The Racial Contract

by

Charles W. Mills

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on The Racial Contract makes teaching easy.
The titular and central concept in Mills’s book, the racial contract is a body of formal and informal agreements among white people that establish and maintain a white supremacist society (in which white people permanently control the majority of power and wealth). It divides humanity into racial groups, categorizing white people as deserving freedom and full rights and non-white people as subhuman and undeserving of the same rights or liberties. According to Mills, the racial contract is made up of several different elements: the expropriation contract, the slavery contract, and the colonial contract.

Racial Contract Quotes in The Racial Contract

The The Racial Contract quotes below are all either spoken by Racial Contract or refer to Racial Contract. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Global White Supremacy Theme Icon
).
Introduction Quotes

White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 1
Explanation and Analysis:

The “Racial Contract,” then, is intended as a conceptual bridge between two areas now largely segregated from each other: on the one hand, the world of mainstream (i.e., white) ethics and political philosophy, preoccupied with discussions of justice and rights in the abstract, on the other hand, the world of Native American, African American, and Third and Fourth World political thought, historically focused on issues of conquest, imperialism, colonialism, white settlement, land rights, race and racism, slavery, jim crow, reparations, apartheid, cultural authenticity, national identity, indigenismo, Afrocentrism, etc. These issues hardly appear in mainstream political philosophy, but they have been central to the political struggles of the majority of the world’s population. Their absence from what is considered serious philosophy is a reflection not of their lack of seriousness but of the color of the vast majority of Western academic philosophers (and perhaps their lack of seriousness).

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1, Part 1 Quotes

The Racial Contract is that set of formal or informal agreements or meta-agreements […] between the members of one subset of humans, henceforth designated by (shifting) “racial” (phenotypical/genealogical/cultural) criteria C1, C2, C3 . . . as “white,” and coextensive (making due allowance for gender differentiation) with the class of full persons, to categorize the remaining subset of humans as “nonwhite” and of a different and inferior moral status, subpersons, so that they have a subordinate civil standing in the white or white-ruled polities […] the general purpose of the Contract is always the differential privileging of the whites as a group with respect to the nonwhites as a group, the exploitation of their bodies, land, and resources, and the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities to them. All whites are beneficiaries of the Contract, though some whites are not signatories to it.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 11
Explanation and Analysis:

The requirements of “objective” cognition, factual and moral, in a racial polity are in a sense more demanding in that officially sanctioned reality is divergent from actual reality. So here, it could be said, one has an agreement to misinterpret the world. One has to learn to see the world wrongly, but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority, whether religious or secular.

Thus in effect, on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made. […] To a significant extent, then, white signatories will live in an invented delusional world, a racial fantasyland.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 17-8
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1, Part 2 Quotes

Although no single act literally corresponds to the drawing up and signing of a contract, there is a series of acts—papal bulls and other theological pronouncements; European discussions about colonialism, “discovery,” and international law; pacts, treaties, and legal decisions; academic and popular debates about the humanity of nonwhites; the establishment of formalized legal structures of differential treatment; and the routinization of informal illegal or quasi-legal practices effectively sanctioned by the complicity of silence and government failure to intervene and punish perpetrators—which collectively can be seen, not just metaphorically but close to literally, as its conceptual, juridical, and normative equivalent.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 20-1
Explanation and Analysis:

It would be a fundamental error, then—a point to which I will return—to see racism as anomalous, a mysterious deviation from European Enlightenment humanism. Rather, it needs to be realized that, in keeping with the Roman precedent, European humanism usually meant that only Europeans were human. European moral and political theory, like European thought in general, developed within the framework of the Racial Contract and, as a rule, took it for granted.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker), John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant
Page Number: 26-7
Explanation and Analysis:

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.”

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Savage
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:

We live, then, in a world built on the Racial Contract. That we do is simultaneously quite obvious if you think about it […] and nonobvious, since most whites don’t think about it or don’t think about it as the outcome of a history of political oppression but rather as just “the way things are.” […] In the Treaty of Tordesillas (1494) which divided the world between Spain and Portugal, the Valladolid (Spain) Conference (1550–1551) to decide whether Native Americans were really human, the later debates over African slavery and abolitionism, the Berlin Conference (1884–1885) to partition Africa, the various inter-European pacts, treaties, and informal arrangements on policing their colonies, the post-World War I discussions in Versailles after a war to make the world safe for democracy—we see (or should see) with complete clarity a world being governed by white people.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 30
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1, Part 3 Quotes

Economic structures have been set in place, causal processes established, whose outcome is to pump wealth from one side of the globe to another, and which will continue to work largely independently of the ill will/good will, racist/antiracist feelings of particular individuals. This globally color-coded distribution of wealth and poverty has been produced by the Racial Contract and in turn reinforces adherence to it in its signatories and beneficiaries.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 36-7
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2, Part 1 Quotes

It is not merely that space is normatively characterized on the macrolevel before conquest and colonial settlement, but that even afterward, on the local level, there are divisions, the European city and the Native Quarter, Whitetown and Niggertown/Darktown, suburb and inner city. David Theo Goldberg comments, “Power in the polis, and this is especially true of racialized power, reflects and refines the spatial relations of its inhabitants.” Part of the purpose of the color bar/the color line/apartheid/jim crow is to maintain these spaces in their place, to have the checkerboard of virtue and vice, light and dark space, ours and theirs, clearly demarcated so that the human geography prescribed by the Racial Contract can be preserved.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 47-8
Explanation and Analysis:

The basic sequence ran something like this: there are no people there in the first place; in the second place, they’re not improving the land; and in the third place—oops!—they’re already all dead anyway (and, honestly, there really weren’t that many to begin with), so there are no people there, as we said in the first place.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 50
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2, Part 2 Quotes

The hierarchically differentiated human values of plebeian and patrician, of serf, monk, and knight, were replaced by the “infinite value” of all human beings. It is a noble and inspiring ideal, even if its incorporation into countless manifestos, declarations, constitutions, and introductory ethics texts has now reduced it to a homily, deprived it of the shattering political force it once had. But what needs to be emphasized is that it is only white persons (and really only white males) who have been able to take this for granted, for whom it can be an unexciting truism. As Lucius Outlaw underlines, European liberalism restricts “egalitarianism to equality among equals,” and blacks and others are ontologically excluded by race from the promise of “the liberal project of modernity.” The terms of the Racial Contract mean that nonwhite subpersonhood is enshrined simultaneously with white personhood.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 55-6
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2, Part 3 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Savage
Page Number: 63-4
Explanation and Analysis:

The Racial Contract, therefore, underwrites the social contract, is a visible or hidden operator that restricts and modifies the scope of its prescriptions. But since there is both synchronic and diachronic variation, there are many different versions or local instantiations of the Racial Contract, and they evolve over time, so that the effective force of the social contract itself changes, and the kind of cognitive dissonance between the two alters.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 72
Explanation and Analysis:

Contemporary debates between nonwhites and whites about the centrality or peripherality of race can thus be seen as attempts respectively to point out, and deny, the existence of the Racial Contract that underpins the social contract. The frustrating problem nonwhites have always had, and continue to have, with mainstream political theory is not with abstraction itself (after all, the “Racial Contract” is itself an abstraction) but with an idealizing abstraction that abstracts away from the crucial realities of the racial polity. The shift to the hypothetical, ideal contract encourages and facilitates this abstraction, since the eminently nonideal features of the real world are not part of the apparatus. There is then, in a sense, no conceptual point-of-entry to start talking about the fundamental way in which (as all nonwhites know) race structures one’s life and affects one’s life chances.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 76
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2, Part 4 Quotes

Thus in the North and South American reactions to Native American resistance and slave uprisings, in the European responses to the Saint Domingue (Haitian) revolution, the Sepoy uprising (“Indian Mutiny”), the Jamaican Morant Bay insurrection, the Boxer rebellion in China, the struggle of the Hereros in German Africa, in the twentieth century colonial and neocolonial wars (Ethiopia, Madagascar, Vietnam, Algeria, Malaya, Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Namibia), in the white settlers’ battles to maintain a white Rhodesia and an apartheid South Africa, one repeatedly sees the same pattern of systematic massacre. It is a pattern that confirms that an ontological shudder has been sent through the system of the white polity, calling forth what could be called the white terror to make sure that the foundations of the moral and political universe stay in place. […] In general, then, watchfulness for nonwhite resistance and a corresponding readiness to employ massively disproportionate retaliatory violence are intrinsic to the fabric of the racial polity in a way different from the response to the typical crimes of white citizens.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 85-6
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3, Part 1 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker), John Locke, Immanuel Kant
Related Symbols: The Savage
Page Number: 94
Explanation and Analysis:

Correspondingly, the Racial Contract also explains the actual astonishing historical record of European atrocity against nonwhites, which quantitatively and qualitatively, in numbers and horrific detail, cumulatively dwarfs all other kinds of ethnically/racially motivated massacres put together.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 98
Explanation and Analysis:

There is a real choice for whites, though admittedly a difficult one. The rejection of the Racial Contract and the normed inequities of the white polity [require one] to speak out and struggle against the terms of the Contract. So in this case, moral/political judgments about one’s “consent” to the legitimacy of the political system and conclusions about one’s effectively having become a signatory to the “contract,” are apropos—and so are judgments of one’s culpability. By unquestioningly “going along with things,” by accepting all the privileges of whiteness with concomitant complicity in the system of white supremacy, one can be said to have consented to Whiteness.
And in fact there have always been praiseworthy whites—anticolonialists, abolitionists, opponents of imperialism, civil rights activists, resisters of apartheid—who have recognized the existence and immorality of Whiteness as a political system, challenged its legitimacy, and insofar as possible, refused the Contract.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 107
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3, Part 2 Quotes

If to white readers this intellectual world, only half a century distant, now seems like a universe of alien concepts, it is a tribute to the success of the rewritten Racial Contract in transforming the terms of public discourse so that white domination is now conceptually invisible. […] That the revival of Anglo-American political philosophy takes place in this period, the present epoch of the de facto Racial Contract, partially explains its otherworldly race insensitivity. The history of imperialism, colonialism, and genocide, the reality of systemic racial exclusion, are obfuscated in seemingly abstract and general categories that originally were restricted to white citizens.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 118
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3, Part 3 Quotes

No one actually believes nowadays, of course, that people formally came out of the wilderness and signed a contract. But there is the impression that the modern European nation-states were not centrally affected by their imperial history and that societies such as the United States were founded on noble moral principles meant to include everyone, but unfortunately, there were some deviations. The “Racial Contract” explodes this picture as mythical, identifying it as itself an artifact of the Racial Contract in the second, de facto phase of white supremacy. Thus—in the standard array of metaphors of perceptual/conceptual revolution—it effects a gestalt shift, reversing figure and ground, switching paradigms, inverting “norm” and “deviation,” to emphasize that nonwhite racial exclusion from personhood was the actual norm.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 122
Explanation and Analysis:

Ironic, cool, hip, above all knowing, the “Racial Contract” speaks from the perspective of the cognizers whose mere presence in the halls of white theory is a cognitive threat, because—in the inverted epistemic logic of the racial polity—the “ideal speech situation” requires our absence, since we are, literally, the men and women who know too much, who—in that wonderful American expression—know where the bodies are buried (after all, so many of them are our own). It does what black critique has always had to do to. be effective: it situates itself in the same space as its adversary and then shows what follows from “writing ‘race’ and [seeing] the difference it makes.” As such, it makes it possible for us to connect the two rather than, as at present, have them isolated in two ghettoized spaces, black political theory’s ghettoization from mainstream discussion, white mainstream theory’s ghettoization from reality.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 132
Explanation and Analysis:
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Racial Contract Term Timeline in The Racial Contract

The timeline below shows where the term Racial Contract appears in The Racial Contract. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Introduction
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...racism in these universal terms, which is why Mills has developed the concept of a racial contract . (full context)
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...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... (full context)
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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... (full context)
Chapter 1, Part 1: The Racial Contract is political, moral, and epistemological
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In the racial contract ’s epistemological contract, participants agree to classify themselves as “white” and therefore fully human. They... (full context)
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The racial contract ’s epistemological contract also affects its political and moral contracts. Politically, traditional social contract theory... (full context)
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The racial contract also includes a different moral contract. Most traditional contractarian theorists view the moral contract as... (full context)
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Finally, the racial contract also transforms the traditional social contract’s epistemology, or view of knowledge. Traditional theories are based... (full context)
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Similarly, under the racial contract , people must consent to a specific way of viewing the world in order to... (full context)
Chapter 1, Part 2: The Racial Contract is a historical actuality
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...rather than an actual historical explanation for the formation of society, Mills argues that the racial contract is real and historically verifiable. It wasn’t a one-time agreement, but rather the product of... (full context)
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...a kind of global alliance. Mills concludes that our contemporary world is “built on the Racial Contract .” This is obvious when looking at the historical record, yet it’s not obvious to... (full context)
Chapter 1, Part 3: The Racial Contract is an exploitation contract that creates global European economic domination and national white racial privilege
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...that property. However, the traditional social contract isn’t primarily economic in nature. In contrast, the racial contract is: it’s designed to enable “white/persons” to systematically exploit “nonwhite/subpersons.” (full context)
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...people have fewer economic opportunities and far less wealth, which is evidence of how the racial contract has prevented them from building wealth across generations. This is because of formal policies in... (full context)
Chapter 2, Part 1: The Racial Contract norms (and races) spaces, demarcating civil and wild spaces
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Unlike the ordinary social contract theory, the racial contract shows how space is raced, or understood as dominated by a specific racial group. Similarly,... (full context)
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Finally, the racial contract norms bodies themselves. It teaches white people to view non-white people primarily as physical bodies... (full context)
Chapter 2, Part 2: The Racial Contract norms (and races) the individual, establishing personhood and subpersonhood
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...implicitly assume that only white men are capable of participating in society. In contrast, the racial contract is primarily about defining which people are capable of joining society. (full context)
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In the racial contract , people are raced in a moral and legal way, a cognitive way, and an... (full context)
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Morally and legally, the racial contract divides persons from subpersons. The social contract’s vision of a modern society governed through the... (full context)
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...result, while the social contract theory presents racism as a “deviation” from perfect equality, the racial contract theory shows that racially unequal societies have actually been following their founding white supremacist ideal:... (full context)
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These societies have applied different versions of the racial contract (the expropriation contract, the slavery contract, and the colonial contract) to different categories of non-white... (full context)
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The racial contract also races people cognitively. The social contract theory claims that everyone in society can cooperate... (full context)
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...heads, and IQs. Based on the myth of non-white intellectual inferiority, states founded on the racial contract deny non-white people basic legal and political rights. (full context)
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Finally, the racial contract races people aesthetically by establishing whiteness as the standard of beauty. This often gets conflated... (full context)
Chapter 2, Part 3: The Racial Contract underwrites the modern social contract and is continually being rewritten
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...than racism. This is because racism only came about in the modern era, through the racial contract . (In fact, Mills thinks that the racial contract created the very concept of race,... (full context)
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...as people. Therefore, when they philosophized about the social contract, they were really proposing the racial contract . Mills will next examine the key writings of the four major classic social contract... (full context)
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...contract theories divided white and non-white people more strictly, which shows that over time, “the Racial Contract began to rewrite the social contract.” (full context)
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Mills concludes that the racial contract “underwrites the social contract,” meaning that it “restricts and modifies” the community to whom the... (full context)
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...no longer explicitly believe in white supremacy, and non-white people formally have rights. But the racial contract still functions implicitly, through informal mechanisms like widespread discrimination, misallocation of resources, and a general... (full context)
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...people debate the importance of race in society, Mills argues, they’re really debating whether the racial contract exists. As a hypothetical theory of how society should work, the social contract replaces difficult... (full context)
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...slavery. Mills concludes that these white philosophers are still thinking within and according to the racial contract . Instead of recognizing the racial contract’s existence, history, and effects, they instead imagine that... (full context)
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The racial contract also evolves by shifting the definitions of whiteness and non-whiteness. Over time, whiteness generally expands... (full context)
Chapter 2, Part 4: The Racial Contract has to be enforced through violence and ideological conditioning
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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... (full context)
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...that destroys people’s sense of their own culture and encourages them to consensually accept the racial contract . (full context)
Chapter 3, Part 1: The Racial Contract historically tracks the actual moral/political consciousness of (most) white moral agents
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...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. (full context)
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...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... (full context)
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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... (full context)
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To understand how the racial contract managed to invert morality, Mills looks to cognitive science. For instance, the racial contract builds... (full context)
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...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. (full context)
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The racial contract also explains the Holocaust, which was the culmination of a long historical process of colonization... (full context)
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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... (full context)
Chapter 3, Part 2: The Racial Contract has always been recognized by nonwhites as the real moral/political agreement to be challenged
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...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... (full context)
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...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... (full context)
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In response to the racial contract , colonized people tried to form unified racial movements (like Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism). But Europeans... (full context)
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...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... (full context)
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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... (full context)
Chapter 3, Part 3: The “Racial Contract” as a theory is explanatorily superior to the raceless social contract in accounting for the political and moral realities of the world and in helping to guide normative theory
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Mills argues that political theorists should replace the social contract with the racial contract , which paints a more accurate picture of the world. This means that it can... (full context)
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Next, Mills argues that the racial contract theory is useful because it shows that race is both a powerful political force and... (full context)
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The racial contract theory also shows that European racism is the product of a particular history, but the... (full context)
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...how white supremacy maintains power and privilege for white people through domination and exclusion. The racial contract threatens this power and privilege by theorizing in the same way as white thinkers. Thus,... (full context)