The concept of the non-white “savage” symbolizes how white people have historically justified white supremacy by imagining an inherent division between white and non-white people. In European and North American popular culture, literature, and philosophy, the portrayal of non-white people as “savages” is a common racist trope—and Mills argues that viewing non-white people in this way is really just a thinly-veiled justification for colonization, expropriation, and slavery. This is because it suggests that non-white people are culturally, morally, and intellectually inferior to white people. In turn, this implies that non-white people need to be reformed, particularly through contact with (or domination by) white people and cultures.
The term “savage” originates in the Latin homo sylvestris, which essentially means “wild man of the wood.” In Europe, this word became a way to associate non-white people with wild, untamed, exotic, and dangerous spaces. By extension, just as Europeans considered it their mission to tame wild spaces, they made it their mission to tame—or colonize—“savage” populations. In reality, framing non-white people in this way was an excuse for Europeans to colonize their lands and enslave them. And in this way, the stereotype of the “savage” represents the way white supremacy has been normalized throughout history.
Enlightenment philosophers like Hobbes and Rousseau also used the concept of savagery to place limits on who deserves freedom and equality. Because they tied the difference between human beings and savages to certain characteristics that they deemed necessary for civil society—like the capacity for morality and rational thought—they used the idea of savagery to justify denying political rights and freedoms to non-white people. Unfortunately, Mills argues, the racist trope of savagery is still alive and well today: many white people continue to live in a “racial fantasyland,” seeing non-white people as animalistic savages rather than complex human beings. For Mills, then, the “savage” still symbolizes the way that non-white people are treated as subhuman under white supremacy.
The Savage Quotes in The Racial Contract
Yet the United States itself, of course, is a white settler state on territory expropriated from its aboriginal inhabitants through a combination of military force, disease, and a “century of dishonor” of broken treaties. The expropriation involved literal genocide (a word now unfortunately devalued by hyperbolic overuse) of a kind that some recent revisionist historians have argued needs to be seen as comparable to the Third Reich’s. Washington, Father of the Nation, was, understandably, known somewhat differently to the Senecas as “Town Destroyer.” In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson characterized Native Americans as “merciless Indian Savages,” and in the Constitution, blacks, of course, appear only obliquely, through the famous “60 percent solution.” Thus, as Richard Drinnon concludes: “The Framers manifestly established a government under which non-Europeans were not men created equal—in the white polity…they were nonpeoples.”
The golden age of contract theory (1650 to 1800) overlapped with the growth of a European capitalism whose development was stimulated by the voyages of exploration that increasingly gave the contract a racial subtext. The evolution of the modern version of the contract, characterized by an antipatriarchalist Enlightenment liberalism, with its proclamations of the equal rights, autonomy, and freedom of all men, thus took place simultaneously with the massacre, expropriation, and subjection to hereditary slavery of men at least apparently human. This contradiction needs to be reconciled; it is reconciled through the Racial Contract, which essentially denies their personhood and restricts the terms of the social contract to whites. “To invade and dispossess the people of an unoffending civilized country would violate morality and transgress the principles of international law,” writes Jennings, “but savages were exceptional. Being uncivilized by definition, they were outside the sanctions of both morality and law.” The Racial Contract is thus the truth of the social contract.
There is also the evidence of silence. Where is Grotius’s magisterial On Natural Law and the Wrongness of the Conquest of the Indies, Locke’s stirring Letter concerning the Treatment of the Indians, Kant’s moving On the Personhood of Negroes, Mill’s famous condemnatory Implications of Utilitarianism for English Colonialism, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’s outraged Political Economy of Slavery? Intellectuals write about what interests them, what they find important, and—especially if the writer is prolific—silence constitutes good prima facie evidence that the subject was not of particular interest. By their failure to denounce the great crimes inseparable from the European conquest, or by the halfheartedness of their condemnation, or by their actual endorsement of it in some cases, most of the leading European ethical theorists reveal their complicity in the Racial Contract.
The Savage Symbol Timeline in The Racial Contract
