The Racial Contract

“In the Racial Contract, by contrast, the crucial metamorphosis is the preliminary conceptual partitioning and corresponding transformation of human populations into ‘white’ and ‘nonwhite’ men. The role played by the ‘state of nature’ then becomes radically different.”

Where dominant contract discourse identifies the crucial metamorphosis as uncivilized man to civilized man, Mills argues that the metamorphosis is the distinction between white and nonwhite people, i.e., the distinction between persons and subpersons. The role of the state of nature is transformed by this distinction because, as Mills illustrates in later theses, the nonwhite spaces constitute actual states of nature in which the moral and legal egalitarianism of the social contract are not applicable. For Europeans, the state of nature is either hypothetical or already partially civilized so that it really only serves as a conceptual device for explaining/justifying the structure of civil society.

“Thus in effect, on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will generally be unable to understand the world they themselves made.”

Here, Mills first identifies the cognitive dysfunction that allows white signatories to the Racial Contract to commit atrocious acts against nonwhite populations even as they claim moral and rational superiority. Furthermore, this quote explains why so many white people are unable to understand that they exist in a racial/racist polity—the Racial Contract norms the racial structure and makes white people the normative somatotype within it. Thus, it is essentially like a fish being unable to recognize that the environment they move through is water because the environment is taken for granted.

“Correspondingly, various moral and legal doctrines were propounded which can be seen as specific manifestations and instantiations, appropriately adjusted to circumstances, of the overarching Racial Contract. These were specific subsidiary contracts designed for different modes of exploiting the resources and people of the rest of the world for Europe: the expropriation contract, the slavery contract, the colonial contract.”

Here, Mills articulates that the Racial Contract is not just one contract, but a series of contracts that forms the overall. Furthermore, the metacontract, the Racial Contract, constantly being rewritten through the moral and legal doctrines so that the overall contract remains intact. The subsidiary contracts that Mills identifies support his case for the historical actuality of the Racial Contract.

“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.”

This quote raises the point that racism is the norm of modern Western philosophy, whereas racism is often presented as a deviation from the norm in dominant discourse. The passage points to historical antecedents of modern racism, which becomes an important theme in the text, specifically with respect to Western Christianity and its influence on Enlightenment era philosophy.

“The legacy of this world is, of course, still with us today, in the economic, political, and cultural domination of the planet by Europeans and their descendants.”

Here, Mills points out that the terms of the Racial Contract, or modern racism, remain in effect in postmodern society. The eradication of de jure racism often serves as the pretext for the denial of racism, which is a significant element of The Epistemology of Ignorance. Eliminating formal recognition of racism did little to upend the structure of white supremacy and instead transformed it in ways that obscure its reality.

“The whole point of establishing a moral hierarchy and juridically partitioning the polity according to race is to secure and legitimate the privileging of those individuals designated as white/persons and the exploitation of those individuals designated as nonwhite/subpersons.”

Mills suggests that the project of European global domination is a capitalist project as the golden age of contract theory coincided with the rise of capitalism. Thus, it can be argued that racism and capitalism in modern (and postmodern) society are mutually reinforcing.

“The norming of space is partially done in terms of the racing of space, the depiction of space as dominated by individuals (whether persons or subpersons) of a certain race. At the same time, the norming of the individual is partially achieved by spacing it, that is, representing it as imprinted with the characteristics of a certain kind of space.”

The norming and racing of space and individuals is inextricably bound and mutually reinforcing, although he treats space and individual separately for analytical purposes. For subpersons, this mutual reinforcement is a circular indictment whereby their space is considered deficient because of its inhabitants. Likewise, the inhabitants are considered deficient because they exist in that space. Europeans have used this premise to justify the conquest and domination of nonwhite territories and nonwhite people foreigners in their lands.

The non-European state of nature is thus actual, a wild and racialized place that was originally characterized as cursed with a theological blight as well, an unholy land. The European state of nature, by contrast, is either hypothetical or, if actual, generally a tamer affair, a kind of garden gone to seed, which may need some clipping but is really already partially domesticated and just requires a few modifications to be appropriately transformed—a testimony to the superior moral characteristics of this space and its inhabitants.”

Here, Mills recalls the point that he makes in Thesis 1 about how the crucial distinction between white and nonwhite people, or persons and subpersons, transforms the role of the state of nature in classic contract theory. This quote also demonstrates the circular relationship between space and individual for European/white people.

“Since the Racial Contract links space with race and race with personhood, the white raced space of the polity is in a sense the geographical locus of the polity proper. Where indigenous people were permitted to survive, they were denied full or any membership in the political community, thus becoming foreigners in their own country.”

There is a gap between the application of legal and moral code and the actual segregation of white and nonwhite spaces. The denial of political membership to nonwhite people implies that state obligation to protect rights and alleviate the problems of modern (and postmodern) society stops at the nonwhite space. This is an indication of the relationship between space and individual, as well as The Epistemology of Ignorance, because the justification for the state’s lack of intervention in the problems that it essentially creates is that those problems exist in nonwhite communities because of the nonwhite people themselves.

“The reality is that one can pretend the body does not matter only because a particular body (the white male body) is being presupposed as the somatic norm. In a political dialogue between the owners of such bodies, the details of their flesh do not matter since they are judged to be equally rational, equally capable or perceiving natural law or their own self-interest.”

Here, Mills points to the crux of the issue with taking embodied norms for granted. White male embodiment in a white male dominated world obscures that their privilege is essentially a political matter although they have ironically designated themselves as the body politic.

“But the embarrassing fact for the white West (which doubtless explains its concealment) is their most important moral theorist of the past three hundred years is also the foundational theorist in the modern period of the division between Herrenvolk and Untermenschen, persons and subpersons, upon which Nazi theory would later draw. Modern moral theory and modern racial theory have the same father.”

This quote refers to Immanuel Kant. It alludes to the intentional whitewashing of historical and philosophical discourse because to acknowledge the full picture and present a more rounded narrative would be to indict those who have been idolized and to call into question those who have done the idolizing. While the quote is specific to Kant, it could be generally applied to many celebrated figures in Western moral and political philosophy, in terms of how their philosophies were developed in tandem with, and are perhaps predicated upon, racist views. This quote also alludes to a later point that Mills makes about the Jewish Holocaust being indicative of norms established by the Racial Contract, rather than a deviation or an anomaly.

“Globally, the Racial Contract effects a final paradoxical norming and racing of space, a writing out of the polity of certain spaces as conceptually and historically irrelevant to European and Euro-world development, so that these raced spaces are categorized as disjoined from the path of civilization (i.e., the European project).”

Mills refers to the whitewashing of dominant discourse as well as one of the manifestations of The Epistemology of Ignorance. Here, the misinterpretation of the world is indicated by the lack of recognition of the causal connection between European global dominance and the exploitation/destruction of non-European societies.

“Nationally, within these racial polities, the Racial Contract manifests itself in white resistance to anything more than the formal extension of the terms of the abstract social contract (and often to that also). Whereas before it was denied that nonwhites were equal persons, it is now pretended that nonwhites are equal abstract persons who can be fully included in the polity merely by extending the scope of the moral operator, without any fundamental change in the arrangements that have resulted from the previous system of explicit de jure racial privilege.”

The relationship between de jure and de facto racism is the subject of this quote. The eradication of legally recognized racism provides the pretext for the denial of racism. However, it is precisely the legal enshrinement of colorblindness that allows white supremacy to persist in more covert ways and cuts matters of racism off from legal remediation.

“The silence of mainstream moral and political philosophy on issues of race is a sign of the continuing power of the Contract over its signatories, an illusory color blindness that actually entrenches white privilege. A genuine transcendence would require, as a preliminary, the acknowledgement of its past and present existence and the social, political, economic, psychological, and moral implications it has had both for its contractors and its victims.”

Mills reiterates that colorblindness reinforces white supremacy. In addition, he demonstrates his intention towards a prescriptive application of the Racial Contract theory. By illuminating the ways that the Racial Contract underwrites the social contract, it becomes possible, from Mills’s view, to reach towards the ideals that Western philosophy prizes.

“In seeking first to establish and later to reproduce itself, the racial state employs the two traditional weapons of coercion: physical violence and ideological conditioning.”

Mills identifies the two methods by which white supremacy establishes and reinforces itself. Although he argues that the physical violence constitutes the primary means of white supremacy’s early establishment, it is by no means limited to the early period. Physical violence to reinforce the white supremacist structure continues today in the form of police brutality and inhumane prison conditions. The other, and perhaps more insidious, method of ideological conditioning happens largely through the educational apparatus by which nonwhite people’s inferior status is inculcated through whitewashed narratives and lessons that center white ways of being and knowing as the norm to which all should aspire.

“The coercive arms of the state, then—the police, the penal system, the army—need to be seen as in part the enforcers of the Racial Contract, working both to keep the peace and prevent crime among the white citizens, and to maintain the racial order and detect and destroy challenges to it, so that across the white settler states nonwhites are incarcerated at differential rates and for longer terms.”

Here, Mills articulates the role of law enforcement, the justice system, and the military in the subordination of nonwhite populations. A significant point here is the dual role that they play whereby white people can have faith in these arms of the state and view them essentially as protective, while nonwhite people’s experience is primarily that these arms of state are combative towards nonwhite populations. A contemporary example of this differential perspective is the way that predominantly nonwhite communities have made calls for defunding the police, while it is predominantly white people who identify with the police and advocate that the police force remain intact, all in light of the recent exposure of police brutality towards nonwhite, especially Black, communities.

“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.”

The important point here is that it is not enough to merely acknowledge white supremacy or racism. What is required is understanding how it functions, specifically that it is so insidious and pervasive that it is taken for granted and obscured in various ways.

“The Racial Contract thus makes White moral psychology transparent; one is not continually being ‘surprised’ when one examines the historical record, because this is the psychology the contract prescribes.”

Here, Mills suggests that the cognitive dysfunction prescribed by the Racial Contract is two-fold. Not only did it allow white people to commit atrocious acts against people of color throughout history and around the world, but it also makes white people in the present disbelieving of and surprised by the historical facts that illuminate the atrocities that their forefathers have committed. There is also an important allusion here to the way that the white collective’s self-perception is undergirded by self-delusion that prevents them from seeing themselves and their forefathers accurately.

“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 does not require one to leave the country but to speak out and struggle against the terms of the Contract.”

Again, Mills articulates the distinction between whiteness and Whiteness. In short, there is a choice among those who are phenotypically/genealogically white to repudiate Whiteness, which is to reject the Racial Contract. Mills acknowledges that the choice is difficult, because the repudiation of Whiteness would alienate them from friends and family who do not make the same choice. There is also the possibility, albeit slim, that the repudiation of Whiteness could be a relinquishment of the benefits that Whiteness confers.

“Correspondingly, nonwhites, with no vested material or psychic interest in the Racial Contract—objects rather than subjects of it, viewing it from outside rather than inside, subpersons rather than persons—are (at least before ideological conditioning) able to see its terms quite clearly. Thus the hypocrisy of the racial polity is more transparent to its victims.”

Here, Mills articulates why The View from the Bottom is a more accurate perception of social reality. There is little to no benefit for people of color to deny the realities of racism because the Racial Contract does not confer any privileges to them. Furthermore, because they are not the somatic norm, they are not the fish in the water. The environment cannot be taken for granted because there are real material consequences should they not be aware of the environment through which they are moving.

“Linked with the personal struggle will be an epistemic dimension, cognitive resistance to the racially mystificatory aspects of white theory, the painstaking reconstruction of past and present necessary to fill in the crucial gaps and erase the slanders of the globally dominant European worldview.”

The personal struggle that Mills refers to here is the internalization of the status of personhood. Mills suggests that such ideological conditioning also prompts nonwhite people to question if they are accurately perceiving reality, given the force of white epistemic authority. In addition to deconditioning oneself from believing in one’s own inferiority, one must learn to trust one’s own cognitive and perceptual capacities, especially in the face of a dominant worldview that renders that cognition and perception inaccurate.

“We are blinded to realities that we should see, taking for granted as natural what are in fact human-created structures. So we need to see differently, ridding ourselves of class and gender bias, coming to recognize as political what we had previously thought of as apolitical or personal, doing conceptual innovation, reconceiving the familiar, looking with new eyes at the old world around us.”

This quote refers to how one’s social environment and social reality impacts one’s perception of reality. Dominant contract theorists are able to disappear the body because they embody the somatic norm. Historically, academia has been dominated by white middle/upper class men who have rendered crucial political issues apolitical. They resemble those who are in power so they don’t have to think about the inequitable distribution of power. Thus, fresh, and often oppositional, perspectives are brought into scholarly discourse when those who embody oppressed categories enter the academic space.

“In a sense, the ‘Racial Contract’ decolorizes Whiteness by detaching it from whiteness, thereby demonstrating that in a parallel universe it could have been Yellowness, Redness, Brownness, or Blackness. Or alternatively phrased, we could have had a yellow, red, brown, or black Whiteness: Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations.”

Mills explicitly states why the distinction between whiteness and Whiteness is a point of his argument. The historical trajectory of European dominance and white supremacy was/is a choice, not contingent or accidental.