools of thought are largely founded on racism. If 17th-, 18th-, 19th-, and early 20th-century Euro-American philosophers do not mention race, this is likely only because white supremacy was common sense to them, so it did not need to be explained or justified. But the recent shift away from explicit white supremacy has done little to change contemporary societies’ underlying political and economic structure. In fact, for Mills, it is a way of maintaining this same structure by denying reality and refusing to change.
Themes
For example, the United States was founded as a white supremacist slave state, built on land claimed through expropriation and genocide. Its Constitution enshrined nonwhite people’s inferior status into law. This is also true of other settler states, like Canada, Australia, and South Africa. These countries’ laws have changed over time, but very slowly, and they’re still based on white supremacy. For instance, until very recently, the U.S., Canada, and Australia only allowed white people to immigrate and become citizens.
Notably, Mills tells a version of U.S. history that’s drastically different from the nationalistic version most North Americans are likely to learn in school. Much religion and philosophy were used to justify white supremacy in the past, oftentimes history is retold in order to glorify American white supremacy in the present. Although the U.S., Canada, and Australia have recently changed their immigration policies to accept non-white people, before this the borders were open to Europeans for more than a century. As a result, older generations of European immigrants have had much longer to build wealth in these countries. This wealth gap is a product of historical white supremacy, which illustrates how seemingly race-neutral policies can actually be a continuation of racist policies in the past.
Themes
These examples show how European colonizers collectively subdued the rest of the world, acting in a kind of global alliance. Mills concludes that our contemporary world is “built on the Racial Contract.” This is obvious when looking at the historical record, yet it’s not obvious to most white people. This is because they learn to see white supremacy “as just ‘the way things are.’” This includes Anglo-American philosophers, who have largely failed to identify and analyze the modern world’s white supremacist foundations.
The enormous gap between most white people’s assumptions and the actual historical record is further evidence that the racial contract continues to powerfully shape the way that white people perceive the world. Specifically, it teaches them to perceive it in a distorted way that hides the real source of the wealth gap between white and non-white people: genocide, slavery, and colonialism. The fact that this distorts even the perception of philosophers—whose role is to analyze the world as objectively as possible—further speaks to the power of white supremacy in the modern world.
Themes
