In The Racial Contract, Charles W. Mills argues that white supremacy isn’t just a profoundly unequal political order: it’s also a way of thinking and perceiving the world. Specifically, the racial contract racializes the world, meaning that it imposes race on people, places and things. It also fosters an “epistemology of ignorance,” or a set of distorted patterns of thinking and perception that make white supremacy invisible to the very people who benefit from it—white people themselves. According to Mill, these cognitive distortions serve to justify, protect, and stifle resistance to the racial contract, all while protecting white people’s disproportionate wealth, power, and political rights under it.
First, the racial contract racializes the world—that is, it imposes race onto people, places, and things—in order to justify white domination over non-white people. Most importantly, the racial contract racializes individuals, defining them in terms of racial categories. Essentially, this means that white people divide the human population into white/non-white, or human/subhuman, so that they can distribute rights and liberties to different groups in different ways. Mills gives the example of how European colonial societies invented racially specific justifications for expropriating Native people’s land, enslaving Black people, and taking over existing societies in Africa and Asia through conquest. This shows how the racial contract allowed Europeans to project racial categories onto the rest of the world, depending on how it best served them. The racial contract also racializes spaces, meaning that it associates spaces with different racial groups. During the era of European conquest, for example, Europeans defined Europe as “the global locus of [morality and] rationality,” while associating the rest of the world with vice, godlessness, and unreason. This allowed Europeans to portray colonization as a global process of Europe “civilizing” the world. Mills argues that this also happens today, and it also happens on smaller scales—for instance, through public rhetoric about majority-non-white urban neighborhoods in the U.S., which justifies gentrifying or divesting from those neighborhoods. Again, this shows that racializing space is an excuse for expropriating or dominating it.
In order to justify white people’s disproportionate power and privilege, the racial contract blinds them to the truth about this power and privilege. In many instances, rather than seeing non-white people as complex individuals making rational decisions in imperfect circumstances, white people replace them with racist caricatures. Mills argues that many white people live in “a racial fantasyland” because they never actually interact with non-white people but learn stereotypes about them from popular culture. Accordingly, in place of the real non-European world, they imagine “countries that never were, inhabited by people who never were.” Unsurprisingly, these stereotypes tend to be negative and emphasize non-white people’s childishness, stupidity, or exoticism. These racist caricatures both prevent white people from empathizing with non-white people and justify their subjugation. Next, the racial contract creates a “racialized moral psychology” in which white people learn to see racist exploitation as the right thing to do. Mills calls this “Herrenvolk [master-race] ethics,” because white people learn to apply one set of moral principles to one another and another set of moral principles to non-white people. (For instance, they might perceive enslaving people as doing them a favor.) As a result, when dealing with people of color, white people are sometimes literally unable to tell right from wrong, so they often perpetrate violence while believing themselves to be doing good.
Most insidiously, Mills says, the racial contract encourages white people to strategically forget certain crucial elements of their own history. This allows them to avoid recognizing the historical reality of white supremacy or seeing how it has victimized other groups. Mills points out that, over the last 500 years, Europe and its offshoot countries (like the U.S. and Australia) has been responsible for the vast majority global of atrocities, genocides, and wars. He offers a long list of these abuses, ranging from the genocide of Native American peoples to slavery, lynching, and U.S. war crimes in Vietnam. And yet, with the notable exception of the Holocaust, Europeans and North Americans seldom learn about this history in school and don’t have an open conversation about it in the public sphere. For instance, Hitler openly proclaimed that he was following the same steps as the English took in India and the Spanish did in the New World—but not only is this not common knowledge, it would likely seem egregious to many Europeans and Americans. For Mills, this shows that white people are collectively in denial about the past, and this collective denial prevents them from confronting the fact that their own wealth and privilege is based on genocide, slavery, and exploitation. In other words, this collective denial makes the racial contract invisible. It allows white citizens, scholars, and policymakers to sincerely believe that Europe is wealthy because of its geographical advantages or due to random chance—rather than seeing that this wealth is the direct result of centuries of subjugation.
While the racial contract often distorts its white benefactors’ perceptions beyond recognition, its structure and effects are usually clear to the non-white people it exploits and devalues. White thinkers, citizens, and politicians talk about extending universal rights and liberties to all people, all while imposing racial categories on humanity and then ensuring that those rights and liberties are only fully extended to white people. But Black, Indigenous, and Third World thinkers throughout history have clearly recognized that European and European-founded states were based on a two-tier system of rights and privileges. Meanwhile, esteemed white intellectuals often deny that white supremacy exists, even while they’re staring it in the face. That said, Mills by no means thinks that white people can’t understand how white supremacy works—after all, his book is an attempt to explain white supremacy to people of all races. Rather, his point is that the racial contract systematically distorts the white public’s thinking so that they don’t have to confront the uncomfortable contradiction between their stated values and the actual power structures that benefit them.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Cognitive Distortion and White Ignorance ThemeTracker
Cognitive Distortion and White Ignorance Quotes in The Racial Contract
When white people say "Justice," they mean "Just us."
—Black American folk aphorism.
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.
It is necessary, then, to accept as a principle and point of departure the fact that there is a hierarchy of races and civilizations, and that we belong to the superior race and civilization…The basic legitimation of conquest over native peoples is the conviction of our superiority, not merely our mechanical, economic, and military superiority, but our moral superiority. Our dignity rests on that quality, and it underlies our right to direct the rest of humanity.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
