The Racial Contract

by

Charles W. Mills

Social Contract Term Analysis

The social contract is a philosophical explanation for the way societies form and why government authority over individuals is legitimate. Essentially, social contract theorists argue that people collectively agree to form or join a society in order to protect their rights. The racial contract is Charles W. Mills’s response to the social contract theory: it’s intended to show that, as a matter of historical fact, white people formed societies to protect their rights at the expense of non-white people.

Social Contract Quotes in The Racial Contract

The The Racial Contract quotes below are all either spoken by Social Contract or refer to Social 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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).
Introduction Quotes

When white people say "Justice," they mean "Just us."
—Black American folk aphorism.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 1
Explanation and Analysis:

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).

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1, Part 1 Quotes

The Racial Contract is that set of formal or informal agreements or meta-agreements […] between the members of one subset of humans, henceforth designated by (shifting) “racial” (phenotypical/genealogical/cultural) criteria C1, C2, C3 . . . as “white,” and coextensive (making due allowance for gender differentiation) with the class of full persons, to categorize the remaining subset of humans as “nonwhite” and of a different and inferior moral status, subpersons, so that they have a subordinate civil standing in the white or white-ruled polities […] the general purpose of the Contract is always the differential privileging of the whites as a group with respect to the nonwhites as a group, the exploitation of their bodies, land, and resources, and the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities to them. All whites are beneficiaries of the Contract, though some whites are not signatories to it.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 11
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 1, Part 2 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker), John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant
Page Number: 26-7
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2, Part 3 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Related Symbols: The Savage
Page Number: 63-4
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 72
Explanation and Analysis:

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.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 76
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3, Part 1 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 92
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 3, Part 2 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: Charles W. Mills (speaker)
Page Number: 118
Explanation and Analysis:
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Social Contract Term Timeline in The Racial Contract

The timeline below shows where the term Social Contract appears in The Racial Contract. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Introduction
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Racism in Philosophy Theme Icon
Mainstream contractarian theories argue that people form a society by freely agreeing to a “ social contract .” But Mills will argue that the contract is really only made between white people,... (full context)
Racism in Philosophy Theme Icon
Contemporary philosophers like John Rawls imagine an ideal social contract in order to ask questions about justice. However, Mills’s project is closer to that of... (full context)
Chapter 1, Part 1: The Racial Contract is political, moral, and epistemological
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Mills explains that philosophers really talk about three kinds of social contracts : political, moral, and epistemological. Political contracts describe how people form society and a government.... (full context)
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The racial contract’s epistemological contract also affects its political and moral contracts. Politically, traditional social contract theory imagines “abstract raceless ‘men’” establishing the state. Meanwhile, the racial contract theory shows how... (full context)
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Finally, the racial contract also transforms the traditional social contract ’s epistemology, or view of knowledge. Traditional theories are based on the idea of natural... (full context)
Chapter 1, Part 2: The Racial Contract is a historical actuality
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Although contemporary philosophers generally use social contract theories as a thought experiment, rather than an actual historical explanation for the formation of... (full context)
Chapter 1, Part 3: The Racial Contract is an exploitation contract that creates global European economic domination and national white racial privilege
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The traditional social contract includes an economic dimension, becuase it says that people form societies in order to accumulate... (full context)
Chapter 2, Part 1: The Racial Contract norms (and races) spaces, demarcating civil and wild spaces
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Unlike the ordinary social contract theory, the racial contract shows how space is raced, or understood as dominated by a... (full context)
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According to white social contract theory, Europeans turned Europe from a “presociopolitical space” (the state of nature) into a “postsociopolitical... (full context)
Chapter 2, Part 2: The Racial Contract norms (and races) the individual, establishing personhood and subpersonhood
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Just like classical social contract theorists tend to ignore space, they also ignore the body. This is because they implicitly... (full context)
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Morally and legally, the racial contract divides persons from subpersons. The social contract ’s vision of a modern society governed through the rule of law depends on Kant’s... (full context)
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As a result, while the social contract theory presents racism as a “deviation” from perfect equality, the racial contract theory shows that... (full context)
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The racial contract also races people cognitively. The social contract theory claims that everyone in society can cooperate because of their shared rationality. However, the... (full context)
Chapter 2, Part 3: The Racial Contract underwrites the modern social contract and is continually being rewritten
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The classical social contract theorists, who believed in liberty and equality for all people, were writing from about 1615–1800.... (full context)
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...state of nature—meaning they could fall to the same level as non-white people. But later social contract theories divided white and non-white people more strictly, which shows that over time, “the Racial... (full context)
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Finally, Immanuel Kant imagined the social contract as an imaginary agreement among abstract people, whose personhood is defined by their rationality. He... (full context)
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...that only white people are fully rational, fully human, and fully capable of joining a social contract . Mills points out that contemporary white philosophers agonize about how some of their idols,... (full context)
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Mills concludes that the racial contract “underwrites the social contract ,” meaning that it “restricts and modifies” the community to whom the social contract applies.... (full context)
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...whether the racial contract exists. As a hypothetical theory of how society should work, the social contract replaces difficult realities with idealized abstractions. Namely, it abstracts away from racism and instead talks... (full context)
Chapter 2, Part 4: The Racial Contract has to be enforced through violence and ideological conditioning
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Mills explains that different political philosophies imagine the state differently. According to the social contract , the state is legitimate because people consent to its authority and then use it... (full context)
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Under the social contract theory, the state only uses force to protect the people, but the white supremacist state... (full context)
Chapter 3, Part 1: The Racial Contract historically tracks the actual moral/political consciousness of (most) white moral agents
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...the past—and present.” Specifically, they must learn why the racial contract succeeded and the raceless social contract failed. (full context)
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Social contract theory generally presents racism as a random and ultimately unimportant deviation from the norm of... (full context)
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...Rousseau all agreed that societies should subordinate women. Similarly, all the major philosophers of the social contract —and even many of their opponents—agreed that white people are more civilized and generally superior... (full context)
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...principles apply to white people but not to other groups. This explains why the classic social contract philosophers, like Locke and Kant, claimed to be discussing universal values yet really ended up... (full context)
Chapter 3, Part 2: The Racial Contract has always been recognized by nonwhites as the real moral/political agreement to be challenged
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...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... (full context)
Chapter 3, Part 3: The “Racial Contract” as a theory is explanatorily superior to the raceless social contract in accounting for the political and moral realities of the world and in helping to guide normative theory
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Mills argues that political theorists should replace the social contract with the racial contract, which paints a more accurate picture of the world. This means... (full context)
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...that it hasn’t realized, and theorizing in order to help achieve those ideals. Meanwhile, the social contract uses illusions and abstractions to distract people from the real world. Mills isn’t against all... (full context)