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 different political philosophies imagine the state differently. According to the social contract, the state is legitimate because people consent to its authority and then use it to form an equal community and pass laws too govern themselves. But there are also other models of the state, including communitarian, corporatist, anarchist, and Marxist ones. Mills argues that there should be one more: “the racial, or white-supremacist, state.”
The social contract’s original purpose was to explain what makes a state legitimate. But Mills suggests that this isn’t a useful task for philosophy, because the states that most people live under aren’t based on legitimate popular consent. Rather, they’re based on one group banding together to exploit another. Therefore, theorizing about “the racial, or white-supremacist, state” can actually help people improve the world, and forming a legitimate state in the contemporary world would require taking race into account (in order to undo white supremacy) rather than pretending that it doesn’t exist.
Themes
Under the social contract theory, the state only uses force to protect the people, but the white supremacist state uses force to control “the subperson population.” Specifically, it enacts this control through violence and ideology.
While violence and ideological coercion aren't the white supremacist state's main purpose or goal, these methods are what makes the white supremacist state morally reprehensible in Mills’s view. In other words, this violence and ideological coercion violate the very values that the social contract pretends to uphold: freedom, equality, and justice.
Themes
The white supremacist state first asserted itself through brutal violence, by committing genocide in the Americas and Australia, launching brutal wars in Africa and Asia, and imposing slavery on millions of people. European forces removed non-white people from their land (in the expropriation contract), or else forced them to work on it under constant surveillance (in the slavery and colonial contracts). In the slavery contract, Europeans forced enslaved people to accept their status as subhumans through brutal practices like “seasoning” or “breaking” them through torture when they first arrived in the New World.
The violence of European colonialism has enduring consequences in the present, because it’s what allowed European people to initially seize non-white people’s land, wealth, and resources. Crucially, this was state-sponsored violence: whereas similar actions today would be illegal, at the time, this violence was involved in establishing the rule of law in European colonies. This shows that, contrary to the social contract theory, these states were actually based on illegitimate violence, not legitimate consent.
Themes
After establishing itself, the white supremacist state enforces the racial contract by punishing crimes against white people and stopping dissent and rebellion among non-white people. This explains police brutality’s long history in the U.S., where the police have historically served as an occupying army in Black neighborhoods. It also explains why crimes against white people are punished disproportionately: they represent a threat “to a system predicated on nonwhite subpersonhood.” For instance, Europeans frequently punished slave uprisings, colonial rebellions, and even peaceful protests through disproportionate violence, in order to maintain the racial order. Similarly, extrajudicial violence is commonly committed against non-white people, who are seen as “inherently bestial and savage.” Lynching and vigilante killing are common examples.
White supremacist nations commit state-sponsored violence in order to maintain their stratified racial hierarchies. In fact, Mills suggests that they require a baseline level of constant violence in order to prevent their exploited workforce and underclasses from rebelling against the entire political system. White supremacy’s alliance with extrajudicial vigilantes further shows that the law is fundamentally geared toward protecting white people’s interests and is carried out through coercion, not the people’s legitimate consent. In the social contract’s terms, that would make a state illegitimate.
Themes
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Next, the white supremacist state also uses ideological coercion to maintain the racial hierarchy. Namely, it uses a “depersonizing conceptual apparatus” to teach people to see non-white people as subhuman. For instance, after the abolition of slavery, the U.S. education system failed to teach Black people about their historical achievements. Across the world, similar programs prohibited native people from exercising their traditional cultures and speaking their own languages. Colonial education taught them to see themselves through Europeans’ eyes instead, creating what writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o has called a “cultural bomb” that destroys people’s sense of their own culture and encourages them to consensually accept the racial contract.
The “depersonizing conceptual apparatus” is a set of ideas and stories that encourages non-white people to see themselves as inferior to white people. By erasing non-white people’s collective histories, languages, and cultures, Europeans disempowered them and discouraged them from resisting the racial contract. This facilitated the economic exploitation of their land and labor, which was always the racial contract’s primary goal. Even today, most students learn history, literature, and philosophy from a European or North American perspective—regardless of where they live.
Themes
