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.
Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1: “Overview”
Thesis 1 Summary and Analysis: “The Racial Contract is political, moral, and epistemological”
Each subsection of the book is named for a thesis Mills explores. In the first thesis, Mills defines the dimensions of the Racial Contract. Typical contract theories focus on the political and moral dimensions of society. The political dimension entails an account of the origins of government and individuals’ political obligations to it. This dimension is typically broken down into the establishment of society and the establishment of the state. The moral dimension of contract theory explains the foundation of moral codes that regulate citizens’ behavior, and there are two interpretations of those foundations that Mills goes on to explain later. Mills’s articulation of the third dimension, the epistemological, in terms of the Racial Contract, suggests that the Racial Contract clarifies the “prescribing norms for cognition” (11), which are implicit in the social contract rather than explicitly stated. Having already established in his Introduction that he is directly inspired by Carol Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988), the three dimensions of Mills’s Racial Contract exemplify this inspiration as Pateman’s theory puts forth the same three dimensions.
Where typical contract discourse suggests that all individuals participate in the social contract, Mills argues that the Racial Contract is an agreement between white people only. Nonwhite people are the objects of the agreement. This establishes the theme of Personhood vs. Subpersonhood that comes to play an important role throughout Mills’s analysis. Mills demonstrates that the Racial Contract shifts the key terms and principles of classic social contract theory. The agreement is not merely the establishment of civil society out of a pre-existing non-racialized state of nature, but rather the establishment of a racialized polity characterized by white domination over pre-existing nonwhite societies, which Mills later demonstrates constitute the so-called state of nature that the social contract seeks to civilize. Underscoring the theme of Personhood vs. Subpersonhood, the Racial Contract transforms the human population in more discrete terms than classic social contract. It is not merely the distinction between uncivilized to civilized that characterizes the transformation from the state of nature to the civil polity, but the distinction between nonwhite and white people. The state established by the contract is, thus, not neutral. It is created to maintain and reproduce a racial order, and the parties’ civic and political duty is to that racial order, i.e., to whiteness.
Classic contract philosophers explain the relationship between the moral and political dimensions of society, and Mills elaborates on these dominant interpretations. On one hand, the objective view holds that morality exists in the state of nature as natural law, and so constrains the terms of the political contract. On the other hand, the Hobbesian view is that the political contract creates morality, and so morality is considered purely conventional. Mills’s Racial Contract aligns with the objective view.
He notes that the view of an “objectively just polis” (15) is derived from Christian theology, establishing another theme which is important to his argument: The Transformation of Christian-Based Prejudice to White Supremacy. Implied in the “objectively just polis” view is the idea of moral egalitarianism. Mills provides evidence of moral egalitarianism by explaining how it appears in the work of Locke and Kant. However, as Mills demonstrates in later parts of the book, this moral egalitarianism, linked to legal egalitarianism, is limited to those who are considered persons, i.e., white people, again building the theme of Personhood vs. Subpersonhood.
The explanation of the relationship between morality and politics in classic contract theory leads into Mills’s assertion that the epistemological dimension, that the cognitive model implied in classic contract is clarified by the Racial Contract. According to Mills, the Racial Contract establishes an inverted epistemology by which those who are party to the contract, white people, explicitly or implicitly agree to misinterpret and misrepresent the world and its social realities. This misinterpretation makes possible the contradictions between the social contract’s purported ideals and the reality of the conquest, colonization, and enslavement of non-white peoples. The Epistemology of Ignorance that informs white people’s denial of this contradiction is another important theme throughout the book.
Thesis 2 Summary and Analysis: “The Racial Contract is a historical actuality”
With his second thesis, Mills demonstrates a crucial characteristic that distinguishes classic contract theory and its dominant interpretations from Racial Contract theory. While classic contract theory and its dominant interpretations are characterized by conjectural reasoning exercises, the Racial Contract is rooted in historical fact. Mills supports his point by explaining the historical evidence. Citing Anthony Pagden, he identifies two distinct and interdependent periods of European empire—the colonization of the Americas from 1492 to the 1830s and the occupation of Asia, Africa, and the Pacific from the 1730s to the mid-1950s (21). These periods include overlapping legal codes and doctrines that indicate the differential adjudication of law and application of morality that indicate the formalization of the distinction between white and nonwhite people. This distinction builds on the themes of Personhood vs. Subpersonhood and the Epistemology of Ignorance, which allude to how the moral and legal egalitarianism of the classic contract is limited to white people.
Within the Racial Contract are three distinct and interrelated contracts that consolidate global European dominance and white supremacy: the expropriation contract, the slavery contract, and the colonial contract. Again, Mills demonstrates the inspiration that he takes from Pateman’s Sexual Contract, as she, too, identifies three contracts that consolidate the subjugation of women. Mills mentions actual doctrines and legal codes that exemplify the Racial Contract. For example, he discusses the “Doctrine of Discovery,” Indian laws, and instances of genocide of Indigenous populations in North America, Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia, and South Africa that are central to the expropriation contract. He identifies slave codes and Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) as examples of the slavery contract. He also points to colonial Indigenous acts, the Berlin Conference (1884-1885), and “various inter-European pacts, treats, and informal arrangements on policing their colonies” (30) as evidence of the colonial contract.
In short, what these three subsidiary contracts and the Racial Contract do is formalize the subordination of nonwhite populations to their white overseers. The Racial Contract, then, “creates a transnational white polity, a virtual community of people linked by their citizenship in Europe at home and abroad […] and constituted in opposition to their indigenous subjects” (29). Mills’s articulation of the community of Europeanness/whiteness is an important transition point for his next thesis, and his note of the oppositional character of whiteness is a significant foreshadowing of a later thesis that explains how white identity is constructed as not-being the subordinated nonwhite population.
Thesis 3 Summary and Analysis: “The Racial Contract is an exploitation contract”
Another important dimension of the social contract and the white supremacist structure that it establishes and maintains is economics. Mills points to Locke’s concern with private property in the state of nature and Hobbes’s s concern with how the state of nature precludes safe and moral industry to exemplify how the economic dimension of society lies in the background of classic contract. Mills also notes that while there are various interpretations regarding moral egalitarianism with respect to economy and industry, the general idea is that the presumed equality in the state of nature is “supposed to carry over into the economy of the created sociopolitical order, leading to a system of voluntary human intercourse and exchange in which exploitation is precluded” (32). By contrast, the Racial Contract foregrounds the economic dimension, illuminating that its very purpose is the economic exploitation of nonwhite populations in order to secure the material advantages of the European/white population. The convergence with Pateman’s theory is evident in terms of illuminating the salience of economic exploitation for those who are party to and beneficiaries of the contract.
It’s important to note here that Mills distinguishes between European material dominance on a global scale and white material privilege on a national scale, although the two are interrelated and both are a part of the terms of the same Racial Contract. Regarding the former, Mills discusses the prevailing tendency to present European global dominance in an ahistorical and autochthonous manner. That is, European wealth is rendered as an indication of specialness and exceptionalism that is unconnected to and independent of a history of colonialism and global exploitation of nonwhite populations. This builds on the theme of the Epistemology of Ignorance, as it exemplifies the misrepresentation of social reality by way of historical amnesia and narrative re-writing.
In contrast to this erroneous view of European dominance, Mills cites several Black and so-called Third World scholars who have articulated that the exploitation of nonwhite populations was crucial to the material development and advantage of Europe. The more realistic view of the nonwhite population becomes the subject of Thesis 9 and introduces the theme of The View from the Bottom. Furthermore, Europe has continued to enjoy a material advantage in the aftermath of its former colonial territories gaining independence because European and Euro-American (the United States and Canada) capitals continue to dominate the world through financial institutions, lending agencies, and corporations.
On a national scale, differential wealth distribution between white and nonwhite populations also indicates the terms of the Racial Contract. In his explanation, Mills asserts that the Racial Contract is constantly being rewritten, which is the subject of Thesis 6. Using the US as the primary example, Mills includes statistics on the wealth disparity between Black and white Americans. He also notes the illusory nature of a smaller income gap and the creation of the Black middle class following the eradication of formal de jure exclusion and segregation to illustrate that it is not income but rather wealth that is a significant indicator of the Racial Contract at play.
Mills closes Thesis 3 by reiterating what the first three theses have indicated about the Racial Contract—that on global and national scales, it establishes a racial polity characterized by a specific political, social, and moral hierarchy that serves white interests and is structured by the economic exploitation of the nonwhite population. It also involves an epistemological dimension that allows the contradictions between ideals and reality to exist. The first three theses provide the basis for a more detailed analysis in Chapter 2 of how the Racial Contract works in its differential establishment and application of the four dimensions articulated in Chapter 1.
