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The Racial Contract

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"White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today." So begins The Racial Contract, and in the mere 133 pages that follow this line the book deftly marshals evidence from the Western political tradition and general history to effectively place race at the heart of political theory. It centrally elucidates the ways in which the social contract has unspoken suppositions which in actuality make it a handshake between whites to exploit the lands, labors and bodies of nonwhites. These suppositions include the understanding that the peoples and places it "races" are not fully human--an idea that has legitimated 500 years of Western atrocities and exploitations exacted upon countries with peoples of color. Thus it also calls into question the popular idea that racism is merely a misguided worldview, and says rather that it is solidly within the epistemological, political and moral understandings of the West.

Mills places his theory firmly within the liberal conception of rights and so explores the ways in which such rights (as to life and labors) have been systematically alienated from nonwhites. Hence, those who have called this work a "deconstruction" or anti-Enlightenment are quite wrong. Mills: "Though it may appear to be such, the 'Racial Contract' is not a 'deconstruction' of the social contract.... The 'Racial Contract' is really...pro-Enlightenment...and antipostmodernist" (129). The reason that this is so important to Mills' project is that he is not proposing that ethics are relative or that there are no ethical norms that can coherently be placed at the center of a political project. He proposes that there are such norms but that they have been systematically denied to nonwhites. He also puts forth the very unpostmodern idea that there is a correct metanarrative of history--one that identifies white supremacy and conquest as the unnamed political system making the world what it is today. Hence, this work is more correctly placed in the tradition of the "radical and to-be-completed Enlightenment" (129). (In other words, if prospective readers are looking for contemporary continental thought--go to [my favorites] Zizek, Foucault or Fanon, not to Mills.)

I hope that this does not sound too academic or technical. I have read plenty of dry and boring theoretical texts, and this simply is not that. I stayed up until four in the morning finishing The Racial Contract in one sitting--it is perhaps my favorite book read thus far in college. Anyone concerned about the problems of race--whether familiar with political theory or not--can (and should) read this book and get a tremendous amount from it.

A must read.

In The Racial Contract, Mills places race in context of much larger societal patterns. His approach allows us to see the systemic nature of the problem. Given this context, one can have a more objective conversation about constructs relating to racism.

As a black person, The Racial Contract helped me understand why racism exists, why it's so difficult to reverse and how we all play a role in the system.

Reader beware. Unless you are an academic, the first third of the book can be tough going. It's worth pushing forward. Mills' writing gets easier to navigate.

I'm not sure this book needs much of a review. Most folks who have gotten this far are probably already predisposed towards buying this book anyway. Other reviews of this book treat the book exactly the way Mills has covered the subject matter. I will not be as eloquent. This book is quite simply the most truthful book ever written on the subject. "The Racial Contract" should be required reading for everyone that can read. Its message is not finger pointing, or condescending in tone. It is not apologetic at all. It could be a wake up call for Eurocentric civilization... if it is read!

If you are a student of Western philosophy, particularly Social Contract theory, this book will help you to see the white supremacy inherent in the document. Mills asserts that just as fish can't see water, white men can't see the existence of a white polity here in America. He is clear and thorough in his writing, while keeping the work enjoyable. This book will definitely change your understanding of our government, so if you are interested in finding the "truth" or making positive changes in our political system, The Racial Contract is a requisite first step.

Regardless of age, skin color, or ethnicity, Charles Mills' concepts regarding the invisible contract of white supremacy is an eloquent truth about modern society. Citizens go through day to day life with a misconception that the fight for equality was somehow miraculously won with desegregation and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. However, The Racial Contract throws that notion right out the door. Unfortunately, unless you are engaged in the current injustices regarding racial tensions, the concept is lost. Charles Mills fully admits his "contract" is not a tangible text of racist beliefs, but the text is a detailed description of the subconscious ideologies of superiority that truly dictate political agenda. Unfamiliar with the work of Mills until my Junior year in college, I have to say that Mills accomplished his goal of redirecting pigeon-holed ideas, at least with myself. I would recommend The Racial Contract to anyone who believes in the power of knowledge. Although, I caution readers who would read this book for the simple sake of saying you read it. Unless you are open to thought provoking ideas and enlightening truths this book is not for you, only because it deserves an open mind and respect toward a heartbreaking realization that the land of the free really isn't as free as we would like to think.

If you are engaged with social justice, then you must read this book. In succinct language, direct form and powerful revelations, Professor Mills has helped me to better understand structures that need to be changed and strategies for making that happen.

My Review of the "Racial Contract"

by Charles W. Mills

Finally we have a theory of race (and racism) that is worth its weight in gold, one that is analytically rigorous, parsimonious, elegant and epistemologically powerful: one that explains everything at once and for all times. In short, we have more than a mere theory, we have in the grand tradition of post-modern theorizing, a full fledge ontology of American racism.

However, it must be said, only if in passing, that it is not for lack of trying that we had reached an intellectual precipice, an impasse, a theoretical cul de sac from which only a heroic theoretical effort could rescue us. We had witnessed up close and personal the ugly trail of impotent "near (and pre) theories," often being little more than thinly veiled propaganda pieces, or the desperate flailing of angry fists in the air in search of any explanation better than what the culturally adjusted conventional wisdom was trying to sell us.

Professor Mills has finally given us just such a heroic theory.

In short, we saw the contradictions and confusion that weak theorizing had caused, especially when it was played out as social practice. And we wanted no part of that. A few of us, Dr. Mills among them, have tried to grind our way up the backside of the sisyphus like mountain. There have been many close calls such as Dr. Cornel West's entry in which he explains racism in moral Christian terms, or those of Professor Charles Beard's and Dr. W.E.B. Dubois' where American racism is seen and dissected through the lens of the socialist model. Then there are the psychologists, like the work of Dr. Robert Young; the profound work of the post-Freudians as best represented by the work of Dr. Eric Fromm and Ernest Becker.

Some of these required the fancy footwork of imputing "motives" to our founding fathers, etc. In the end, however, the game of attributing motives as a method of theorizing (or offering establishment excuses for their behavior) is always a tricky and intellectually weak (often dishonest) and messy affair, one that even when successful, seldom leads to generalizable results. There are just too may moving parts to good social and political theorizing to rely on hysteria, ideology, societal manipulation, or theoretical gimmickry. Then there is also of course the work of Carole Pateman: "The Sexual Contract," and similar post-modern works like it that stand alone. It is the epistemological power of such examples, along with that of Jean Jacques Rousseau's own "Social Contract," and John Rawl's "Theory of Justice," that provided both the impetus and a template for Dr. Mill's own "Racial Contract."

Before getting into a brief summary of the author's own theory of the racial contract, I do not hesitate to also mention in passing my own (yet to be published) theoretical entry, which explains racism as but one of many elements in what I call "The Drama of the "White Man's Hero System." It is an idea pirated from the post-Freudian works of Dr. Ernest Becker. And while for the moment I will not be so arrogant as to tout my own entry just to steal Dr. Mill's thunder, suffice it to say that I still believe my own entry (following Becker's lead) is a serviceable one and deserves to be evaluated in the same market place of ideas as this one of Dr. Mill, as well as with the other theories of racism mentioned above. What I believe the idea of a "Drama of the white Man's Hero System" brings to the party is a better explanation of the many unseen psychological aspects of racism that conspire to give it its persistence and longevity. But that is a discussion for another time.

That said however, it is fair to summarize what the author has done as that of having fashioned a theory of racism the old fashion way: out of the intellectual fallout and debris of our "Western ways of philosophizing," ways that have been around since well before the establishment of the American Republic. In the Occam's Razor sense of theorizing, he has come up with a theory that is so simple, so intuitively pleasing, so economic, and so elegant and intellectually tight that its epistemological power alone literally takes the breath away:

In a nutshell, the author's theory is that racism can be completely explained as a "racial contract" between white men about the meaning and purpose of white supremacy. With this simple recognition, white supremacy itself moves from behind the shadows out onto the beach into the light of day as the "stand alone" political system that it really is (and has always been): "a particular configuration of global power and human exploitation with its own formal and informal moral rules, socioeconomic privileges, and norms for the differential distribution of material (and psychological) wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties." It is just short of a pact with the devil to carve up the world of "lesser beings" solely to benefit the survival of the white race. It is a theory whose fruits are seen objectively everywhere and in everything today.

What we have discovered in Professor Mills' rendition, is a theory that founds government on the popular consent of the only individuals that count (that is, when people are taken as equals). The "catch" of course, is that in this "grand theory as racial contract," only whites are defined as individuals that count. Why? Because they are indeed the only people who it can be "taken for granted" are objectively and subjectively, full human beings. For instance, it is only through white subjectivity that humanity is given form. We are not allowed to think in terms of any other subjectivity. Whiteness has been self-defined as 'the Universal humanity."

This simple acknowledgment about the meaning and centrality of white supremacy in defining what our universal humanity is, and whose subjectivity is co-terminus with the Western worldview, explains everything: the moral contradictions and schizophrenia of our founding fathers; why America continues to keep two separate sets of "moral books;" how our founding fathers could live so comfortable with a fundamental contradiction living and growing deep inside their revolutionary bosoms; why there still remains so much cognitive dissonance between American ideals and its everyday social practices; and why even today America can tolerate two separate societies, one Black the other White, and lose no sleep over the vast differences between them. It is also why some white Americans want to claim that its own current mulatto President is not fully American. Firmly in its subtext, the idea of American Exceptionalism has always meant, by definition, that America is only for white men -- everyone else exist in American culture on a contingent provisional basis, forever awaiting white validation -- and whose rights are also always contingent and subject to reversal by the summary mandate of white people.

What has been essential (but purposefully overlooked) in normal Western and American political, social and philosophical discourse, is that the essential Western Social Contract, has not been a contract between everybody (as in "we the people") but only between the people that count as fully human, white people. Full acknowledgment of this single fact has existential repercussions that reverberate all the way back to the founding of this nation, and at the very least requires a revisiting of the social contract as being seen as "settled social theory." And in this revisiting, guided by this author's theorizing, we can see clearly, that newly resurrected, the "racial Contract" constitutes a powerful set of theoretical lens through which the establishment of American society and government should be viewed. Not just in a normatively sense to generate judgments about social justice and injustice, but also descriptively to actually explain the genesis of the American state: the way the society is structured, the way the government functions, and the way people's psychology, both moral and social works and has evolved. Put somewhat more prosaically, Dr. Mill's theory finally allows us a way out of the darkness of the tunnel to an intellectual clearing that rests on more solid human grounds. One that finally frees the white man too from his own self-imposed shackles and raises the humanity of whites back to level ground. In short, it allows us a way of excavating the bones of America's aborted experiment in democracy.

In 133 clearly written theoretical pages, this author takes us back to the creation of the American state, and then leads us by the hand pass the signposts of almost 250 years, walking us empirically up through American history to the present, showing us where all the dead bodies are buried. To call his work a tour de force would itself be a monument to understatement. Of the 988 book I have reviewed so far on amazon.com this little book, far and away, is the very best: 988 stars.

this book really opened my eyes....being a philosophy major, i have always been bombarded with western european thought and its influences on culture. the thing that has always been praised the most is the wonder of the Enlightenment. it has been heralded as doing more for the individual than any other age, BUT.....

mills clearly and passionately shows how this is simply not the case...

read it