White Supremacy Term Analysis

White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.

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).

It is necessary, then, to accept as a principle and point of departure the fact that there is a hierarchy of races and civilizations, and that we belong to the superior race and civilization…The basic legitimation of conquest over native peoples is the conviction of our superiority, not merely our mechanical, economic, and military superiority, but our moral superiority. Our dignity rests on that quality, and it underlies our right to direct the rest of humanity.

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.”

The basic sequence ran something like this: there are no people there in the first place; in the second place, they’re not improving the land; and in the third place—oops!—they’re already all dead anyway (and, honestly, there really weren’t that many to begin with), so there are no people there, as we said in the first place.

The hierarchically differentiated human values of plebeian and patrician, of serf, monk, and knight, were replaced by the “infinite value” of all human beings. It is a noble and inspiring ideal, even if its incorporation into countless manifestos, declarations, constitutions, and introductory ethics texts has now reduced it to a homily, deprived it of the shattering political force it once had. But what needs to be emphasized is that it is only white persons (and really only white males) who have been able to take this for granted, for whom it can be an unexciting truism. As Lucius Outlaw underlines, European liberalism restricts “egalitarianism to equality among equals,” and blacks and others are ontologically excluded by race from the promise of “the liberal project of modernity.” The terms of the Racial Contract mean that nonwhite subpersonhood is enshrined simultaneously with white personhood.

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.

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.

Thus in the North and South American reactions to Native American resistance and slave uprisings, in the European responses to the Saint Domingue (Haitian) revolution, the Sepoy uprising (“Indian Mutiny”), the Jamaican Morant Bay insurrection, the Boxer rebellion in China, the struggle of the Hereros in German Africa, in the twentieth century colonial and neocolonial wars (Ethiopia, Madagascar, Vietnam, Algeria, Malaya, Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Namibia), in the white settlers’ battles to maintain a white Rhodesia and an apartheid South Africa, one repeatedly sees the same pattern of systematic massacre. It is a pattern that confirms that an ontological shudder has been sent through the system of the white polity, calling forth what could be called the white terror to make sure that the foundations of the moral and political universe stay in place. […] In general, then, watchfulness for nonwhite resistance and a corresponding readiness to employ massively disproportionate retaliatory violence are intrinsic to the fabric of the racial polity in a way different from the response to the typical crimes of white citizens.

Correspondingly, the Racial Contract also explains the actual astonishing historical record of European atrocity against nonwhites, which quantitatively and qualitatively, in numbers and horrific detail, cumulatively dwarfs all other kinds of ethnically/racially motivated massacres put together.

There is a real choice for whites, though admittedly a difficult one. The rejection of the Racial Contract and the normed inequities of the white polity [require one] to speak out and struggle against the terms of the Contract. So in this case, moral/political judgments about one’s “consent” to the legitimacy of the political system and conclusions about one’s effectively having become a signatory to the “contract,” are apropos—and so are judgments of one’s culpability. By unquestioningly “going along with things,” by accepting all the privileges of whiteness with concomitant complicity in the system of white supremacy, one can be said to have consented to Whiteness.
And in fact there have always been praiseworthy whites—anticolonialists, abolitionists, opponents of imperialism, civil rights activists, resisters of apartheid—who have recognized the existence and immorality of Whiteness as a political system, challenged its legitimacy, and insofar as possible, refused the Contract.

No one actually believes nowadays, of course, that people formally came out of the wilderness and signed a contract. But there is the impression that the modern European nation-states were not centrally affected by their imperial history and that societies such as the United States were founded on noble moral principles meant to include everyone, but unfortunately, there were some deviations. The “Racial Contract” explodes this picture as mythical, identifying it as itself an artifact of the Racial Contract in the second, de facto phase of white supremacy. Thus—in the standard array of metaphors of perceptual/conceptual revolution—it effects a gestalt shift, reversing figure and ground, switching paradigms, inverting “norm” and “deviation,” to emphasize that nonwhite racial exclusion from personhood was the actual norm.

The recent advent of discussions of “multiculturalism” is welcome, but what needs to be appreciated is that these are issues of political power, not just mutual misconceptions resulting from the clash of cultures.