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
By virtue of their position at the bottom of the racial hierarchy, non-white people tend to clearly see the racial contract’s hypocrisy. In particular, they understand that white people freely talk about values and people in the abstract, when they are really only referring to white people. Therefore, in conversations about political theory, people of color tend to pay attention to whether the theory is implicitly limiting personhood to white people. White people see such non-white people as preoccupied with race, but this is because they recognize that conversations about the social contract are really conversations about the racial contract—in which, as non-white people, their own personhood is never guaranteed.
Non-white people tend to understand the system that oppresses them, because they have to in order to survive. One important aspect of this is understanding that white people often limit their sphere of concern to other white people without even realizing it. In other words, white supremacy—or putting one’s whiteness before one’s humanity—is an automatic reflex for many white people. For some, “people” implicitly means “white people.”
Themes
Mills points out that major Black, Indigenous, anti-colonial, and Third World thinkers have generally recognized the basic dimensions of the racial contract: the distinction between persons and subpersons, the “Herrenvolk ethics” that prescribes different rules for white and non-white people, and the institutionalized white supremacy of the state. Mills offers a long list of examples from famous thinkers, activists, and political leaders ranging from the Lakota leader Sitting Bull and the Black American sociologist W.E.B. DuBois to the Indian Independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru and the Martinican activists Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. They all realized that society is founded on “racial subordination,” and that political theory is generally written from the perspective of white subordinators.
Mills cites a long list of prominent thinkers in order to underline his point that people of color generally recognize the workings of the racial contract because of how it affects them. He also hopes to remind his readers that the global fight against the racial contract has been going on for many generations. Non-white people have developed their own political theories as part of this fight, and Mills makes it clear that his own theory of the racial contract is part of this tradition.
Themes
In response to the racial contract, colonized people tried to form unified racial movements (like Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism). But Europeans were already unified: European writers and philosophers explicitly thought about colonization as a way of clearing the world for white people to settle it. Therefore, they explicitly banded together to protect white supremacy.
Colonized people’s unified movements show that they clearly understood how white supremacy created a kind of global European alliance (and perhaps rivalry, as well) among colonial countries. This shows that white supremacy was emerging as a global political system and could only be countered by similarly powerful global alliances.
Themes
In response, non-white peoples banded together around their shared political goal: the fight against imperialism and white supremacy. This split explains why W.E.B. DuBois famously argued that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” It also explains the alliances that non-European nations and peoples formed at occasions like the famous 1955 Bandung Conference.
“The problem of the color line” persists today, in the form of the great divide between majority-white and majority-non-white countries that Mills discussed in his first chapter. However, it’s not clear how non-white people and nations plan to challenge the global alliance of white supremacy today, several decades after formal decolonization.
Themes
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Today, this idea of a fight against imperialism and white supremacy seems outdated to most people. Mills argues that this is because the racial contract has made white supremacy, and its long history, largely invisible. Contemporary philosophers have contributed to this cover-up by insisting on talking about society in terms of “abstract and general categories that originally were restricted to white citizens.” And because these philosophers were stuck in these abstract terms and don’t recognize the racial contract, they can’t understand the depth and diversity of non-white philosophers’ thought.
Mills attributes the decline of anti-imperialism to the new phase of informal white supremacy that formed in the mid-20th century. Because both philosophy and politics are stuck using “abstract and general categories,” they portray the world as equal, while forgetting to address the cumulative inequalities created by 500 years of formal white supremacy. Now, identifying white supremacy as a global political system is much harder than in the past, when European colonialism made it obvious. However, Mills’s theory of the racial contract is an attempt to make this system visible again.
Themes
For non-white people, who are considered subhuman under the racial contract, the first step in politics has to be claiming personhood. This starts with an “internal battle” against their own internalized sense of inferiority. After finding self-respect, non-white people next have to reclaim epistemic power over themselves, or learn to think about society and history outside conventional Eurocentric frameworks of thinking. This often includes writing “vindicationist” histories to correct white historians’ misrepresentations. Finally, to resist the racial contract’s beauty standards, non-white people have to assert their own. This is what makes slogans like “Black is beautiful!” politically significant.
Mills follows in the footsteps of numerous anti-racist scholars before him by giving his readers a roadmap toward liberation. This is a long and difficult process for people of color, who have to unlearn white supremacy’s distorted worldview. Then, they have to learn to see the world in a totally new way if they want to reclaim their humanity. But by winning the “internal battle” for self-respect, people of color can identify the racial contract and reject the myth of the social contract, which falsely suggests that the state is built on citizens’ legitimate consent.
Themes
