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 explains why a small minority of the human population—comprised mostly of Europeans and their descendants living in industrialized countries—still controls the majority of global wealth and power. Based on his critical analysis of classical European social contract theory, Mills proposes thinking of this global white supremacy as based on a racial contract, or an agreement among white people to treat one another as human and protect one another’s rights, while treating non-white people as subhumans without rights. Mills concludes that the racial contract is a historically accurate and politically useful explanation for white supremacy’s existence, and he shows that white supremacy explains the profound racial inequalities in today’s global economy.
Mills argues that the racial contract historically created a system of global white supremacy by dividing humanity into two groups—white humans and non-white subhumans—and then distributing political rights and liberties based on this distinction. Mills characterizes the racial contract as a collective agreement among white people that is enacted over time through a series of texts (like religious proclamations, philosophical tracts, and especially legal codes). Through these texts, white people establish that they deserve disproportionate rights, power, and wealth in society compared to non-white people. In other words, they establish a white supremacist political system. Mills argues that the racial contract’s primary purpose is economic: having disproportionate rights and privileges makes it legal for white people to exploit non-white people, take their land, and steal their material resources.
Mills distinguishes three main historical versions of this racial contract: “the expropriation contract,” “the slavery contract,” and “the colonial contract.” All of these give white people economic advantages by creating a two-tiered system of rights and liberties. The expropriation contract refers to the set of legal agreements through which Europeans decided that native non-European people could not exercise property rights. This made it legal for Europeans to take non-Europeans’ land, because it created a two-tiered legal system in which Europeans could possess land, but non-Europeans couldn’t. The slavery contract refers to the legal processes in which courts gave white citizens the legal right to enslave non-white people, based on the idea that non-white people were inferior and did not have human rights, or even that they needed to be civilized through slavery. This made slavery a legal, regulated business and profoundly shaped the modern world. In the slavery contract’s two-tiered system, white men could own property, whereas non-white people could only ever be property. Finally, the colonial contract refers to the legal procedures through which Europeans gave themselves the right to rule the rest of the world, based on the notion that they alone were civilized and capable of democracy. The colonial contract created its own two-tiered system, in which white people could rule societies autonomously, but non-white people could only ever obey white rulers.
After explaining how the racial contract establishes white supremacist rule—government by and for white people—Mills argues that this racial contract persists today by showing that global white supremacy is still a dominant force in world politics. Mills argues that white supremacy accounts for the global differences in economic development and political power between the majority white nations of the so-called Global North (Europe, North America, and Australia) and the predominantly non-white developing nations of the Global South. This disparity can be traced directly back to the expropriation, slavery, and colonial contracts. Through the expropriation contract, white settlers seized legal control of all the land in countries like Australia and the United States, while the slavery contract allowed white slave owners to benefit from enslaved non-white people’s labor for centuries. Through the colonial contract, all the profits from economic activity in colonies outside Europe ultimately flowed to and got reinvested in Europe. This accounts for Europe’s historical and present-day economic power. Accordingly, Europe’s wealth and power aren’t accidental, and they don’t testify to Europe’s inherent virtues: rather, they’re simply what Europe has gained from imposing white supremacist rule on the rest of the world for centuries. These global imbalances in wealth and power are currently growing, not shrinking. Mills attributes this to the fact that financial institutions and multinational corporations in the Global North set the rules of the global economy for their own benefit. In rich nations, white people also discriminate against non-white people, through both legal mechanisms like immigration restrictions and informal mechanisms like discrimination. This means that the redistribution of wealth from majority-non-white countries to majority-white countries (and non-white people to white people within white countries) continues just as before.
The Racial Contract is primarily an account of the contemporary world order and its underlying political ideology: white supremacy, which is based on a racial contract. Although the expropriation, slavery, and colonial contracts no longer fully apply in contemporary times, the European and American countries that hold the majority of global power (despite having a small minority of the global population) continue to wield this power primarily for their own benefit. With this, Mill emphasizes that white supremacy still stubbornly persists, and the racial contract is still an accurate and useful way to understand the political systems under which most contemporary people live.
Related Themes from Other Texts
Global White Supremacy ThemeTracker
Global White Supremacy Quotes in The Racial Contract
White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
