Racism’s Historical Evolution Theme Analysis

In The Racial Contract, Charles W. Mills doesn’t just condemn European colonialism, imperialism, and slavery in the past: he also argues that the racial contract persists today. While contemporary nation-states no longer formally write racial hierarchies into their laws and constitutions, Mills explains, they still impose these hierarchies through other, less obvious, but equally powerful means. This is because the racial contract has evolved: non-white people have convinced the white public to reject open discrimination, so the white public has created a system of informal discrimination instead. This illustrates the racial contract’s adaptiveness in the long term. Indeed, Mills emphasizes that “the Racial Contract is continually being rewritten,” which means that whenever it’s challenged, it adapts over time to reassert its dominance and hide its workings.

In the 20th century, the racial contract replaced explicit racial hierarchy with an informal one, which allows it to sustain white supremacy today, when even most white people no longer accept explicit hierarchies. Mills divides the history of the racial contract into three periods: the time before white supremacy; the long epoch of “formal, juridical white supremacy” from roughly the 1500s to the mid-1900s; and the current period, which he calls “de facto white supremacy,” or white supremacy in practice but not in law. In this current period, the racial contract functions by legally granting non-white people equal rights but depriving them of these rights through different, nominally race-blind procedures. Therefore, formal (or de jure) discrimination in the past has been replaced with informal (or de facto) discrimination in the present. For instance, Mills points out that racial discrimination in hiring is no longer legal in the U.S., but organizations—including city governments—have developed informal procedures to label and reject Black candidates’ applications. Similarly, housing discrimination is still rampant, and most poor non-white neighborhoods in the U.S. remain highly segregated. With these examples, Mill shows that it’s possible to maintain white supremacy through the law (or at least in compliance with it) even when the law legally claims to uphold equality for all people. However, Mills admits that many people—especially white people who benefit from the racial contract—believe that racism no longer exists because discrimination is no longer de jure (formal). This shows that, by switching from formal to informal discrimination, the racial contract has sustained white supremacy and convinced white people that white supremacy no longer exists. In turn, this illustrates how the racial contract’s adaptability is one of the reasons it’s so powerful and difficult to dismantle.

Similarly, depending on the sources of intellectual authority in any given place and time, the racial contract can adapt the language it uses to justify discrimination. This leads many of its white benefactors to misperceive exploitation as justice. For instance, Mills points out that Europeans initially used religious language to justify their rule over non-Europeans—the Spanish colonized the New World with explicit approval from the Pope and argued that Native Americans had no natural rights because they were not Christians. Gradually, as reason and democracy gained power over religion and the Church, this gave way to secular language. For instance, Kant argued that humans’ inherent value depended on their rationality (which he argued that non-white people lacked). By couching itself in the dominant concepts of each time period, the racial contract presented itself as the natural order of things and won validity in its white beneficiaries’ eyes. This process repeated itself a century later, when Darwin’s evolutionary theories became popular and biology gained authority in European public life. This led to European scientists measuring people’s skulls and IQs in an attempt to prove that white people were superior to non-white people. While scientifically invalid, their experiments gave white supremacy a veneer of scientific authority. Again, this shows how the racial contract consolidates its power by adapting to broader intellectual trends.

Finally, racial categories can change over time, which makes the racial contract more resilient and adaptable. Mills points out that the category of whiteness generally expands over time. Whenever they face a threat to their power, white people (the racial contract’s beneficiaries) can grow stronger by simply accepting new people into the club of whiteness. This is why white people once discriminated against “the Irish, Slavs, Mediterraneans, and above all, of course, Jews,” but now these groups are largely considered white (at least in North America). Of course, the category of whiteness has also shrunk at times—most notably with the Nazis, who considered themselves the best of all white people. Essentially, the Nazis kicked other groups out of their definition of whiteness, and then applied the basic logic of the racial contract to them, treating them as subhumans with no rights because of their perceived inferiority. This shows how selectively restricting racial categories can also increase a group’s power. For Mills, the racial contract is constantly transforming: its methods, its justifications, and even its underlying racial categories change depending on what is most effective at maintaining the existing structure of power. In turn, the common belief that white supremacy no longer exists actually just proves how effectively white supremacy has adapted to new social contexts. The racial contract is still in effect, just in a changed form. If the racial contract’s critics truly want to dismantle it and create a just and equitable society, Mills suggests that they have to adapt along with it by identifying and confronting its new forms, structures, and justifications.