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
Moral philosophy generally focuses on formulating ideals for human behavior, while political philosophy focuses on applying those ideals. However, Mills is focusing on actual history, not ideals. This is because he thinks that people can change society more effectively if they recognize “the ugly truth of the past—and present.” Specifically, they must learn why the racial contract succeeded and the raceless social contract failed.
Mills makes an important distinction between ideal theories like the social contract, which try to imagine a perfect society in order to help guide people’s actions, and “naturalized” theories like the racial contract, which try to describe the actual world in order to show people how to improve it. Because an ideal society wouldn’t include racism or white supremacy, theorizing about such a society does not help people eliminate racism or white supremacy in the real world. This is why Mills concludes that non-white people need a “naturalized” theory in order to win equity and justice.
Themes
Social contract theory generally presents racism as a random and ultimately unimportant deviation from the norm of human equality. In contrast, the racial contract theory recognizes that racism is the norm, and discrimination isn’t random but rather systematically targets certain groups, as enshrined in law.
Some philosophers may respond to Mills’s argument by saying that the social contract is still a useful ideal for society, and that its benefits just haven’t been fully extended to people of color yet. Mills’s response is that the social contract has always really been a racial contract, even in its earliest and most idealistic versions. In turn, modern societies have all been fundamentally based on racist exclusion. Because the white population’s power and identity are tied to racial oppression, this means that simple reforms will never be enough to create meaningful change.
Themes
Understanding real human morality means seeing how a “racialized moral psychology” comes out of the racial contract and convinces white people that they’re acting morally while they’re being racist. This is just like how, despite all their important disagreements, influential male philosophers ranging from Plato and Aristotle to Hobbes and Rousseau all agreed that societies should subordinate women. Similarly, all the major philosophers of the social contract—and even many of their opponents—agreed that white people are more civilized and generally superior to non-white people. Moreover, as writers tend to write about the things they care about, their failure to discuss racial inequity and the crimes of European colonialism further shows that they are complicit with the racial contract.
The racial contract influences the way white people treat non-white people, because it convinces them that a different set of moral codes ought to apply to each group. So just as Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, and Rousseau thought that subordination was genuinely best for women and people of color, white people often genuinely do not understand how their behavior is racist. This can make it particularly difficult for them to recognize or work against the racial contract.
Themes
To understand how the racial contract managed to invert morality, Mills looks to cognitive science. For instance, the racial contract builds prejudice into white people’s basic conceptions about race, leading them to view their own superiority as obvious and natural. It also encourages them to define their own well-being by comparing themselves to non-white people, and it blocks them from empathizing with non-white people.
Mills is only proposing a few hypotheses about racial cognitive distortion: he recognizes that this is a broad topic that could use further study. (Much of his later work focuses on this very idea.) However, his core argument here is that white people tend to be ignorant about racial issues because this allows them to avoid confronting the consequences of white supremacy. By saving their empathy for other white people and explaining inequalities by referencing non-white people’s perceived flaws, white people stay comfortable enough with their privilege that they can avoid taking steps to give it up.
Themes
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Mills concludes that these “structures of moral cognitive distortion” create a “Herrenvolk [master-race] ethics,” in which moral principles apply to white people but not to other groups. This explains why the classic social contract philosophers, like Locke and Kant, claimed to be discussing universal values yet really ended up reserving those values for white people. In fact, this kind of Herrenvolk ethics can distort any moral theory in order to preserve white supremacy. People of color have long recognized this.
Herrenvolk ethics distorts ordinary race-neutral ethics just as the racial contract distorts the social contract: by limiting its scope to a certain group of people. This allows white people to dodge criticism by talking in universal terms, but without truly universal intent. In other words, Herrenvolk ethics is a strategy for maintaining de facto white supremacy, now that formal white supremacy is no longer viable.
Themes
Mills quotes writers Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin, who argued that white people often choose ignorance and self-deception rather than recognizing non-white people’s humanity. The philosopher Lewis Gordon describes this as an example of bad faith, which means deliberately choosing to believe “comfortable falsehoods” over “uncomfortable truths.”
These examples show that Black intellectuals have long recognized and theorized about the way white supremacy fosters ignorance. To overcome this ignorance, white people have to confront “uncomfortable truths” and actively help correct the suffering and inequality that white supremacy has created. This is difficult personally, socially, and politically, but it’s also necessary to build the free, just, and equal society that the Enlightenment supposedly promised.
Themes
White supremacist societies distort the truth and choose willful ignorance by denying the horrific atrocities that Europe has committed against the world. In by far the largest genocide in human history, European colonists murdered at least 100 million Native Americans. They enslaved at least 30 million Africans in the Americas, and imperial militaries casually massacred native people throughout the world for centuries to strengthen colonial rule. Soldiers frequently dehumanized their non-white victims by keeping their bones and body parts as war trophies. Public lynchings continued in the U.S. into the 20th century. During wars, Europeans have consistently used more lethal weapons and disproportionate force against non-Europeans. European racism led to the Holocaust, mass murder by American troops in Vietnam, and numerous other horrors. Mills concludes that all these examples show how, under the racial contract, white people’s lives are considered far more valuable than non-white people’s lives.
Mills’s three-page-long catalogue of European and American atrocities might be hard for some readers to swallow, and that’s his point: the historical record shows that white supremacy has caused has more death, suffering, and destruction than any other political ideology in the history of humankind. It’s still the reigning ideology in the contemporary global order, which means people still have to reckon with it. But its magnitude explains why most white people choose to ignore or forget about it whenever they can. Although this makes people feel better, it also prevents them from speaking out or taking action against white supremacy. Therefore, although ignorance is common and understandable, it’s also a form of morally reprehensible negligence. It amounts to complicity with both historical and contemporary genocide, slavery, and colonialism. This is because willful ignorance allows white people to continue enjoying the power, wealth, and privilege that they and their ancestors have amassed through the racial contract.
Themes
The racial contract also explains the Holocaust, which was the culmination of a long historical process of colonization and genocide. But today, many people continue to believe that the Holocaust was totally unique in human history. Mills argues that this shows how the racial contract has successfully made white people forget all the atrocities Europeans committed earlier, outside of Europe. The Holocaust only seems unique in human history to people who value white lives above non-white lives. In fact, even Hitler himself explicitly said that he was following in the footsteps of the Spanish in the New World and the English in India.
Mills argues that white supremacy is responsible for both the Holocaust itself and the contemporary belief that the Holocaust is unique among world events. To truly do justice to the Holocaust’s victims, Mills believes that we must acknowledge that it was part of an ongoing historical pattern that continues today. After all, understanding and learning to recognize this pattern is the best way to stop future genocides. As Hitler himself pointed out, white supremacy is the common thread between the Holocaust and earlier genocides, which were all attempts to enforce the racial contract.
Themes
Finally, Mills argues that viewing society through the lens of the racial contract is important because it gives white people the opportunity to disavow white supremacy and “speak out and struggle against the terms of the Contract.” If they don’t, they are consenting to white supremacy. Small numbers of white “race traitors” have always bravely put humanity’s collective interests above the white population’s specific interests. Mills names a few, such as Spanish priest Bartolomé de las Casas, philosophers Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and white abolitionists and anti-apartheid activists.
Mills considers it important that his theory allows white people to become “race traitors,” because this means he isn’t blaming them for things they can’t choose (like being born white). In other words, white people are born at the top of a global system of violence and exploitation. Whether they like it or not, their position gives them substantial advantages throughout their lives, but these advantages depend on other people’s suffering. However, white people’s position of power in the system of global exploitation also gives them significant power to help end that system. But this means that they have to become politically active on behalf of humanity as a whole.
Themes
