The Racial Contract

With Thesis 5, Mills explicitly articulates the Person vs. Subpersonhood theme and relationship. He begins by noting that in classic contract, the body entirely disappears. The body can be construed as inconsequential in classic contract because a particular body, the white male body, is presupposed as the somatic norm. Drawing on feminist theory that indicates the body is only irrelevant when it’s a male body, Mills asserts that a similar dynamic exists in terms of the Racial Contract. The body is only irrelevant when it’s a white body. The Racial Contract, thus, brings the body politic to the foreground, and the argument put forth here alludes to The View from the Bottom that Mills more explicitly details in later theses.

As the Contextual Analysis notes, social contract theory, while associated with the modern period, has antecedents in ancient philosophy. Mills provides an example of this through his discussion of Aristotle’s “natural slave.” While Aristotle does not articulate who the “natural slave” is, Mills asserts that the Racial Contract clarifies the identification because it “establishes a particular somatotype as the norm” (54). This leads to a discussion of another important antecedent to the norming (and racing) of the body in the distinction between Christians and so-called heathens in determination of personhood and full political membership. By explaining the inadequacies of the theologically based distinction (because people can convert), Mills builds on The Transformation theme that establishes racial norming as the prevailing paradigm and the white body as the somatic norm fit for personhood and political membership. 

For analytical purposes, Mills distinguishes the moral/legal, cognitive, and aesthetic dimensions of racial norming of the individual, although they are related. Regarding the moral/legal dimension, Kant becomes an important figure as he is the classic philosopher associated with defining “personhood” as it relates to morality and rights. Per Mills, the Racial Contract simultaneously enshrines personhood and subpersonhood, and to understand personhood, one must understand subpersonhood. Here lies another indication of the oppositional definition and identification on which whiteness is founded. Mills defines subpersons as humanoids, i.e., not humans. This humanoid status means that morally and legally, they may be justifiably treated in ways that one could not treat a fellow human according to the normative standards. While the crucial divide between personhood and subpersonhood undergirds the colonial project, the most obvious example of this for Mills is racial slavery, where white and Black identity are mutually reinforcing by not-being the other.

The moral dimension is linked to the cognitive dimension. To explain the cognitive dimension, Mills again starts with Aristotelian and Christian theological roots of white supremacist ideology, given the relationship between God’s so-called natural law and one’s ability to reason. Furthermore, where social contract discourse begins with cognitive equality, the Racial Contract asserts an inequality in “the capacity of different human groups to know the world and to detect natural law” (59). That is, subpersons are considered rationally deficient. Mills cites Locke, Hume, Kant, Voltaire, and Mill on the racialized “incapacity for rationality, abstract thought, cultural development, civilization in general” (59). The examples he provides from these philosophers call back to Thesis 4 and the denial of cognition to nonwhite populations that exemplifies The Epistemology of Ignorance central to the Racial Contract. He also notes later attempts arising out of Darwinism to “scientifically” quantify the intellectual inferiority of nonwhite people, as well as the way that the cognitive inferiority thesis precluded nonwhite court testimony as an accurate perception of the world. The idea here is that white cognition is the only valid cognition. 

The aesthetic dimension is also linked to the moral dimension, in that moral judgements and aesthetic judgements are conflated in Enlightenment-era thought. The result is that proximity to the white somatotype determines one’s proximity to upright morality. Thus, it follows that Black features are considered the least beautiful and the most indicative of moral deficiency. Mills notes the real-world implications of the aesthetic notions, such as the effects on employment and education opportunities, which are observable in the easier acceptance of mixed-race and light-skinned Black in the “white world. This last point recalls Mills’s argument in Thesis 4 where the Black body (and the Blacker it is) connotes a source of discomfort for white people, especially in white normed space. It also demonstrates the intimate link between the norming and racing of space and the individual. 

In Thesis 1, Mills briefly points out the ways that the Racial Contract realistically illuminates and transforms the terms of the social contract, and in Thesis 3, Mills mentions the continual rewriting of the Racial Contract. Here in Thesis 6, he fully articulates what he means regarding the Racial Contract being the actual contract that governs global society and its constant revision to maintain the white supremacist structure that it establishes. While there is debate about the existence and extent of racism in antiquity, there is general agreement that racism is most theoretically developed in modernity and linked to global European domination. With the general acceptance as his starting point, Mills argues that the Racial Contract both creates racial exploitation and creates race as a group identity. By noting the overlap between the golden age of contract theory and the growth of European capitalism, Mills draws the two creations together as mutually interdependent, providing further support for his argument in Thesis 3. In short, the encounter with non-European people during Europe’s exploration voyages provided a racial subtext for capitalist development. This makes the Racial Contract the truth of the social contract. 

Mills cites the evidence of the Racial Contract in classic contract theory, focusing on Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. For Hobbes, “savages” in America represented a real-life example of the state of nature, where the state of nature is only hypothetical for European/white populations. This supports Mills’s suggestion in Thesis 1 on the association of nonwhite spaces and bodies with a state of nature and his outright assertion in Theses 4 and 5 that these nonwhite spaces and bodies are regarded as requiring the intervention of Europeans/white people to become civilized. Noting that Hobbes is typically interpreted “as an awkwardly transitional writer” (66) regarding feudal absolutism and parliamentarianism, Mills argues that he is transitional in another way with respect to the ideology of racial subordination that had not yet fully taken root in Britain’s imperialism. Hobbes’s work indicates that “without a sovereign even Europeans could descend to [a state of nature], and that the absolutist government appropriate for nonwhites could also be appropriate for whites” (66). The use of “even” suggests the differential view of the “naturally savage” Native American and the already civilized and rational European, who could only possibly descend to the state of nature without proper governance. In short, there is no intrinsic deficiency for Hobbes’s European as there is for his Native American. 

Locke’s wildly different state of nature (as compared to Hobbes) is “virtually civil,” allowing for white people to exist in a state of nature without their intrinsic qualities being called into question. Again, there is a differential view with respect to European and non-European populations, whereby Locke justifies the expropriation contract on the basis of Europeans’ “superior rationality,” from which adding value to the natural world of the Indigenous population follows. In addition, Locke justifies the slavery contract, except it’s on the basis of just war, and he “explicitly opposes hereditary slavery” (68). However, Mills points out that Locke was invested in the Royal Africa Company, and he helped write the slave constitution of Carolina, so Locke’s “just war” notion and his opposition to hereditary slavery are actually contradictory to his real-life practices, in that “just war” is not an “accurate characterization of European raiding parties seeking African slaves” (68). The point here is that when the Racial Contract is brought into view, Locke’s contradictions are apparently resolved. Here, the theme of Personhood vs. Subpersonhood shows up in terms of who benefits from the terms of Locke’s social contract, demonstrating that the Racial Contract underwrites the social contract.

Rousseau’s theory has been interpreted in dominant discourse as indicative of a belief in inequality, particularly because of his Discourse on Inequality (1755) and the idea of the “noble savage.” However, Mills notes important indications of Personhood vs. Subpersonhood and The Epistemology of Ignorance in Rousseau’s work. The only “natural savages” in Rousseau’s theory are not white, and his “noble savages” are presented as “primitive beings who are not actually part of civil society, barely raised above animals, without language” (69). He also puts forth the autochthonous and self-congratulating argument regarding Europeans purportedly introducing metallurgy and agriculture to Indigenous populations. In these displays of the text’s themes, Rousseau exhibits his belief in and justification for the “interventionist” tendencies of the European population.

Kant represents the most obvious example of the Racial Contract underwriting the social contract because Kant himself is the “father of the modern concept of race” (70) and enshrined in his work are definitions of both personhood and subpersonhood. In the discussion of Kant, Mills draws on Emmanuel Eze’s re-reading of Kant, by which Eze examines Kant’s well-known philosophical work in conjunction with his lesser-known anthropology and physical geography lectures where his racialized views are most evident. Kant’s work demonstrates the conflation of aesthetic and moral judgements with racial hierarchy, recalling Thesis 5. Mills notes that the racialized views are often obscured in philosophical discourse, contributing evidence to The Epistemology of Ignorance that undergirds white supremacy. 

Having discussed the four classic theorists, Mills turns to the continual rewriting of the Racial Contract. He distinguishes two global periodizations of its evolution—before and after the institutionalization of white supremacy. He focuses on the “after” period, further distinguishing periods of de jure and de facto racism. In the de jure period, the Racial Contract is explicit, and its subsidiary contracts—the expropriation, slave, and colonial contracts—are openly endorsed and enforced by white agents. The de facto period, however, is more complicated in that the Racial Contract is written out of formal existence and reinforced in more covert ways. Mills identifies unofficial local agreements, such as resource allocation and employment discrimination, as evidence of the covert reinforcement. Other important indications of the covert rewriting are the ways that white supremacist manifestations are taken for granted as the status quo and the way that contract discourse stays within the bounds of the nation-state and relies on abstractions of ideal society that obscure the reality of a global racialized society.

Mills trains his argument on the taken-for-granted and abstract qualities to make important points about The Epistemology of Ignorance and The View from the Bottom. Mills describes the relationship between the two as follows:

Nonwhites then find that race is, paradoxically, both everywhere and nowhere, structuring their lives but not formally recognized in political/moral theory. But in a racially structured polity, the only people who can find it psychologically possible to deny the centrality of race are those who are racially privileged, for whom race is invisible precisely because the world is structured around them, whiteness as the ground against which the figures of other races—those who, unlike us, are raced—appear. The fish does not see the water, and whites do not see the racial nature of a white polity because it is natural to them, the element in which they move (76).

While various Black theorists, like Toni Morrison, Patricia Williams, Bill Lawson, and Anita Allen are able to articulate the realities of the racist polity because of their lived experience in it, the abstraction towards the ideal, found in the work of white theorists like John Rawls and Robert Nozick, which largely characterizes mainstream discourse, rewrites and invisibilizes the Racial Contract. For Mills, the rewriting and invisibilizing entrenches white supremacy. 

Furthermore, the rewriting can be seen in the moving borders of Whiteness, such as with respect to Slavs, Mediterraneans, Jewish people—“off-white people”—and even Chinese and Japanese Americans who are considered “model minorities” and “honorary whites.” The moving goalposts diminish essentialist claims about race and demonstrate that Whiteness is constructed by the Racial Contract. This is an important allusion to an argument that Mills suggests in Thesis 1 and will elaborate on in Thesis 10—the distinction between whiteness as an indication of being beneficiaries to the Racial Contract and Whiteness as an indication of being signatories to the Racial Contract.