The Racial Contract Themes

In The Racial Contract, political philosopher Charles W. Mills argues that the modern world is built on white supremacy, a political system that creates power, wealth, and privilege for white people by exploiting non-white people’s labor, land, and resources. Slavery, colonialism, and segregation provide the clearest evidence of how white supremacist governments redistributed wealth and power from non-white non-Europeans to white Europeans, but Mills argues that white supremacy continues to reign today. This…

Charles W. Mills presents his theory of the racial contract as an alternative to the social contract, which is a common explanation for the formation of society in European and American political philosophy. Contemporary philosophers imagine the social contract as a race-neutral agreement among people who all agree to view one another as equals. In contrast, Mills describes the racial contract as an explicitly white supremacist agreement among white men, as he believes this…

In The Racial Contract, Charles W. Mills doesn’t just condemn European colonialism, imperialism, and slavery in the past: he also argues that the racial contract persists today. While contemporary nation-states no longer formally write racial hierarchies into their laws and constitutions, Mills explains, they still impose these hierarchies through other, less obvious, but equally powerful means. This is because the racial contract has evolved: non-white people have convinced the white public to reject open…