The Racial Contract

by

Charles W. Mills

Expropriation Contract Term Analysis

The expropriation contract is one dimension of the historical racial contract. It’s a set of legal agreements that white people used to dispossess non-white people of their land and resources. For instance, in the Americas, European settlers deemed that native people weren’t capable of having true property rights, and that it was therefore legal to take native people’s land.

Expropriation Contract Quotes in The Racial Contract

The The Racial Contract quotes below are all either spoken by Expropriation Contract or refer to Expropriation Contract. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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).
Chapter 1, Part 2 Quotes

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.”

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Savage
Page Number: 28
Explanation and Analysis:
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Expropriation Contract Term Timeline in The Racial Contract

The timeline below shows where the term Expropriation Contract appears in The Racial Contract. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1, Part 2: The Racial Contract is a historical actuality
Global White Supremacy Theme Icon
For instance, in what Mills calls “the expropriation contract ,” white lawyers and judges argued that native peoples were incapable of having property rights... (full context)
Chapter 2, Part 2: The Racial Contract norms (and races) the individual, establishing personhood and subpersonhood
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Cognitive Distortion and White Ignorance Theme Icon
Racism’s Historical Evolution Theme Icon
These societies have applied different versions of the racial contract (the expropriation contract , the slavery contract, and the colonial contract) to different categories of non-white people. Meanwhile,... (full context)
Chapter 2, Part 4: The Racial Contract has to be enforced through violence and ideological conditioning
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...slavery on millions of people. European forces removed non-white people from their land (in the expropriation contract ), or else forced them to work on it under constant surveillance (in the slavery... (full context)