The Racial Contract: Chapter 3, Part 2 Summary & Analysis

By virtue of their position at the bottom of the racial hierarchy, non-white people tend to clearly see the racial contract’s hypocrisy. In particular, they understand that white people freely talk about values and people in the abstract, when they are really only referring to white people. Therefore, in conversations about political theory, people of color tend to pay attention to whether the theory is implicitly limiting personhood to white people. White people see such non-white people as preoccupied with race, but this is because they recognize that conversations about the social contract are really conversations about the racial contract—in which, as non-white people, their own personhood is never guaranteed.

Mills points out that major Black, Indigenous, anti-colonial, and Third World thinkers have generally recognized the basic dimensions of the racial contract:  the distinction between persons and subpersons, the “Herrenvolk ethics” that prescribes different rules for white and non-white people, and the institutionalized white supremacy of the state. Mills offers a long list of examples from famous thinkers, activists, and political leaders ranging from the Lakota leader Sitting Bull and the Black American sociologist W.E.B. DuBois to the Indian Independence leader Jawaharlal Nehru and the Martinican activists Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire. They all realized that society is founded on “racial subordination,” and that political theory is generally written from the perspective of white subordinators.

In response to the racial contract, colonized people tried to form unified racial movements (like Pan-Africanism and Pan-Arabism). But Europeans were already unified: European writers and philosophers explicitly thought about colonization as a way of clearing the world for white people to settle it. Therefore, they explicitly banded together to protect white supremacy.

In response, non-white peoples banded together around their shared political goal: the fight against imperialism and white supremacy. This split explains why W.E.B. DuBois famously argued that “the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line.” It also explains the alliances that non-European nations and peoples formed at occasions like the famous 1955 Bandung Conference.

Today, this idea of a fight against imperialism and white supremacy seems outdated to most people. Mills argues that this is because the racial contract has made white supremacy, and its long history, largely invisible. Contemporary philosophers have contributed to this cover-up by insisting on talking about society in terms of “abstract and general categories that originally were restricted to white citizens.” And because these philosophers were stuck in these abstract terms and don’t recognize the racial contract, they can’t understand the depth and diversity of non-white philosophers’ thought.

For non-white people, who are considered subhuman under the racial contract, the first step in politics has to be claiming personhood. This starts with an “internal battle” against their own internalized sense of inferiority. After finding self-respect, non-white people next have to reclaim epistemic power over themselves, or learn to think about society and history outside conventional Eurocentric frameworks of thinking. This often includes writing “vindicationist” histories to correct white historians’ misrepresentations. Finally, to resist the racial contract’s beauty standards, non-white people have to assert their own. This is what makes slogans like “Black is beautiful!” politically significant.