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Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Racial Contract, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Global White Supremacy
Racism in Philosophy
Cognitive Distortion and White Ignorance
Racism’s Historical Evolution
Summary
Analysis
Unlike the ordinary social contract theory, the racial contract shows how space is raced, or understood as dominated by a specific racial group. Similarly, it shows how individuals are spaced, or understood as belonging to a specific racialized space.
The racial contract connects race to space because its original purpose was to enable European colonization—or Europe’s domination of non-European spaces and peoples.
Themes
According to white social contract theory, Europeans turned Europe from a “presociopolitical space” (the state of nature) into a “postsociopolitical space” (a civilized land). Meanwhile, they viewed non-Europeans as “savages” (meaning “the wild man of the wood”) who were inherently wild and therefore permanently stuck in the state of nature (unlike civilized Europeans). To reinforce this distinction, European colonizers emphasized the wildness and alienness of non-European spaces. This allowed them to justify colonialism as “an active spatial struggle […] against the savage and barbaric.”
Mills again shows how European colonialism and social contract theories shared the same ideological assumptions. Namely, colonialism required dividing the world into Europe and non-Europe, and European philosophers divided the world into civilization and the state of nature. Conveniently, these categories converged, so that Europe conquering and dominating non-Europe appeared identical to civilization spreading out into the state of nature. This allowed European philosophers to paint brutal violence and genocide as a form of benevolent progress.
Themes
Mills explains that Europeans raced spaces in both epistemological way and moral ways. Epistemologically, they insisted that “real knowledge” is spatially limited to Europe. To justify this prejudice, they destroyed evidence of non-European art and science, or else attributed them to Europeans. Similarly, the European obsession with “‘discovery’ and ‘exploration’” implies that certain spaces are blank or empty until white people visit them and transform them into civilized spaces through colonialism. In other words, Europe declares itself “the global locus of rationality.”
European’s insistence that they had superior knowledge discredited non-Europeans’ thought and perspectives. Since colonialism’s non-European victims were the people most likely to speak out against it, discounting them in this way prevented Europeans from taking their criticisms seriously. This results in the assumption that European perspectives on the world are the only legitimate ones—that they are “the global locus of rationality”—even when these perspectives are used as excuses for violence and exploitation.
Themes
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Morally, Europe also defined itself as the global center of virtue. European cartographers and settlers portrayed the world outside Europe as a monstrous and immoral version of the state of nature, particularly because it wasn’t Christianized. The trope of “the journey into the interior” depends on moralizing space this way: when Europeans visit native territory, it’s often portrayed as confronting their own inner darkness as well. Space is still moralized today, with majority-white places portrayed as light and virtuous, but majority-non-white places as dark, evil, and backwards. In countries like the U.S. and South Africa, segregation strictly maintains that division.
Stories of travel and exploration (both today and particularly at the height of European colonialism) tend to depict white people leaving relatively comfortable lives and wealthy home countries—often in order to investigate poorer, “darker,” more sinister, and less urbanized places. The traveler also undergoes a process of self-discovery, which ends when the traveler returns home with a new knowledge about themselves. Mills argues that this trope is actually based on the moral superiority aspect of the racial contract, which was used to justify Europe’s colonization of non-European nations.
Themes
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In the modern day, the moral dimension of racialized space is less about Christian vice and virtue than the secular idea of “progress and modernization.” Europeans view places not adapted to their own agricultural and industrial methods as empty, or “virgin,” and ripe for settlement. Any native people living there are viewed as pests who need to be cleared out for Europeans to civilize the land. Even today, majority-non-white spaces (like U.S. inner cities) are viewed as foreign to the nation, and they often lack the political representation and public services that majority-white spaces receive.
Just like ideas of white superiority, justifications for colonization also gradually switched from using religious language to using the language of science and rationality. In this passage, Mills is explicitly talking about the contemporary world. Spreading “progress and modernization” is essentially the main goal of modern international institutions, but Mills points out that this means forcing non-white peoples to live according to European economic and political norms. One example is the story that “developing countries” are lagging behind Europe and North America and need to catch up by copying Western economic models. Another is the story that white Americans have to morally and culturally fix inner cities (which are predominately Black and Latinx). While there are many genuine social problems in these spaces, these stories about politics are dangerous because they suggest that white outsiders are especially capable of solving non-white people’s problems.
Themes
Finally, the racial contract norms bodies themselves. It teaches white people to view non-white people primarily as physical bodies (rather than human beings with bodies and minds), or as representatives of their race (rather than complex and unique individuals). There are even different rules of social etiquette for interacting within and between racial groups.
For Mills’s readers, the racialization of bodies and everyday spaces is probably much more familiar than the other examples he talks about in this chapter. People behave differently around others of different races—and not only because of their individual prejudices, but because of social and historical facts about the society they live in. In this way, the racial contract transforms the way people take up space and allow others to do the same.
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