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
Just like classical social contract theorists tend to ignore space, they also ignore the body. This is because they implicitly assume that only white men are capable of participating in society. In contrast, the racial contract is primarily about defining which people are capable of joining society.
Mills implies that classical social contract theorists assume that society is made of white men because they are white men. They tend to mistake their specific social position for a neutral or objective one, and they are never forced to imagine the world from anyone else’s perspective. As a result, white philosophers can talk about a raceless society only because they confuse whiteness with racelessness.
Themes
The distinction between those who can and cannot join society is originally based on Aristotle’s idea that some people are naturally destined for slavery. For centuries, Europeans have looked for ways to clearly distinguish natural slaves from naturally free people, or real citizens from sub-citizens. At first, they based this on the distinction between Christians and Muslims. Later, they began using the category of race, in part because it’s more permanent.
The history that Mills cites here shows how categorizing people into different groups has always been powerful people’s strategy for justifying hierarchies that profit them. The idea of natural slavery is particularly appealing for those with political and economic power because it allows them to blame the violence they commit on the people they are exploiting, and not on their own decision to exploit those people.
Themes
In the racial contract, people are raced in a moral and legal way, a cognitive way, and an aesthetic way.
These three aspects of race allow the white people who form the racial contract to insist that their privilege is based on their moral and legal, cognitive, and aesthetic superiority. In reality, it’s the other way around: their power creates their sense of superiority.
Themes
Morally and legally, the racial contract divides persons from subpersons. The social contract’s vision of a modern society governed through the rule of law depends on Kant’s argument that all persons are inherently morally equal. However, the racial contract excludes non-white people from this moral equality by arguing that they are subpersons. Therefore, the Kantian ideal of equality turns into “equality among equals.” Meanwhile, non-white people get an inferior set of rights and freedoms in society.
Mills hints at his full critique of Enlightenment philosophy: their social contract is really part of the racial contract. Essentially, the racial contract includes the social contract for white people and the expropriation, slavery, and colonial contracts for non-white people. Because many white people do not fully recognize non-white people’s humanity, they wrongly think that they live under the social contract, when they really live under the racial contract. It’s true that all persons get freedom and equality—the problem is that the philosophy of the social contract, like the contemporary idea of race-neutral politics, is based on limiting the scope of who counts as persons.
Themes
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As a result, while the social contract theory presents racism as a “deviation” from perfect equality, the racial contract theory shows that racially unequal societies have actually been following their founding white supremacist ideal: personhood for white people and subpersonhood for non-white people.
By showing that racism is the norm in social contract theory, not the exception, Mills refutes those social philosophers who would insist that the social contract can be rescued from its founders’ racism or is still useful as a social ideal.
Themes
These societies have applied different versions of the racial contract (the expropriation contract, the slavery contract, and the colonial contract) to different categories of non-white people. Meanwhile, white people identify themselves as white becuase they do not belong to any of those categories. Indeed, people generally understand their own racial group through other racial groups’ eyes—for instance, in the U.S., white and Black people’s identities depend on the historical and social opposition between them.
Mills argues here that the racial contract actually creates racial categories. Essentially, Europeans first set up specific social, political, and economic arrangements to exploit different groups of non-Europeans, and then categorized those non-Europeans depending on what kind of arrangements they were forced into. This shows that racial categories are not absolute, and they generally don’t exist before groups come into contact with one another. It also shows how these categories transform over time, depending on social and political conditions.
Themes
The racial contract also races people cognitively. The social contract theory claims that everyone in society can cooperate because of their shared rationality. However, the racial contract purports that non-white subpersons lack rationality and therefore can’t participate as equals in society.
Assessing others’ rationality is really a way of deciding others’ fitness for participation in society. By characterizing non-white people are irrational, Europeans justified excluding non-Europeans from making political decisions or wielding any significant amount of power.
Themes
The idea that non-white people are not fully rational started with medieval theologians. Then, it spread to Enlightenment philosophers (including Locke, Hume, Kant, Voltaire, and Mills) who argued that non-white people were intellectually inferior and couldn’t rule themselves. Later, European pseudoscientists tried to prove the same hypothesis by measuring people’s brains, bone structures, heads, and IQs. Based on the myth of non-white intellectual inferiority, states founded on the racial contract deny non-white people basic legal and political rights.
Europeans’ historical debates over non-white people’s rationality evolved alongside the European intellectual establishment. Religion gave way to philosophy and then to science as a source of authority, but each time, scholars found a new justification for declaring non-white people subhuman. These justifications are all demonstrably false, but scholars’ deep commitment to racism shows how powerfully white supremacy distorts their thinking.
Themes
Finally, the racial contract races people aesthetically by establishing whiteness as the standard of beauty. This often gets conflated with goodness and desirability. Moreover, all people’s bodies are evaluated against the white beauty standard. Black people are furthest from this standard, and in particular, Black women suffer the double oppression of being judged primarily according to their appearance but never meeting the white beauty ideal.
Unequal beauty standards also contribute to discrimination and prejudice against non-white people because they shape who gets power and privilege in society. Like the concepts of moral personhood and rationality, beauty becomes the basis for a hierarchy that puts certain human lives above others.
Themes
