The Racial Contract Summary

According to conventional theories of the social contract, a group of people forms a society when they voluntarily and collectively agree to protect one another’s rights and freedoms. However, Mills points out that these theories are often blind to race, which is a problem, because racial exploitation is the historical foundation of most modern societies. So, when philosophers treat race and racism as irrelevant to the structure of an ideal society, they miss the fact that racism is the precise reason why societies have not been able to meet that ideal. In contrast, Mills proposes the racial contract theory as a way of explaining the modern world’s structure of global politics, economics, and social power.

The racial contract is an agreement between white people that creates a white supremacist society, or one in which white people control the vast majority of power, wealth, and privilege. In the racial contract, white men declare themselves equals with equal rights, while defining non-white people as subhumans who do not deserve those same rights. By dividing humanity, the racial contract establishes a government by and for white people, who rule over non-white people and exploit their land and resources. White people justify this system by perpetuating the racist idea that non-white people are inferior.

Over the last 500 years, Europeans have used this strategy to systematically colonize the rest of the world—that is, to seize land and resources and enslave people. They have justified taking non-white people’s land by arguing that only white men are morally capable of truly owning property, and they legalized slavery based on the notion that it would benefit uncivilized non-white people. For more than 500 years, nations built on white supremacy had dual governments: one set of rules applied to “white/persons” and another to “nonwhite/subpersons.” This has created an enormous divide in wealth and power between developed white countries and developing non-white countries, as well as between white and non-white people in diverse countries like the U.S.

The racial contract hasn’t just denied economic opportunities to non-white people: it has enabled white people to build wealth by exploiting non-white people. Through slavery, expropriation, and colonization, Europeans seized control of (and profited off of) non-white people’s labor, land, and wealth. Mills argues that this is the source of most white people’s wealth today—for instance, in the U.S., Black people lost out several trillions of dollars of household wealth because of legally mandated slavery and discrimination. Racism isn’t just personal prejudice or an unfortunate deviation from the norm of equality for all: it’s the political and economic foundation of the contemporary world order.

Under the racial contract, white people learn to see the world in a specific way, which helps justify the genocide, slavery, and colonization that bring them power and privilege. This worldview divides the world into “civilized” and “savage” places and peoples, as well as white persons and non-white subpersons. These prejudices aren’t limited to popular culture, politics, and the law—religion, science, and philosophy also played a crucial role in shaping them over time. In fact, Mills argues that the Enlightenment philosophers who originally developed the social contract theory—Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant—were really talking about a racial contract. Even while these thinkers argued that the social contract would guarantee equality for all persons, they argued that non-white people were subhuman savages unfit for living in civilized society. So, they were really just defending the racial contract by disguising it as a social contract.

Mills points out that today, white people do much the same thing by insisting that racism no longer exists and was a deviation from the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality for all. In reality, the racial contract has never offered freedom and equality to nonwhite people: instead, it has subjugated them through violence (genocide and slavery) and “ideological conditioning.” The latter involves teaching non-white people to accept their inferior status through the education system and public discourse.

Mills hopes that philosophers can help undo this conditioning by analyzing society through the lens of a racial contract. However, the purpose of ideological conditioning is to prevent people from understanding how the racial contract works, distorting people’s perceptions in order to prevent them from distinguishing right from wrong. For instance, much like the Enlightenment philosophers Mills has discussed, many white people learn to assume that they are naturally superior to non-white people, so they consider it correct to apply different sets of moral principles to white people and non-white people. White people also tend not to learn very much about the history of European conquest, slavery, imperialism, and global war that enabled white people to capture the majority of the world’s resources and wealth. In contrast, non-white people tend to clearly understand the racial contract, which gives them a kind of cognitive privilege relative to white people. For centuries, Black, Indigenous, and Third World writers and activists have pointed out that white supremacy is the driving force of contemporary politics.

Ultimately, Mills proposes that philosophers should start talking about the racial contract rather than the social contract, because it’s a more useful theory for understanding society and planning to improve it. Nevertheless, most white philosophers continue to theorize about an ideal society in which racism doesn’t exist, instead of addressing the realities of the society they actually live in. They assume that their own perspectives are neutral, objective, and authoritative. Meanwhile, they ignore the theories that anti-racist, anti-colonialist, and Indigenous thinkers have produced about contemporary society. In contrast, the racial contract theory is part of this tradition, and it gives all people—regardless of race—the opportunity to take a stand for or against white supremacy.