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The Racial Contract
The Racial Contract puts classic Western social contract theory, deadpan, to extraordinary radical use. With a sweeping look at the European expansionism and racism of the last five hundred years, Charles W. Mills demonstrates how this peculiar and unacknowledged "contract" has shaped a system of global European how it brings into existence "whites" and "non-whites," full persons and sub-persons, how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and how this system is imposed on non-whites through ideological conditioning and violence. The Racial Contract argues that the society we live in is a continuing white supremacist state. As this 25th anniversary edition―featuring a foreword by Tommy Shelbie and a new preface by the author―makes clear, the still-urgent The Racial Contract continues to inspire, provoke, and influence thinking about the intersection of the racist underpinnings of political philosophy.
216 pages, Paperback
First published October 1, 1997
229 people are currently reading
6421 people want to read
About the author
Charles W. Mills
26 books87 followersCharles W. Mills was a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He worked in the general area of social and political philosophy, particularly in oppositional political theory as centered on class, gender, and race. He was the author of over a hundred journal articles, book chapters, comments and replies, and six books. His first book, The Racial Contract (Cornell UP, 1997), won a Myers Outstanding Book Award for the study of bigotry and human rights in America. It has been translated into Korean and Turkish. His second book, Blackness Visible: Essays on Philosophy and Race (Cornell UP, 1998), was a finalist for the award for the most important North American work in social philosophy of that year.
Mills received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, and previously taught at the University of Oklahoma, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Northwestern University. He was the President of the American Philosophical Association Central Division for 2017-18. In 2017, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Mills received his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto, and previously taught at the University of Oklahoma, the University of Illinois at Chicago, and Northwestern University. He was the President of the American Philosophical Association Central Division for 2017-18. In 2017, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 180 reviews
February 11, 2017
This should be compulsory reading for all undergraduates everywhere.
February 6, 2011
When I searched for this book on goodreads a message came back saying, "Did you mean Social Contract?" Which is a testament to the truth of Mills' thesis. He suggests the world is one structure to its core by white supremacy, and that political philosophy has largely ignored this fact in order to maintain it. I would love to think of myself and my world as "colorblind," but I mean let's face it, it can't be done. If nothing else, this book will be an eye-opener for people unfamiliar with the global history of the ubiquity of racism: Voltaire, Locke, Hobbes, Hegel, Kant, Darwin, Rousseau, and obviously all the founding "fathers" wrote blatantly and openly about their preference for certain melatonin levels. Race is real, no matter how you define what is "real." Denying its place in legislative activity (i.e. opposition to affirmative action) is irresponsible and downright ignorant. The neoliberal/conservative argument that race doesn't exist, or that we've done enough to level the playing field, or whatever, is a tempting fantasy we all (myself and Mills included) would love to embrace. But the fantasy only denies the fact that the playing field itself is racially constructed. Mills advocates the wholsale reinsertion of color into political and philosophical discourse. I agree with no reservations (pun intended...?). I'm also really funny.
October 31, 2017
Was Kant a theorist of the Herrenvolk? Did Locke build his theory on the subjection of non-Whites? Yes, if you believe Charles W. Mills. According to him, the entire canon of Western thought is fundamentally racist. He claims that "global white supremacy" is at the heart of Western ideas.
Mills's plea for an alternative historical account of the foundations of Western domination is at times inspiring and at times insane. Some of his arguments are brilliant, others laughable. It has to be admitted that he manages to combine a powerful rhetorical style with penetrating penmanship.
One must be wary of excusing Mills's hyperbolic assertions for the sake of social justice, however.
Mills's book is a typical example of a politicized attempt to break up established canons, to smash some sacred cows, and to open up a space, finally, for the "subaltern" to speak in full freedom. It also manages to show, in concrete terms, how racial prejudices have informed Western thinking.
The problem is that Mills doesn't take full cognizance of the fundamental fact of racism as a general human condition. He acknowledges that the Japanese and other "races" have proven themselves to be equally capable of casting other races as subhuman. But he barely mentions the ancient institution of slavery or the long line of xenophobia and genocide since the Babylonians and the ancient Aryans. There is nothing "White" about the desire to see one's own kin as superior.
Mills also falls for the easily debunked notion that Western wealth accumulation was (largely) the singular result of the expropriation and oppression of non-whites through colonial exploitation. In fact, it was the increasing wealth of the West, combined with technological innovations, that allowed them to expand into a global Empire (or a circus of Empires) capable of colonial oppression.
The question is not, What did Western civilization do wrong to turn to racism? (Every civilization has relied on racism, cultural superiority and self-serving moral justifications.) But, What did it do right to give birth to technologies, institutions and moral ideas that can be, even if they have not always been, fruitfully applied to move mankind to accept the peaceful coexistence of the races?
The wistful longing for a non-Western alternative canon is noble, but it is dangerous to deprive non-whites of the tools of Western learning. How much of the Enlightenment legacy do we really want to abandon because we can see traces of "white supremacy" inscribed in its history books? Painting universalist aspirations as the ideological equivalent of colonialism is a perilous path.
Mills is mostly wrong about economics and about the centrality of Whiteness. But where he is right, he is really right, as in his potent criticism of the historical blindness of Western ideal theory. There are lingering injustices that continue to cripple the bodies and mute the vocal chords of non-whites, and no amount of abstract theory can deny that. But there are also lingering glimmers of hope, in that same theory, that can empower the minds of all of humanity, regardless of race, precisely because the notions of Kantian autonomy and Lockean liberty are, yes, colour-blind.
Mills's plea for an alternative historical account of the foundations of Western domination is at times inspiring and at times insane. Some of his arguments are brilliant, others laughable. It has to be admitted that he manages to combine a powerful rhetorical style with penetrating penmanship.
One must be wary of excusing Mills's hyperbolic assertions for the sake of social justice, however.
Mills's book is a typical example of a politicized attempt to break up established canons, to smash some sacred cows, and to open up a space, finally, for the "subaltern" to speak in full freedom. It also manages to show, in concrete terms, how racial prejudices have informed Western thinking.
The problem is that Mills doesn't take full cognizance of the fundamental fact of racism as a general human condition. He acknowledges that the Japanese and other "races" have proven themselves to be equally capable of casting other races as subhuman. But he barely mentions the ancient institution of slavery or the long line of xenophobia and genocide since the Babylonians and the ancient Aryans. There is nothing "White" about the desire to see one's own kin as superior.
Mills also falls for the easily debunked notion that Western wealth accumulation was (largely) the singular result of the expropriation and oppression of non-whites through colonial exploitation. In fact, it was the increasing wealth of the West, combined with technological innovations, that allowed them to expand into a global Empire (or a circus of Empires) capable of colonial oppression.
The question is not, What did Western civilization do wrong to turn to racism? (Every civilization has relied on racism, cultural superiority and self-serving moral justifications.) But, What did it do right to give birth to technologies, institutions and moral ideas that can be, even if they have not always been, fruitfully applied to move mankind to accept the peaceful coexistence of the races?
The wistful longing for a non-Western alternative canon is noble, but it is dangerous to deprive non-whites of the tools of Western learning. How much of the Enlightenment legacy do we really want to abandon because we can see traces of "white supremacy" inscribed in its history books? Painting universalist aspirations as the ideological equivalent of colonialism is a perilous path.
Mills is mostly wrong about economics and about the centrality of Whiteness. But where he is right, he is really right, as in his potent criticism of the historical blindness of Western ideal theory. There are lingering injustices that continue to cripple the bodies and mute the vocal chords of non-whites, and no amount of abstract theory can deny that. But there are also lingering glimmers of hope, in that same theory, that can empower the minds of all of humanity, regardless of race, precisely because the notions of Kantian autonomy and Lockean liberty are, yes, colour-blind.
April 18, 2017
This should be core reading for everyone, seriously.
In 130 pages or so, Mills highlights the unintentional but more often intentional omission of race and racism in white dominated political systems. From slavery, colonialization, imperialism and apartheid, Mills provides an overview of the on going racial oppression suffered by the majority of the world's population via the Racial Contract. A contract that separates white, human individuals from non-white, barbaric sub-persons. This book came out 20 years ago, but boy is it as relevant as ever in a time when race still determines humanity, superiority, and privilege.
"..before it was denied that nonwhites were equal persons, it is now pretended that nonwhites are equal"
In 130 pages or so, Mills highlights the unintentional but more often intentional omission of race and racism in white dominated political systems. From slavery, colonialization, imperialism and apartheid, Mills provides an overview of the on going racial oppression suffered by the majority of the world's population via the Racial Contract. A contract that separates white, human individuals from non-white, barbaric sub-persons. This book came out 20 years ago, but boy is it as relevant as ever in a time when race still determines humanity, superiority, and privilege.
"..before it was denied that nonwhites were equal persons, it is now pretended that nonwhites are equal"
September 12, 2008
I loved this book. I used it in a political philosophy class of mostly white men. Some of the students freaked out and focused on feeling offended. But the ones who worked past that were able to do interesting work on evaluation their own whiteness.
Read
November 26, 2025"One could say then, as a general rule, that white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion, and self deception on matters related to race are among the most pervasive mental phenomena of the past few hundred years, a cognitive and moral economy psychically required for conquest, colonization, and enslavement."
April 6, 2019
I'd recommend anyone interested in the theoretical grounding of critical race theory read Charles Mills' Racial Contract as it eloquently lays out the case for theorizing about white supremacy as a political system of domination.
However, I was not entirely persuaded by Mills' critique of the hypothetical contractualist tradition as he asserts rather than argues that it is by understanding the actual operations of the nonideal world that we come to understand how to transform it to make it more just, ethical etc. I don't disagree that we need to consider the actual operations of the world in considering whether the actual world is just, but I am not convinced that we need to be examining the actual operation of the world to generate principles of justice. Instead, I would defend some form of reflective equilibrium in which we have certain abstract moral intuitions that need to be tested against concrete reality, but are not necessarily generated from an in depth consideration of the concrete world.
As a case in point, Mills' points to the damage that is done to nonwhites by the internalization of the negative picture of the nonwhite other by nonwhites. However, from a Rawlsian, hypothetical contractualist perspective I can make sense of this as a failure in the distribution of the primary good of the social bases of self-respect. Clearly, in actual existing liberal democracies this good is not adequately distributed according to Rawlsian principles of justice, but I did not need the theoretical device of the Racial Contract for this, I just need to check the abstract principles of justice against empirical evidence. So, Rawlsian liberals need not be blind to this racialized inequality even while maintaining an abstract, raceless hypothetical contractualism.
However, I was not entirely persuaded by Mills' critique of the hypothetical contractualist tradition as he asserts rather than argues that it is by understanding the actual operations of the nonideal world that we come to understand how to transform it to make it more just, ethical etc. I don't disagree that we need to consider the actual operations of the world in considering whether the actual world is just, but I am not convinced that we need to be examining the actual operation of the world to generate principles of justice. Instead, I would defend some form of reflective equilibrium in which we have certain abstract moral intuitions that need to be tested against concrete reality, but are not necessarily generated from an in depth consideration of the concrete world.
As a case in point, Mills' points to the damage that is done to nonwhites by the internalization of the negative picture of the nonwhite other by nonwhites. However, from a Rawlsian, hypothetical contractualist perspective I can make sense of this as a failure in the distribution of the primary good of the social bases of self-respect. Clearly, in actual existing liberal democracies this good is not adequately distributed according to Rawlsian principles of justice, but I did not need the theoretical device of the Racial Contract for this, I just need to check the abstract principles of justice against empirical evidence. So, Rawlsian liberals need not be blind to this racialized inequality even while maintaining an abstract, raceless hypothetical contractualism.
May 22, 2023
pretty good. philosophers never struggle to use an unnecessary amount of words to make their point
January 19, 2024
Good intro to how racism pervades systems and reinforces itself.
February 5, 2026
Any good American is taught that America was founded on the principles of equality, liberty, and justice for all. Yes, there was slavery and the genocide of Native Americans, but that is treated as an asterisk, an exception to the lofty moral ideal. Charles Mills argues that this is backwards. Racism is the rule, not the exception, and you will not understand Western ethical and political philosophy if you do not grasp that fact. Mills critiques European philosophy for its inability to explain or theorize racial subjugation.
All Western ethical and political philosophies, utilitarianism, Kantianism, liberalism, social contract theory, and so on, are implicated. It does not really matter which theory is at issue. Racism, or the Racial Contract, is a metatheory, something that seeps into the theorizing of all of them. For Kantians, all humans have infinite dignity, except Native Americans and Black people. For utilitarians, the pain of all sentient beings counts the same, except Black people are treated as if they feel less pain than white people. And on and on.
All of these theories fail to explain the racism that has been fundamental to the last 500 years of Western politics, including colonialism, apartheid, the transatlantic slave trade, and more. Racism is not the exception to the rule, but the rule itself. If you do not understand how Kant, Hegel, Locke, and others justified racism, you will not understand their theories.
Mills’s theory is both descriptive and normative. It is descriptive because it better explains how political philosophy and ethics have actually treated nonwhite people, and normative because it sets out a path to fixing those problems by putting race and racial justice front and center. This book is great, concise, well argued, and, in my opinion, obviously correct.
Quotes
Racism and racially structured discrimination have not been deviations from the norm; they have been the norm, not merely in the sense of de facto statistical distribution patterns but, as I emphasized at the start, in the sense of being formally codified, written down and proclaimed as such.
Particularly for blacks, ex-slaves, the importance of developing self-respect and demanding respect from whites is crucial. Frederick Douglass recounts “how a man was made a slave,” and promises “you shall see how a slave was made a man.” But a hundred years later this struggle is still in progress. “Negroes want to be treated like men,” wrote James Baldwin in the 1950s, “a perfectly straightforward statement, containing only seven words. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable.”
The “Racial Contract” starts from these uncomfortable realities. Thus it is not, like the social contract, continually forced to retreat into illusory idealizing abstraction, the never-never land of pure theory, but can move readily between the hypo- thetical and the actual, the subjunctive and the indicative, having no need to pretend things happened which did not, to evade and to elide and to skim over. The “Racial Contract” is intimate with the world and so is not continually “astonished” by revelations about it; it does not find it remarkable that racism has been the norm and that people think of themselves as raced rather than abstract citizens, which any objective history will in fact show.
All Western ethical and political philosophies, utilitarianism, Kantianism, liberalism, social contract theory, and so on, are implicated. It does not really matter which theory is at issue. Racism, or the Racial Contract, is a metatheory, something that seeps into the theorizing of all of them. For Kantians, all humans have infinite dignity, except Native Americans and Black people. For utilitarians, the pain of all sentient beings counts the same, except Black people are treated as if they feel less pain than white people. And on and on.
All of these theories fail to explain the racism that has been fundamental to the last 500 years of Western politics, including colonialism, apartheid, the transatlantic slave trade, and more. Racism is not the exception to the rule, but the rule itself. If you do not understand how Kant, Hegel, Locke, and others justified racism, you will not understand their theories.
Mills’s theory is both descriptive and normative. It is descriptive because it better explains how political philosophy and ethics have actually treated nonwhite people, and normative because it sets out a path to fixing those problems by putting race and racial justice front and center. This book is great, concise, well argued, and, in my opinion, obviously correct.
Quotes
Racism and racially structured discrimination have not been deviations from the norm; they have been the norm, not merely in the sense of de facto statistical distribution patterns but, as I emphasized at the start, in the sense of being formally codified, written down and proclaimed as such.
Particularly for blacks, ex-slaves, the importance of developing self-respect and demanding respect from whites is crucial. Frederick Douglass recounts “how a man was made a slave,” and promises “you shall see how a slave was made a man.” But a hundred years later this struggle is still in progress. “Negroes want to be treated like men,” wrote James Baldwin in the 1950s, “a perfectly straightforward statement, containing only seven words. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable.”
The “Racial Contract” starts from these uncomfortable realities. Thus it is not, like the social contract, continually forced to retreat into illusory idealizing abstraction, the never-never land of pure theory, but can move readily between the hypo- thetical and the actual, the subjunctive and the indicative, having no need to pretend things happened which did not, to evade and to elide and to skim over. The “Racial Contract” is intimate with the world and so is not continually “astonished” by revelations about it; it does not find it remarkable that racism has been the norm and that people think of themselves as raced rather than abstract citizens, which any objective history will in fact show.
December 31, 2022
Should probs be compulsory in a great number of 1st year uni courses
February 17, 2022
Mills made some good point, although I found the delivery and tone quite frustrating. It was more being told what's the case rather than shown.
I think it is important to note that, at least according to my reading of Mills, he is not saying that white people are uniquely racist, but that the current political setup is such that it is racist in favour of whites and to the disadvantage of nonwhites.
I think it is important to note that, at least according to my reading of Mills, he is not saying that white people are uniquely racist, but that the current political setup is such that it is racist in favour of whites and to the disadvantage of nonwhites.
July 11, 2012
4 1/2 stars. Here's another book that I recommend everyone read. It provides a deep, biting critique of traditional social contract theory as being rooted not in equal persons with equal rights, but in a distinction between humans and sub-humans. Mills grounds this critique with numerous examples, examining the history of certain groups (usually whites, of course) dominating other groups seen as sub-human (usually non-whites). He also examines the reasons, and subsequent results, of why political philosophers ignore this distinction. This work really goes to the heart of the historical foundations of political theory and illuminates its true, repugnant underpinnings.
Now, as much as I feel that this is a seminal, ground-breaking piece of theory, there are some big points I take issue with. The biggest issue I have is that Mills apparently doesn't recognize the incidental nature of the human/sub-human distinction as being made in terms of race. That is, it is not a Racial Contract that social contract theory is predicated on. It is an in-group/out-group contract. In-groups (usually composed of white Europeans) thought of themselves as humans imbued with certain rights, while they looked at out-groups (usually composed of non-white indigenous people) as sub-human. The fact that these out-groups were of a different color is incidental and non-essential. True, there's a huge amount of despicable literature attempting to justify a distinction based on race between whites and non-whites, but the focus on skin color was and is merely the result of skin color being the most visually salient difference between the two groups. The real difference laid in the culture, society, and beliefs between the in-group and the out-group. If Europeans came to North America and found Native Americans living in wood and brick houses secured by property rights, adhering to a formal system of government, going to large, imposing structures to worship a monotheistic god, and having an economy with a standardized currency, I imagine their impressions would have been much different--even though their skin was "red."
The previous critique comes to the fore when Mills begins to speculate on issues relating to the Nazi Holocaust and the Japanese nation, as well as Asians living in the United States. He proposes the awkward, clumsy idea that there are different shades of Whiteness, and one white group can basically think of another white group as being "off-white." At various points in history: The Jews weren't thought of as White; the Slavs weren't thought of as White; the Irish weren't thought of as White; Asian-Americans are thought of as "honorary" Whites. Accordingly, the extent to which a group is thought of as human is the extent to which they are thought of as White. It seems to me that it makes much better sense to say that the extent to which a group is thought of as human is the extent to which that group is thought of as being included in the in-group. It's a far better explanation for intra-race conflicts than the "off-white" speculation gives us. It's also a far better explanation when we consider the extent to which Asian Americans have assimilated into American culture, and the extent to which they have been successful, economically speaking, as a group.
As a related point, Mills also proposes that the fundamental actors in the political sphere are not the individuals of liberalism nor the classes of Marxism, but races. However, a better proposal would be that the fundamental actors in the political sphere are individuals adhering to certain group identities (sometimes these identities happen to coincide with a skin color, sometimes not).
Thirdly, Mills says that every person of color is and always has been aware of the Racial Contract--that they're aware that whites dominate non-whites and that this is written into the very fabric of society. And that this continues, in a more subtle way, to this day. This is an empirical claim. However, Mills makes it unfalsifiable in the manner he presents it. Any person of color who denies his claim is a victim of "ideological conditioning," as he puts it. So no matter the response a person of color may give, Mills' claim is corroborated. Very bad science.
Finally, and this is a bit of a quibble, Mills is fond of using the term "white supremacist society" to describe what the Racial Contract has created. The term "white supremacist" may have once been apt to characterize society, but I believe it no longer is. White supremacy, to me, invokes images of a society ruled with the laws and beliefs of a bunch of KKK members. I think a more accurate term may be, say, "white dominated," or something similar.
These objections shouldn't make a person ignore this book, however. This book must not be ignored. The radical interpretation it gives of political theory, as well as society itself, is vital. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to go back to viewing the social contract in the traditional way after reading this.
Now, as much as I feel that this is a seminal, ground-breaking piece of theory, there are some big points I take issue with. The biggest issue I have is that Mills apparently doesn't recognize the incidental nature of the human/sub-human distinction as being made in terms of race. That is, it is not a Racial Contract that social contract theory is predicated on. It is an in-group/out-group contract. In-groups (usually composed of white Europeans) thought of themselves as humans imbued with certain rights, while they looked at out-groups (usually composed of non-white indigenous people) as sub-human. The fact that these out-groups were of a different color is incidental and non-essential. True, there's a huge amount of despicable literature attempting to justify a distinction based on race between whites and non-whites, but the focus on skin color was and is merely the result of skin color being the most visually salient difference between the two groups. The real difference laid in the culture, society, and beliefs between the in-group and the out-group. If Europeans came to North America and found Native Americans living in wood and brick houses secured by property rights, adhering to a formal system of government, going to large, imposing structures to worship a monotheistic god, and having an economy with a standardized currency, I imagine their impressions would have been much different--even though their skin was "red."
The previous critique comes to the fore when Mills begins to speculate on issues relating to the Nazi Holocaust and the Japanese nation, as well as Asians living in the United States. He proposes the awkward, clumsy idea that there are different shades of Whiteness, and one white group can basically think of another white group as being "off-white." At various points in history: The Jews weren't thought of as White; the Slavs weren't thought of as White; the Irish weren't thought of as White; Asian-Americans are thought of as "honorary" Whites. Accordingly, the extent to which a group is thought of as human is the extent to which they are thought of as White. It seems to me that it makes much better sense to say that the extent to which a group is thought of as human is the extent to which that group is thought of as being included in the in-group. It's a far better explanation for intra-race conflicts than the "off-white" speculation gives us. It's also a far better explanation when we consider the extent to which Asian Americans have assimilated into American culture, and the extent to which they have been successful, economically speaking, as a group.
As a related point, Mills also proposes that the fundamental actors in the political sphere are not the individuals of liberalism nor the classes of Marxism, but races. However, a better proposal would be that the fundamental actors in the political sphere are individuals adhering to certain group identities (sometimes these identities happen to coincide with a skin color, sometimes not).
Thirdly, Mills says that every person of color is and always has been aware of the Racial Contract--that they're aware that whites dominate non-whites and that this is written into the very fabric of society. And that this continues, in a more subtle way, to this day. This is an empirical claim. However, Mills makes it unfalsifiable in the manner he presents it. Any person of color who denies his claim is a victim of "ideological conditioning," as he puts it. So no matter the response a person of color may give, Mills' claim is corroborated. Very bad science.
Finally, and this is a bit of a quibble, Mills is fond of using the term "white supremacist society" to describe what the Racial Contract has created. The term "white supremacist" may have once been apt to characterize society, but I believe it no longer is. White supremacy, to me, invokes images of a society ruled with the laws and beliefs of a bunch of KKK members. I think a more accurate term may be, say, "white dominated," or something similar.
These objections shouldn't make a person ignore this book, however. This book must not be ignored. The radical interpretation it gives of political theory, as well as society itself, is vital. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to go back to viewing the social contract in the traditional way after reading this.
July 24, 2022
In the introduction to The Racial Contract, the late Charles Mills, a political philosopher and critical theorist, claims that his book rests on three claims: first, that white supremacy as a conceptual and political phenomenon exists and has existed for several centuries across the world; second, that white supremacy is most appropriately understood as a political system; and third, as a political system, white supremacy can be theorized as based on a “contract” between whites that excludes and subordinates nonwhites—that is, as a Racial Contract. The “Racial Contract,” with quotation marks, is a theory of this Racial Contract, which Mills explains is a set of formal and informal settlements between the members of one subset of humans coextensive with the class of full persons and denominated “white,” to classify the remainder of humans as “nonwhite” and of an inferior moral status, i.e. as subpersons, so that they are subordinate to whites in white-ruled polities. Central to the contract is that the moral and judicial rules that apply to the behavior of whites in their relations with one another either do not apply at all in relations with nonwhites or only in a qualified form. The Racial Contract, then, justifies the exploitation of nonwhites’ bodies, land, and resources, as well as the denial of equal socioeconomic opportunities to them (11). For Mill, the Racial Contract is inextricably bound up with the social contract tradition. In fact, Mills states that “the Racial Contract is . . . the truth of the social contract,” in that the social contract, as conceptualized by early modern political theorists like Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant, represented an attempt to reconcile the political ideals of the new liberal philosophy with the massacre, expropriation, and subjection to hereditary slavery of individuals across the world who were ostensibly human (64). The Racial Contract resolved this contradiction: the social contract and its liberal ideals applied only to full persons, that is, whites.
On one level, then, Mills critiques the social contract tradition as complicit with the white supremacy embodied by the Racial Contract as a historical political reality. On another level, however, he appropriates and subverts the social contract tradition to articulate the “Racial Contract” as a theory. The “Racial Contract,” as Mills frequently asserts, is both descriptive and normative, not unlike the social contract as described by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. It is descriptive in that it explains the actual inception of society and the state, the way society is structured, and the latent effects of institutionalized white supremacy on individuals’ moral worldviews. In these ways, its function mirrors the quasi-historical explanatory function of the social contract in the classical tradition. At the same time, it is normative in that it provokes moral assessments of justice and injustice and identifies obstacles to the realization of liberal political ideals. In this respect, too, the “Racial Contract” participates in the classical tradition, albeit in a somewhat different vein, since the social contract as conceived by Hobbes and Locke, for example, is meant to justify certain norms and the institutional makeup of a just social order. The closest parallel to the “Racial Contract” as a “naturalized” account to explain the rise of a nonideal society is the social contract described by Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality. Unlike the ideal contract, which explains how a just society should be structured, the nonideal, naturalized contract explains how an unjust, exploitative society ruled by an oppressive state comes into existence. “If the ideal contract is to be endorsed and emulated,” Mills explains, “this non-ideal/naturalized contract is to be demystified and condemned” (5). The “Racial Contract” as a theory critically analyzes the Racial Contract qua historico-political phenomenon to enable us “to understand the polity’s actual history and how [its] values and concepts have functioned to rationalize oppression, so as to reform them” (6).
Mills is persuasive in his efforts both to describe the historical reality of the Racial Contract and its conceptual connections to the social contract tradition. To demonstrate the latter, he identifies “some direct evidence” in the texts of the classical contract theorists themselves and plausibly speculates that the reason why the white supremacist basis for their theories has so infrequently been addressed is out of embarrassment on behalf of white, western philosophers (64). It is an especially painful embarrassment that these philosophers’ “most important moral theorist of the past three hundred years,” i.e. Immanuel Kant, “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” (72). In part due to this intellectual ancestry, Mills thinks that contemporary social contract theorists like John Rawls are complicit in the Racial Contract. Their complicity is not, admittedly, attributable to their endorsement of the same racist beliefs held by the classical contractarians; rather, it has to do with their preoccupation with ideal political theory, which excludes “eminently nonideal features of the real world” like the Racial Contract (76). More specifically, because contemporary contractarianism is decidedly ahistorical and acontextual, intentionally oblivious to the empirical realities of white supremacy as a political system, it obfuscates the actual political issues that have concerned nonwhite communities and individuals for centuries (124). Consequently, there is “no conceptual point-of-entry” for nonwhite theorists to talk about “the fundamental way in which (as all nonwhites know) race structures one’s life and affects one’s life chances” (76). In other words, Mills thinks that raceless contractarianism silences theorists and dissidents who seek to call attention to white supremacy in our culture and political institutions.
Based on this critique, it seems that Mills objects more to ideal political theory than contemporary contractarianism specifically. And this is a perfectly reasonable critique he shares with feminists, communitarians, and other non-ideal political theorists. Political theory, he asserts, must be able to name and account for phenomena associated with the Racial Contract, and to the extent that ideal theory obscures these phenomena, it is inadequate. Mills claims that “the silence of mainstream moral and political philosophy on issues of race” is an indication of the power that the Racial Contract still has over thinkers today, “an illusory color blindness” that reinforces white supremacy (77). This may be true, and I am sympathetic to critical race theorists, feminists, and communitarians who promote a more hermeneutical approach to political theory, but I am not sure it means that we must simply jettison ideal theory entirely. Ideal theory, in my view, serves a crucial philosophical function: as Rawls explains in A Theory of Justice, it provides both a critical and constructive standard from which to work and so helps clarify the moral issues at stake in non-ideal circumstances. We would do well to appreciate the value of this function, just as we would do well not to overlook the historical reality of the Racial Contract and its contemporary hold over much of society. Is it not possible to oscillate between the ideal theory of Rawls and the “Racial Contract” of Mills at different moments in our reflection on political life? Must we choose one over the other? Mills dispenses with that possibility perhaps a bit too quickly.
As a final note, I think it is important in our current cultural and political context to briefly comment on how Mills positions the “Racial Contract” in relation to postmodernism. He flatly states that “the ‘Racial Contract’ is not a ‘deconstruction’ of the social contract.” The “Racial Contract” is, rather, a work of critical theory, and more specifically critical race theory, and “antipostmodernist.” In perhaps one of the most crucial sentences of the book, Mills writes that “it criticizes the social contract from a normative base that does not see the ideals of contractarianism themselves as necessarily problematic but shows how they have been betrayed by white contractarians” (129, my emphasis). Moreover, he adds, “it is explicitly predicated on the truth of a particular metanarrative, the historical account of the European conquest of the world, which has made the world what it is today. Thus it lays claims to truth, objectivity, realism, the description of the world as it actually is, [and] the prescription for a transformation of that world to achieve racial justice” (ibid.). These remarks show that Mill’s brand of critical race theory is far from the crude caricature peddled by white nationalists in their efforts to exploit white backlash to recent anti-racist movements in the United States. They also demonstrate that, at bottom, Mills is committed to political liberalism. As Tommie Shelby helpfully characterizes Mills’s project in his foreword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, “Mills seeks to revise, deracialize, and radicalize liberalism so that it can be put to liberatory ends” (xxii).
On one level, then, Mills critiques the social contract tradition as complicit with the white supremacy embodied by the Racial Contract as a historical political reality. On another level, however, he appropriates and subverts the social contract tradition to articulate the “Racial Contract” as a theory. The “Racial Contract,” as Mills frequently asserts, is both descriptive and normative, not unlike the social contract as described by Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau. It is descriptive in that it explains the actual inception of society and the state, the way society is structured, and the latent effects of institutionalized white supremacy on individuals’ moral worldviews. In these ways, its function mirrors the quasi-historical explanatory function of the social contract in the classical tradition. At the same time, it is normative in that it provokes moral assessments of justice and injustice and identifies obstacles to the realization of liberal political ideals. In this respect, too, the “Racial Contract” participates in the classical tradition, albeit in a somewhat different vein, since the social contract as conceived by Hobbes and Locke, for example, is meant to justify certain norms and the institutional makeup of a just social order. The closest parallel to the “Racial Contract” as a “naturalized” account to explain the rise of a nonideal society is the social contract described by Rousseau in his Discourse on Inequality. Unlike the ideal contract, which explains how a just society should be structured, the nonideal, naturalized contract explains how an unjust, exploitative society ruled by an oppressive state comes into existence. “If the ideal contract is to be endorsed and emulated,” Mills explains, “this non-ideal/naturalized contract is to be demystified and condemned” (5). The “Racial Contract” as a theory critically analyzes the Racial Contract qua historico-political phenomenon to enable us “to understand the polity’s actual history and how [its] values and concepts have functioned to rationalize oppression, so as to reform them” (6).
Mills is persuasive in his efforts both to describe the historical reality of the Racial Contract and its conceptual connections to the social contract tradition. To demonstrate the latter, he identifies “some direct evidence” in the texts of the classical contract theorists themselves and plausibly speculates that the reason why the white supremacist basis for their theories has so infrequently been addressed is out of embarrassment on behalf of white, western philosophers (64). It is an especially painful embarrassment that these philosophers’ “most important moral theorist of the past three hundred years,” i.e. Immanuel Kant, “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” (72). In part due to this intellectual ancestry, Mills thinks that contemporary social contract theorists like John Rawls are complicit in the Racial Contract. Their complicity is not, admittedly, attributable to their endorsement of the same racist beliefs held by the classical contractarians; rather, it has to do with their preoccupation with ideal political theory, which excludes “eminently nonideal features of the real world” like the Racial Contract (76). More specifically, because contemporary contractarianism is decidedly ahistorical and acontextual, intentionally oblivious to the empirical realities of white supremacy as a political system, it obfuscates the actual political issues that have concerned nonwhite communities and individuals for centuries (124). Consequently, there is “no conceptual point-of-entry” for nonwhite theorists to talk about “the fundamental way in which (as all nonwhites know) race structures one’s life and affects one’s life chances” (76). In other words, Mills thinks that raceless contractarianism silences theorists and dissidents who seek to call attention to white supremacy in our culture and political institutions.
Based on this critique, it seems that Mills objects more to ideal political theory than contemporary contractarianism specifically. And this is a perfectly reasonable critique he shares with feminists, communitarians, and other non-ideal political theorists. Political theory, he asserts, must be able to name and account for phenomena associated with the Racial Contract, and to the extent that ideal theory obscures these phenomena, it is inadequate. Mills claims that “the silence of mainstream moral and political philosophy on issues of race” is an indication of the power that the Racial Contract still has over thinkers today, “an illusory color blindness” that reinforces white supremacy (77). This may be true, and I am sympathetic to critical race theorists, feminists, and communitarians who promote a more hermeneutical approach to political theory, but I am not sure it means that we must simply jettison ideal theory entirely. Ideal theory, in my view, serves a crucial philosophical function: as Rawls explains in A Theory of Justice, it provides both a critical and constructive standard from which to work and so helps clarify the moral issues at stake in non-ideal circumstances. We would do well to appreciate the value of this function, just as we would do well not to overlook the historical reality of the Racial Contract and its contemporary hold over much of society. Is it not possible to oscillate between the ideal theory of Rawls and the “Racial Contract” of Mills at different moments in our reflection on political life? Must we choose one over the other? Mills dispenses with that possibility perhaps a bit too quickly.
As a final note, I think it is important in our current cultural and political context to briefly comment on how Mills positions the “Racial Contract” in relation to postmodernism. He flatly states that “the ‘Racial Contract’ is not a ‘deconstruction’ of the social contract.” The “Racial Contract” is, rather, a work of critical theory, and more specifically critical race theory, and “antipostmodernist.” In perhaps one of the most crucial sentences of the book, Mills writes that “it criticizes the social contract from a normative base that does not see the ideals of contractarianism themselves as necessarily problematic but shows how they have been betrayed by white contractarians” (129, my emphasis). Moreover, he adds, “it is explicitly predicated on the truth of a particular metanarrative, the historical account of the European conquest of the world, which has made the world what it is today. Thus it lays claims to truth, objectivity, realism, the description of the world as it actually is, [and] the prescription for a transformation of that world to achieve racial justice” (ibid.). These remarks show that Mill’s brand of critical race theory is far from the crude caricature peddled by white nationalists in their efforts to exploit white backlash to recent anti-racist movements in the United States. They also demonstrate that, at bottom, Mills is committed to political liberalism. As Tommie Shelby helpfully characterizes Mills’s project in his foreword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, “Mills seeks to revise, deracialize, and radicalize liberalism so that it can be put to liberatory ends” (xxii).
May 15, 2013
Excellent survey of the racial nature of the politics of the world and how it infects all our discourse. The first half is more a critique of liberal ideas, showing how they are founded in racist distinctions, while the second half is more about the practise of them and how absolutely essential they are to understanding the world today. Does take seriously the issue of "borderline whites." (although it's still a bit dodgily done to me, at least he tries and doesn't dismiss it) Pretty great all round.
Not perfect though because:
- Uses a lot of unnecessary words. This sounds silly, but it makes it tough if you don't realise that a lot of the words used aren't important. Like I guess it's shitty to be all "ugh ACADEMIC LANGUAGE" because part of the book is addressing academic ideas on their own terms but it's enough to be off-putting.
- Doesn't really move outside the ideas of liberalism. Again this seems unfair considering the point of the book but it's a little weird that at the end he seems to be saying "social contract theory is fine except for the race stuff which perverted it", which sort of runs counter to his earlier arguments. I don't expect a serious critique of capitalism, but he really doesn't touch on the economic at all, which is weird and kind of obscures the reality of race exploitation.
Still a great book and worth reading for an important critique of race and its invisibility.
Not perfect though because:
- Uses a lot of unnecessary words. This sounds silly, but it makes it tough if you don't realise that a lot of the words used aren't important. Like I guess it's shitty to be all "ugh ACADEMIC LANGUAGE" because part of the book is addressing academic ideas on their own terms but it's enough to be off-putting.
- Doesn't really move outside the ideas of liberalism. Again this seems unfair considering the point of the book but it's a little weird that at the end he seems to be saying "social contract theory is fine except for the race stuff which perverted it", which sort of runs counter to his earlier arguments. I don't expect a serious critique of capitalism, but he really doesn't touch on the economic at all, which is weird and kind of obscures the reality of race exploitation.
Still a great book and worth reading for an important critique of race and its invisibility.
February 5, 2023
"The establishment of society thus implies the denial that a society already existed; the creation of society requires the intervention of white men, who are thereby positioned as already sociopolitical beings…"
--
"Black American, African American, is 'oxymoronic,' while White American, Euro-American, is 'pleonastic'"
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"The terms of the Racial Contract norm nonwhite persons themselves, establishing morally, epistemically, and aesthetically their ontological inferiority"
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"...what has usually been taken/when it has been noticed at all) as the racist 'exception' has really been the rule; what has been taken as the 'rule,' the ideal norm, has really been the exception..."
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"...its aim is not to replace one Racial Contract with another of a different color but ultimately to eliminate race (not as innocent human variety but as ontological superiority and inferiority, as differential entitlement and privilege) altogether..."
--
"Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations."
--
"Black American, African American, is 'oxymoronic,' while White American, Euro-American, is 'pleonastic'"
--
"The terms of the Racial Contract norm nonwhite persons themselves, establishing morally, epistemically, and aesthetically their ontological inferiority"
--
"...what has usually been taken/when it has been noticed at all) as the racist 'exception' has really been the rule; what has been taken as the 'rule,' the ideal norm, has really been the exception..."
--
"...its aim is not to replace one Racial Contract with another of a different color but ultimately to eliminate race (not as innocent human variety but as ontological superiority and inferiority, as differential entitlement and privilege) altogether..."
--
"Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations."
March 30, 2019
Two quotes that I found especially interesting, throughout the book. First about how white people might perceive black people's bodies, because they are not used to them:
and second, how people were able to do bad things because of racism and think that it was the good thing to do:
the black body in particular is seen as paradigmatically _a body_. Lewis Gordon suggests that the black "presence is a form of absence.... Every black person becomes a limb of an enormous black body: THE BLACK BODY". Whites may get to be "talking heads," but even when blacks' heads are talking, one is always uncomfortably aware of the bodies to which these heads are attached. (So blacks are at best "talking bodies.")
and second, how people were able to do bad things because of racism and think that it was the good thing to do:
How were people able consistently to do the wrong thing while thinking that they were doing the right thing? In part, it is a problem of cognition and of white moral cognitive dysfunction
Read
May 21, 2021A lot of mainstream political philosophy in the late 20th century (and likely still today, though it isn't something I regularly read) makes use of the idea of the social contract, a staple of a range of liberal theorists going back a few centuries. Originally hypothesized as a potentially realistic account of how organized (so-called "civilized") societies came to be, modern social contract theorists treat it as an ideal that is useful for working through political ideas. The basic premise is that society is based on an agreement among the people who live in it, and that people's political and moral obligations are a product of the character of that agreement.
In this book, Mills argues that, along with a range of other critiques that have been levelled against the approach, it is also completely unable to account for the lived realities of white supremacy. He suggests augmenting it with what he calls "the Racial Contract," which boils down to an explicit recognition that the rules and practices of western societies and of the world system over the last five centuries or so have applied differently to white people than to everybody else, and they still do. From its starting point as an ideal that allows for political and moral theorizing in some sort of never-land which lets (mostly white) philosophers distill ideas without the taint and messiness of the real (and lets them avoid dealing with hard social realities like white supremacy), this turns contract theory into a pretty decent overview, at least in a broad strokes sense, of how the world has worked over that time. Obviously there are different eras where the details of the Racial Contract have been quite different, and it varies in different places as well, but there is significant continuity too. The idea is that by better understanding how the polities we live in actually work in this way, we are better able to act together in the direction of justice.
So...I'm not really that interested in social contract theory. I don't find it all that useful for understanding the world, for thinking about how to act in the world, or for the kind of writing that I do. This book *does* seems like a powerful challenge to certain flavours of liberal thinking more generally, so it's probably useful to know about in that sense, given how much of the everyday theorizing we encounter is often based in that sort of thinking. My own interest in this book was sparked because part of how Mills understands the Racial Contract is as an epistemological phenomenon. He uses, and I think coins, the phrase "epistemology of ignorance" to capture a sort of socially enforced, active refusal to know about a lot of this history and present day reality in the white-dominated mainstream, often accompanied by a very aggressive resistance to any attempt to say otherwise. Obviously it is quite related to the idea of standpoint, but gets more directly at the active character of the not-knowing that is integral to being in the position of beneficiary of an oppressive social relation. The book didn't actually talk about this as much as I'd hoped, but it was still useful to get the sense of where the idea came from and how he uses it. And it is a short, sharp book, so I certainly didn't mind reading it.
In this book, Mills argues that, along with a range of other critiques that have been levelled against the approach, it is also completely unable to account for the lived realities of white supremacy. He suggests augmenting it with what he calls "the Racial Contract," which boils down to an explicit recognition that the rules and practices of western societies and of the world system over the last five centuries or so have applied differently to white people than to everybody else, and they still do. From its starting point as an ideal that allows for political and moral theorizing in some sort of never-land which lets (mostly white) philosophers distill ideas without the taint and messiness of the real (and lets them avoid dealing with hard social realities like white supremacy), this turns contract theory into a pretty decent overview, at least in a broad strokes sense, of how the world has worked over that time. Obviously there are different eras where the details of the Racial Contract have been quite different, and it varies in different places as well, but there is significant continuity too. The idea is that by better understanding how the polities we live in actually work in this way, we are better able to act together in the direction of justice.
So...I'm not really that interested in social contract theory. I don't find it all that useful for understanding the world, for thinking about how to act in the world, or for the kind of writing that I do. This book *does* seems like a powerful challenge to certain flavours of liberal thinking more generally, so it's probably useful to know about in that sense, given how much of the everyday theorizing we encounter is often based in that sort of thinking. My own interest in this book was sparked because part of how Mills understands the Racial Contract is as an epistemological phenomenon. He uses, and I think coins, the phrase "epistemology of ignorance" to capture a sort of socially enforced, active refusal to know about a lot of this history and present day reality in the white-dominated mainstream, often accompanied by a very aggressive resistance to any attempt to say otherwise. Obviously it is quite related to the idea of standpoint, but gets more directly at the active character of the not-knowing that is integral to being in the position of beneficiary of an oppressive social relation. The book didn't actually talk about this as much as I'd hoped, but it was still useful to get the sense of where the idea came from and how he uses it. And it is a short, sharp book, so I certainly didn't mind reading it.
April 14, 2023
(Gonna preface this by saying that I haven't read The Sexual Contract, w/ which this work is in conversation, I think, so all that context is absent for me)
My initial gut reaction to The Racial Contract was that it's really important, but that its claims didn't feel particularly groundbreaking or revolutionary — I think part of this reaction stems from the kinds of nonfiction I tend to read, and also because 35 years have passed since The Racial Contract was 1st published.
With that being said, though, while I think The Racial Contract's central claim — that whiteness informs the supposedly "race-neutral" discipline of philosophy, and that to believe otherwise is to further entrench white supremacist logic — is one I completely agree with, I wanted Mills to do more than just argue (repeatedly) that whiteness structures everything and focus, in particular, on attempts to conceive of alternative social contracts. He starts to do this in some places, particularly when he talks about Third Worldism, but he gives these sections SO MUCH less space and attention than the parts where he's talking about how Locke, Rousseau, Kant, etc. in order to make the argument that "Modern moral theory and modern racial theory have the same father."
I think maybe part of this focus on white ("canonical") philosophy stems from the conditions surrounding the book's publication — it came out during the late 1990s at the tail end of the "Canon Wars" when a bunch of academics were trying to argue about the place of white ppl in the canon — and so its value as a work is to point out that the debate is largely moot, b/c whiteness ALREADY structures the canon regardless. (In this way it's kinda similar to Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, but Playing in the Dark (imo) is just...much easier to read.)
But even still, I really desperately wanted Mills to dig deeper into alternative conceptions of that social (racial) contract — even failed ones — b/c those felt more generative for future scholarship and organizing. Honestly, I just think it's a lot more interesting to theorize attempts at resistance, because even if the project is — like Mills's — ultimately about "how we got here," it's so much more productive for future organizing and scholarship to place yourself in conversation with past efforts at resistance as opposed to like...John Locke lol
My initial gut reaction to The Racial Contract was that it's really important, but that its claims didn't feel particularly groundbreaking or revolutionary — I think part of this reaction stems from the kinds of nonfiction I tend to read, and also because 35 years have passed since The Racial Contract was 1st published.
With that being said, though, while I think The Racial Contract's central claim — that whiteness informs the supposedly "race-neutral" discipline of philosophy, and that to believe otherwise is to further entrench white supremacist logic — is one I completely agree with, I wanted Mills to do more than just argue (repeatedly) that whiteness structures everything and focus, in particular, on attempts to conceive of alternative social contracts. He starts to do this in some places, particularly when he talks about Third Worldism, but he gives these sections SO MUCH less space and attention than the parts where he's talking about how Locke, Rousseau, Kant, etc. in order to make the argument that "Modern moral theory and modern racial theory have the same father."
I think maybe part of this focus on white ("canonical") philosophy stems from the conditions surrounding the book's publication — it came out during the late 1990s at the tail end of the "Canon Wars" when a bunch of academics were trying to argue about the place of white ppl in the canon — and so its value as a work is to point out that the debate is largely moot, b/c whiteness ALREADY structures the canon regardless. (In this way it's kinda similar to Toni Morrison's Playing in the Dark, but Playing in the Dark (imo) is just...much easier to read.)
But even still, I really desperately wanted Mills to dig deeper into alternative conceptions of that social (racial) contract — even failed ones — b/c those felt more generative for future scholarship and organizing. Honestly, I just think it's a lot more interesting to theorize attempts at resistance, because even if the project is — like Mills's — ultimately about "how we got here," it's so much more productive for future organizing and scholarship to place yourself in conversation with past efforts at resistance as opposed to like...John Locke lol
October 14, 2021
A thought-provoking examination of the interaction between traditional "social contract" theory — which held out that all men (at least) had certain rights by virtue of their participation in society — with the realities of slavery and colonization.
Mills' argument is that a so-called "racial contract" existed alongside (or even above) the idea of the "social contract," this racial contract holding that full equal personhood was only extended to whites. He presents both philosophical and historical arguments for the existence of this idea as a theory and reality.
I think in to a limited extent Mills' argument here is probably incontrovertible — not only are there numerous examples of non-whites receiving brutal or violent treatment that would have been unacceptable to fellow whites, but there are numerous surviving quotations from thinkers explicitly denying the full humanity of non-whites on the ground that they weren't white, and justifying doing terrible things to them because of it.
The more interesting question is the degree to which the "racial contract" was a dominant or even near-universal belief among whites over the past few centuries, as Mills argues it was. This is the question at the root of many contemporary debates about racial justice — the degree to which the abuses of racism and colonialism were deviations from white societies' ideals, or to which they were embodiments of those ideals. But it's a much stronger claim than that merely some people acted like this, and thus one that requires strong evidence — more than Mills could ever muster in as slim a book as this.
Despite this limitation of format, this is an interesting and quick read that challenges a lot of received wisdom about liberal political theory.
Mills' argument is that a so-called "racial contract" existed alongside (or even above) the idea of the "social contract," this racial contract holding that full equal personhood was only extended to whites. He presents both philosophical and historical arguments for the existence of this idea as a theory and reality.
I think in to a limited extent Mills' argument here is probably incontrovertible — not only are there numerous examples of non-whites receiving brutal or violent treatment that would have been unacceptable to fellow whites, but there are numerous surviving quotations from thinkers explicitly denying the full humanity of non-whites on the ground that they weren't white, and justifying doing terrible things to them because of it.
The more interesting question is the degree to which the "racial contract" was a dominant or even near-universal belief among whites over the past few centuries, as Mills argues it was. This is the question at the root of many contemporary debates about racial justice — the degree to which the abuses of racism and colonialism were deviations from white societies' ideals, or to which they were embodiments of those ideals. But it's a much stronger claim than that merely some people acted like this, and thus one that requires strong evidence — more than Mills could ever muster in as slim a book as this.
Despite this limitation of format, this is an interesting and quick read that challenges a lot of received wisdom about liberal political theory.
February 2, 2023
There is a cataclysmic disconnect between white philosophers and non-white people. Day after day are we forced theories and texts that are written by white people for white people. the lack of perspective is evident, and frankly, embarrassing. from white liberalism to white marxism, it is apparent that these philosophers and theorists are not including non-white perspective, because they’ve never had to consider that the world didn’t revolve around them. white ignorance means they don’t want to consider, or don’t care enough to, the perspective that the world is not designed solely for the white man. white philosophers, it seems, are the antithesis of Black Liberation. Mills is the first political theorist i’ve read that catered to my perspective. his theory is revolutionary and the discussion of the race contract needs to be perpetuated. his critique of white theory makes this a must read for any non-white person in todays state.
February 27, 2023
J'avais étudié des passages du Contrat Racial à l'Université. J'ai décidé de profiter de la nouvelle traduction française pour le relire au complet.
Ça demeure une œuvre de philosophie politique d'une grande importance. Encore plus aujourd'hui qu'à sa sortie, je dirais. Quand on voit à quel point les suprématistes blancs sont décomplexés et prennent une place tristement grandissante dans l'espace public. J'avais eu la chance de voir Mills en conférence peu avant sa mort. Il admettait qu'il était plus aisé d'expliquer aux gens que les sociétés occidentales sont construites sur le racisme depuis l'élection de Trump que, disons, suis Obama.
À la base, c'est un livre très académique. Je n'en conseille pas nécessairement la lecture à quelqu'un qui n'a pas une bonne base en science humaines. Pas parce qu'il est mauvais, plutôt qu'il va assez en profondeur pour perdre en accessibilité.
Ça demeure une œuvre de philosophie politique d'une grande importance. Encore plus aujourd'hui qu'à sa sortie, je dirais. Quand on voit à quel point les suprématistes blancs sont décomplexés et prennent une place tristement grandissante dans l'espace public. J'avais eu la chance de voir Mills en conférence peu avant sa mort. Il admettait qu'il était plus aisé d'expliquer aux gens que les sociétés occidentales sont construites sur le racisme depuis l'élection de Trump que, disons, suis Obama.
À la base, c'est un livre très académique. Je n'en conseille pas nécessairement la lecture à quelqu'un qui n'a pas une bonne base en science humaines. Pas parce qu'il est mauvais, plutôt qu'il va assez en profondeur pour perdre en accessibilité.
September 21, 2025
really solid, synthetic critique of the social contract tradition, which really comes into its own once mills makes the crucial point that hypothetical models of the social contract don't merely decline historical claims, but trade off an implicitly fantasised sanitised history with no grounding in the bloody, segregated reality. i would almost want more material expanding on the history of racial oppression, but the scope of the work is curtailed somewhat in its critical treatment of the presumptions of (especially but not exclusively) white political philosophy. this is a good thing: it makes it a sharp and directed rejoinder to contractarians, which does not disagree with them so much as disagree with what they're doing
September 26, 2021
In the racial contract Charles Mills argues that white supremacy is a political system within itself. Within the contract framework, Mills argues that Whites are signatories and Non-Blacks are objects. Thus, whites are granted certain rights, privileges, wealth and opportunities which non-Blacks are excluded from. Mills argues that this cycle of differentiation is nothing new. In careful analysis of early historic works, periods of ethnic domination really began with the rise of christendom and feudalism which is indicative of Mills point that the racial contract is fluid. It is rewritten over time with challenges. The purpose of Mills work is to understand the structure of government on the global, state and local level, so that governments have the necessary insight on how to reform systems to create more egalitarian societies. While Mills presents a very comprehensive work, I believe his work could have been enhanced by further analyzing challenges to the racial contract.More specifically, challenges by Black Organizations which have challenged the state polity. Mills does, however, discuss the threat posed by Japan. It would have been nice to gain insight on the power of Black and Third World relationships and their contest of the Racial Contract.
All in all, very insightful and prescient book.
All in all, very insightful and prescient book.
January 26, 2023
4.5/5. I had to read this book in 3 days for school so I feel like I wasn’t able to fully appreciate it, but I hope to come back to it because it was so so good. It’s essentially a critique of the social contract theory, arguing that the social contract theory doesn’t take into account the racial exploitation that has been a key player in shaping modern (white supremacist) societies. Mills uses history to show how we’ve progressed into the divided world we live in today.
March 25, 2023
I don't know how I managed to miss Mills for so long, but this was a brilliant summary of the intellectual poverty of contract theory and western moral and political philosophy more broadly. It also predates many of the debates now waged in courts and in public discourse by 25 years. I love the kind of philosophy that combines a real world basis with a normative assessment. This is it.
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August 19, 2025This book rewired my brain chemistry. Charles W Mills, you will always be famous.
September 24, 2025
An important work of sociopolitical theory; essential reading for anyone remotely interested in American and global studies with a racial lens
August 30, 2022
whew!
Mills is a great writer and this is absolutely stunning scholarship.
Mills is a great writer and this is absolutely stunning scholarship.
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