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 more accurately reflects the real course of human history. He also thinks that this is really what Enlightenment social contract theorists like Locke, Hobbes, Rousseau, and Kant had in mind. Therefore, Mills argues not only that the racial contract theory is more accurate and politically useful than the raceless social contract theory, but also that replacing the social contract theory with the racial contract theory is an important step towards addressing the pervasive racism in both historical and contemporary philosophy.
Mills argues that the racial contract is a superior theory to the social contract because it more accurately describes the actual world and better fulfills the goals of political philosophy. First, the racial contract is more accurate than the raceless social contract because it faithfully represents the way governments and global power structures have formed over the last 500 years. Mainstream social contract theorists ignore race and justify doing so by suggesting that race has nothing to do with the true underlying nature of society. Therefore, they present racism as a kind of random deviation from the norm of social equality, but not as an important social phenomenon in its own right. However, as Mills points out, a brief survey of modern human history shows that systematic racism has been the norm, not systematic equality. This racism is not random, either: it has almost always involved discrimination by white people, against non-white people, for the sake of material gain. Therefore, the racial contract theory is superior to the raceless social contract theory because it correctly views racial exploitation, domination, and discrimination as central to political history.
Mills points out that many philosophers consider ordinary social contract theories superior because they ignore real-life characteristics like race and therefore focus on abstract essences rather than messy real-world problems. In response, Mills argues that political philosophy’s purpose is really to help people understand and improve the messy real world. The world is divided on the basis of race, so when philosophers think and write as if it doesn’t exist, they prevent themselves (and their audience) from understanding or addressing racism. In contrast, the racial contract theory offers people of all races an opportunity to identify and take a moral stand against white supremacy.
Mills argues that the racial contract theory is also a more accurate description of what the classical social contract theorists believed than the raceless social contract. In other words, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant actually believed in white supremacy and wanted to construct a society around this principle. Mills shows how all four of these thinkers explicitly defend “equality among equals” but inequality among races. For instance, Immanuel Kant believed that people’s membership in the social contract depends only on their rationality—but he also developed a racial hierarchy in which he explicitly argued that different racial groups had different levels of rationality, or “innate talent.” He therefore concluded that non-white people (and women) were not rational enough to have full rights in society. By showing that classical social contract theories were really proposals for white supremacist racial contracts, Mills explains the apparent contradiction between European colonialism (which was based on subjugation and enslavement) and Enlightenment social contract theory (which proclaimed that all people were equal and deserved equal rights). However, the raceless social contract theory cannot explain this contradiction. Instead, contemporary philosophers erase the white supremacist elements of these classical philosophers’ theories by wrongly treating them as race-neutral.
Finally, Mills argues that the racial contract theory also explains why contemporary mainstream social contract theorists fail to recognize or challenge white supremacy—which makes their work factually incorrect and politically useless. As an example, Mills points out that two of the most influential contemporary political philosophers, John Rawls and Robert Nozick, present extensive theories of society, justice, and equality without ever mentioning slavery or colonialism. Mills argues that philosophers like Rawls and Nozick theorize about “abstract and general categories that originally were restricted to white citizens.” In other words, they settle abstract questions of how equal persons should be treated, but they don’t address the way that different persons are viewed and treated as unequal in the first place. In Mills’s view, this blind spot is only possible because the entire discipline operates in the implicitly white supremacist tradition that Kant, Rousseau, and the other classical theorists laid out. Therefore, other philosophers do not expect thinkers like Rawls and Nozick to mention history, slavery, and colonialism, because these aren’t seen as significant enough to theorize about. Mills argues that this is partially because, in philosophy, a white male perspective is seen as neutral and objective. In fact, many white male philosophers struggle to understand any theory that’s not written from that perspective, whereas non-white philosophers have to write from someone else’s perspective in order to be taken seriously. For Mills, this explains Euro-American philosophy’s remarkable lack of diversity and total inattention to non-European thinkers.
Since Mills argues that political philosophy has always been about describing society and prescribing changes for it, he concludes that it’s essential to connect mainstream white social contract theory to the rich traditions of “Native American, African American, and Third and Fourth World political thought.” Specifically, he views his own work as part of the tradition of oppositional Black political thought. He hopes that the racial contract theory will help make these connections, in addition helping his readers root out the white supremacist assumptions that led earlier thinkers awry and ultimately change the world.
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Racism in Philosophy Quotes in The Racial Contract
When white people say "Justice," they mean "Just us."
—Black American folk aphorism.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My suggestion is that by looking at the actual historically dominant moral/political consciousness and the actual historically dominant moral/political ideals, we are better enabled to prescribe for society than by starting from ahistorical abstractions. In other words, the point is not to endorse this deficient consciousness and these repugnant ideals but, by recognizing their past and current influence and power and identifying their sources, to correct for them. Realizing a better future requires not merely admitting the ugly truth of the past—and present—but understanding the ways in which these realities were made invisible, acceptable to the white population. We want to know—both to describe and to explain—the circumstances that actually blocked achievement of the ideal raceless ideals and promoted instead the naturalized nonideal racial ideals. We want to know what went wrong in the past, is going wrong now, and is likely to continue to go wrong in the future if we do not guard against it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The recent advent of discussions of “multiculturalism” is welcome, but what needs to be appreciated is that these are issues of political power, not just mutual misconceptions resulting from the clash of cultures.
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.
