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
White supremacy has profoundly shaped the contemporary world, but political philosophers virtually never discuss it in their writings. Instead, they mostly take white supremacy for granted, seeing it as natural and inevitable when it’s really a powerful political system.
Mills starts by naming white supremacy because his book is an attempt to explain the structure of modern society through this context. When Mills talks about white supremacy, he’s not just talking about a prejudiced belief in white people’s superiority to other people—he’s talking about a political system that puts that belief into action.
Themes
Philosophy remains one of the least diverse academic disciplines. Its occasional engagement with race often focuses on specific historical figures or political issues rather than the universal questions at its heart. Philosophers need a way to discuss racism in these universal terms, which is why Mills has developed the concept of a racial contract.
Mills believes that philosophers often fail to recognize that race is an essential part of the human condition—it affects everyone, not just a select few. This means that philosophy that ignores race is not very helpful—and often actually harmful—when it comes to truly understanding or improving society. In developing the “racial contract” idea, Mills aims to discuss race in a way that speaks to everyone.
Themes
Mainstream contractarian theories argue that people form a society by freely agreeing to a “social contract.” But Mills will argue that the contract is really only made between white people, who consider themselves fully human but view non-white people as subhuman. The original social contract theories claim that society is based on free individual consent, so these theories don’t adequately explain why different social groups dominate and oppress one another. However, the racial contract theory does. It’s intended to connect mainstream white philosophy’s abstract discussions of justice with “Native American, African American, and Third and Fourth World political thought,” which focuses on the history and effects of colonialism, racism, and slavery.
The social contract theory is important because it establishes the legitimacy of a government. If people form a government through a free and consensual social contract, this means that the government has a right to rule over those people. But if the government gains power through coercion, domination, and violence—which Mills argues is the historical truth about most currently existing states—then those governments don’t truly represent the will of the people. Therefore, the racial contract theory is partially a response to the social contract theory’s assumption that everyone in society has consented to being ruled over (when the realities of colonization and slavery show otherwise).
Themes
Contemporary philosophers like John Rawls imagine an ideal social contract in order to ask questions about justice. However, Mills’s project is closer to that of early social contract theorists like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who imagined how non-ideal social contracts could explain the actual society we live in. Similarly, feminist philosopher Carole Pateman explains male domination by imagining a “Sexual Contract” at the core of Western society.
Contemporary philosophers view the social contract as an ideal theory, or a thought experiment for how society should look. Instead, theorists like Rousseau, Pateman, and Mills himself want to explain the way society actually is, including flaws like racism (as in Mills’s racial contract) and sexism (as in Pateman’s “Sexual Contract”).
Themes
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In this book, Mills will describe a non-ideal racial contract in order to explain white supremacy’s internal logic and external effects. He hopes this will help his readers better understand the world and also question mainstream philosophy’s “raceless” political theories. His three main points are that white supremacy exists; that white supremacy is a political system; and that it’s useful to think of this political system as based on a racial contract among white people.
While the social contract is an explanation of how and why people form organized societies, the racial contract is a way of explaining how white supremacist states formed. In order to make this clear for his readers, Mills must first explain what white supremacy is and the historical role it’s played in global politics.
Themes
