54 pages • 1 hour read
Charles W. MillsThe Racial Contract
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Transformation of Christian-Based Prejudice to White Supremacy
Mills makes references to premodern European Christian thought to illustrate how white supremacist ideology, especially regarding morality and cognition, has antecedents in Christian ideology. It should be noted, however, that the outlook is a distinctly Western phenomenon, and the relationship between Christianity and white supremacy is not an indictment of Christianity as a whole. In the Western religious and philosophical tradition, the crucial distinction between persons and subpersons, and therefore eligibility for political membership, is initially a distinction between Christians and so-called heathens, or stated another way, between Europeans and non-Europeans. For example, in Thesis 4, Mills discusses European cartography and how Europeans mapped the world according to religious belief. He explains that the mappa mundi, a European medieval map of the world, was organized “around the Christian cross” (46), so that the world was partitioned by Christian and non-Christian territories.
The distinction, of course, entails mutually interdependent moral and cognitive dimensions, in which the non-European territories are characterized as having a “blindness to Christian light” (46). While the Enlightenment era ushered in increasingly secularized views of society and politics, the influence of Western Christianity on Enlightenment-era philosophy is not simply eradicated in one fell swoop, but rather is translated into secular terms for state politics and the establishment of the modern civil polity. Among the classic contract philosophers, namely Locke and Kant, morality is pre-political, meaning that it is not purely conventional and is derived from some source other than the civil government. That source, as Mills demonstrates, is the God of the Christian faith, who imbues persons with moral and rational capacities that are exemplified in natural law.
For example, in Thesis 1 where Mills discusses the idea of an “objectively just polis” (15), meaning a preexisting moral code that is present in the state of nature and constrains the terms of the social contract, he writes that the idea comes from “the medieval Christian worldview which continued to influence contractarianism well into the modern period” (15). He provides examples of this view in the work of Locke and Kant. Locke’s Second Treatise argues that political right is derived from the moral egalitarianism that exists in the state of nature. Kant also makes claims to “equal moral personhood” (16) as the source of equal political rights. However, this moral egalitarianism is only extended to the signatories of the Racial Contract. Going on in Thesis 5 to discuss the norming and racing of individuals, Mills notes that the supposed cognitive inferiority of nonwhite people is initially “spelled out in terms of heathen unwillingness to recognize God’s word” (59), which is later secularized to a “raced incapacity for rationality, abstract thought, cultural development, and civilization in general” (59).
Thus, it becomes clear that the theological basis for a perceived difference in moral and cognitive capacity is transformed along a racialized basis as white supremacy became sedimented in global society. The problem with the theological basis, i.e., what required its transformation in secular terms, is that it didn’t properly serve the “politicoeconomic project of conquest, expropriation, and settlement” (54) or justify the unequal treatment of non-European people. That is, the impermanence of religious belief, meaning that non-European people can convert to Christianity and thus arrive at equal moral and cognitive standing, produced a contradiction between the purported egalitarianism and the horrors inflicted on non-European populations. Race, then, becomes the preferred distinguishing factor that determines personhood and eligibility for political membership. Therefore, the Racial Contract and the white supremacist structure that it establishes is derived from Western Christian philosophy.
Personhood vs. Subpersonhood
Personhood vs. Subpersonhood is the central distinction around which the Racial Contract and the perspectives of nonwhite people regarding the social contract pivots. This is primarily because dominant social contract discourse focuses on raceless, undifferentiated individuals and their inherent equality, while the historical record reflects a distinction between who is considered a person and entitled to that equality and civil membership. One of Mills’s main tasks in demonstrating that the Racial Contract underwrites the social contract is to illuminate how the original social contract is an agreement between those considered persons only, which is to say, an agreement between white men. In order for classic contract theorists and mainstream academics to obfuscate the contradictions between purported ideals and reality, the distinction must be present and have normative force.
One of Mills’s first claims as he introduces the Racial Contract and how it transforms the understanding of the terms of the social contract is in Thesis 1. Where dominant contract discourse sees the primary transformation in the original agreement as the “human metamorphosis […] from ‘natural’ man to ‘civil/political’ man, from the resident of the state of nature to the citizen of the created society” (12), Mills argues that the crucial transformation of the human population is its partitioning of society into “‘white’ and ‘nonwhite’ men” (13). This racialized distinction is the basis for personhood and subpersonhood, although Mills demonstrates that the racialized distinction has theological antecedents. Such a distinction allows for the social contract and its claims to civil equality and freedom to exist alongside the realities of inequality, enslavement, and conquest of other human beings.
Thus, the contradiction must be justified by dehumanizing the nonwhite populations. In Thesis 4 and 5 where Mills discusses the norming and racing of space and individuals, he illustrates how nonwhite populations are dehumanized and made into subpersons. The moral, epistemological, and aesthetic dimensions of the Racial Contract are significant here. They all involve the pejorative characterization of nonwhite space and individuals, especially in opposition to the Christianity, perceived rationality, and perceived beauty of European space and individuals. That is, the categories of personhood and subpersonhood are reciprocally defined. In Thesis 5, Mills clearly articulates the crux of the relationship and how it resolves the contract contradictions:
Subpersons are humanoid entities who, because of racial phenotype/genealogy/culture, are not fully human and therefore have a different and inferior schedule of rights and liberties applying to them. In other words, it is possible to get away with doing things to subpersons that one could not do to persons, because they do not have the same rights as persons (56).
Mills demonstrates the mutual interdependence of the categories at several points throughout the text. He especially notes the way that white identity and self-conception is defined in opposition to those who are considered subpersons. For example, in Thesis 2, he writes that the global European/white community is established “in opposition to their indigenous subjects” (29). In Thesis 4, he cites Hayden White on “the technique of ostensive self-definition by negation” (43).
However, the relegation to subpersonhood per the Racial Contract does not in fact make the purported subpersons nonhuman. Thus, it requires a great amount of effort, physically and psychologically, to force nonwhite populations into believing in their inherent inferior status. This is a subject that Mills takes up in Thesis 7. For example, nonwhite assertion of personhood in the form of resistance to the white supremacist polity is met with a disproportionate amount of white terror because the resistance constitutes an ontological threat to white identity and the white polity that is “predicated on nonwhite subpersonhood” (85). On the ideological conditioning, which largely happens through the educational apparatus, he argues that the colonial project involves teaching children in colonial territories “out of British or French or Dutch schoolbooks to see themselves as aspirant (but, of course, never full) colored Europeans, saved from the barbarities of their own cultures” (89). The inculcation of subpersonhood status is required in order for the white polity to flourish. Furthermore, this inculcation happens by denying the moral, cognitive, and cultural capacities of nonwhite people. As such, Mills advocates for nonwhite theorists to overcome a significant struggle, which is their own internalization of subpersonhood status, in Thesis 9.
Despite whatever physical and ideological conditioning nonwhite communities have endured, their resistance throughout history, however obscured in dominant narratives, indicates that they have not in toto accepted subpersonhood status. Thus, the Personhood vs. Subpersonhood distinction and the fact that it is a distinction by which white people have allowed themselves to navigate the world speaks to the cognitive distortion that the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories.
The Epistemology of Ignorance
Mills names the cognitive distortion as The Epistemology of Ignorance, which is prescribed by the Racial Contract in order for white people to uphold their civic duty to Whiteness. He discusses the cognitive distortion most explicitly in Thesis 8, but there are references to and examples of The Epistemology of Ignorance throughout the text.
Mills first identifies the epistemology in Thesis 1, noting that the Racial Contract requires of its signatories “to see the world wrongly, but with the assurance that this set of mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistemic authority, whether religious or secular” (18). Mills’s mention here of white epistemic authority is significant because it provides the grounds for his oppositional argument about dominant contract discourse. That is, The Epistemology of Ignorance is not merely an issue in terms of historical events, but for Mills, it is also a contemporary issue reflected in the academic discourse concerning contract. Throughout the text, he notes the ways that dominant discourse interprets classic contract theory, while correcting for the dominant deficiencies in terms of the Racial Contract. Furthermore, he explicitly acknowledges the contemporary manifestations of the epistemology in Thesis 10:
By its crucial silence on race and the corresponding opacities of its conventional conceptual array, the raceless social contract and raceless world of contemporary moral and political theory render mysterious the actual political issues and concerns that have historically preoccupied a large section of the world’s population (124).
The dominance of white epistemic authority in the academy explains why nonwhite theorists are met with puzzlement and discomfort when they raise important questions about race, i.e., personhood and subpersonhood, in terms of classic contract philosophy. Mills’s aim with the Racial Contract theory is not merely to make an alternative set of claims about the descriptive and prescriptive details of classic contract theory, but it is also meant to jolt his white academic contemporaries out of the Epistemology that is a testament to the lasting effects of the Racial Contract.
Another important indicator of the Epistemology of Ignorance is the self-deluding manner in which European global dominance has been regarded by European theorists. For example, in Thesis 2, he discusses “the thesis of European specialness and exceptionalism” (33) or the idea that “Europe made it on its own […] because of the peculiar characteristics of Europe and Europeans” (33). This is a profound misinterpretation of history and reality because, as Mills and other nonwhite historians demonstrate, European global dominance is causally connected to the exploitation of non-European people, lands, and resources around the world.
A prime example of the self-delusion appears in Thesis 6 where Mills discusses Rousseau’s theory. Rousseau claims that Europeans introduced metallurgy and agriculture to Indigenous populations, despite there being evidence of metallurgy and agriculture among the Aztec and Inca prior to European arrival. Rousseau’s claims about European intervention relate to the argument that Mills puts forth in Thesis 4 regarding the norming (and racing) of space. The terms of the Racial Contract require the denial of scientific achievement and cultural development among non-European populations prior to European intervention. As Mills points out, this denial is reflected in the language of “discovery,” “exploration,” and “virgin lands” with regards to pre-existing societies. Furthermore, any evidence of scientific achievement and cultural development was destroyed, appropriated, or attributed to outside intervention in order to norm the space and its inhabitants as inferior to Europe/Europeans.
Thus, what Mills demonstrates is that not only is the cognitive dysfunction prescribed and encouraged by the Racial Contract, but also that there is a massive amount of effort put into maintaining The Epistemology of Ignorance. It is only through the ignorance that theoretical and practical contradictions can exist and that white people can continue to see themselves as morally and rationally superior despite evidence to the contrary. Furthermore, because many white people are essentially “fish in the water” (76), meaning that they cannot actually see the white supremacist environments through which they move because it is considered “normal” and taken for granted, they also cannot develop an accurate prescriptive lens with which to consider how to move towards the ideal society with which Western philosophy is so concerned. The Epistemology of Ignorance, then, is combatted by The View from the Bottom, which ironically pushes society closer to the ideals advocated by white philosophers.
The View from the Bottom
The View from the Bottom is what Mills describes as “the epistemology of the victims, the objects, of the Racial Contract” (109), which is focused on the reality of racism and white supremacy as experienced by non-White persons. While Mills most extensively discusses The View from the Bottom in Thesis 9, it is a running theme throughout the text.
In Thesis 3, where Mills notes the autochthonous view of European global material advantage, he cites the work of several nonwhite scholars who “have traditionally dissented from this notion of happy divine or natural European dispensation” (34) by articulating the “crucial causal connection between European advance and the unhappy fate of the rest of the world” (34). He names Eric Williams, Walter Rodney, Samir Amin, Andre Gunder Frank, and Immanuel Wallerstein as some of the scholars who have pointed out the ways that plantation slavery and colonial enterprises enabled and consolidated Europe’s material advantage.
In Thesis 5, Mills cites Toni Morrison, who argues that “Americanness definitionally means whiteness” (58) and points out the moving borders of whiteness in the way that European immigrants can arrive in the United States and be assimilated into whiteness, granted they reject markers of their ethnic origin. Mills also discusses the moving borders of whiteness in Thesis 6. The attention to the fluidity of race categories is significant in terms of The View from the Bottom because it is only the outsider perspective, the perspective of someone who would be consistently denied in-group membership based on phenotype, that would allow one to notice who is accepted, why, and how. As Mills has demonstrated in the text, classic contract philosophers, namely Kant, have presented race as fixed, immutable categories, and the purportedly intrinsic qualities of those “races” have been presented as fixed and immutable as well.
The View from the Bottom is also significant because it represents the oppositional Black theory tradition to which Mills attributes The Racial Contract. According to Mills, the tradition is characterized by the way that “it situates itself in the same space as its adversary and then shows what follows from ‘writing race and [seeing] the difference it makes’” (132). Some well-known theorists in the tradition include Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and Frantz Fanon, all of whom Mills cites in the text to demonstrate what they illuminate about the Racial Contract. For example, in Thesis 7, he cites James Baldwin on how segregation “has allowed white people, with scarcely any pangs of conscience whatever, to create, in every generation, only the Negro they wished to see” (88). In Thesis 4, he cites Frantz Fanon on the bifurcation of the colonial world into two “compartments […] inhabited by two different species” (48). These are both important allusions to the Personhood vs. Subpersonhood theme and the means by which subpersonhood is inculcated into nonwhite populations.
In short, The View from the Bottom is a crucial perspective because, unlike the Epistemology of Ignorance, it entails an accurate perception of social reality from which a prescriptive analysis can follow. An important element of The View from the Bottom, then, is also naming and describing white supremacy. As Mills writes in the concluding thesis, “[n]aming this reality brings it into the necessary theoretical focus for these issues to be honestly addressed” (132-33). This is why Mills advocates in Thesis 9 that nonwhite theorists trust that their perception is accurate and that they have the cognitive capacity to develop concepts and theory that challenge the dominant discourse and the contradictions and oversights of mainstream white theorists.
