Racial Contracts

Whereas John Rawls and others, in the 20th-century revival of contractualism, took the hypothetical contracts of John Locke and Immanuel Kant as models and sought to justify norms as the output of imagined choices made in designed situations of deliberation, Charles Mills seeks to recover a different, secondary strand of contractualist theory, one centering on the explanatory potential of non-ideal agreements. Such non-ideal contract theory, of which Jean-Jacques Rousseau's “Second Discourse on Inequality” is locus classicus and Carole Pateman's Sexual Contract is Mills's chief recent model, is used to explain non-ideal actuality, exposing its immorality according to norms that must be otherwise grounded. Mills says his project rests on three claims: existential—that White supremacy exists; conceptual—that White supremacy is a political system; and methodological—that White supremacy can be helpfully modeled as a contact among Whites.

The racial contract, as Mills proposes it, is political, moral, and epistemological. Mills defines the racial contract as (mostly) informal agreements among people deemed “White” (by shifting criteria) to relegate others (deemed “non-Whites” and sub-persons) to inferior moral and civil status, and therein legitimizing the restriction of the normal moral and juridical rules so that they do not fully apply to Whites’ interactions with non-Whites and the exploitation of non-Whites’ bodies, land, and resources. At the moral and political level, the racial contract's purpose is differentially to privilege Whites by founding a racial polity. In it, all Whites benefit from the racial contract, but only most Whites are signatories/parties to it. Because the racial contract entitles and even requires Whites to govern their dealings with one another by higher standards than those it imposes on their dealings with non-Whites, Mills claims to reveal a Herrenvolk (master race) ethics in Kant, G. W. F. Hegel, and others usually said to champion equality. Epistemologically, Mills says the racial contract establishes an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, and cognitive dysfunction, which blinds both Whites and non-Whites to the manifestly unjust structures whereby Whites exploit non-Whites. Mills claims that as non-ideal, the racial contract is, or at least approximates, a historical actuality. He thinks it comprises an expropriation contract, which rationalized, for example, taking lands from Native Americans; a slavery contract that purported to justify the chattel enslavement, especially of Africans and Native Americans; and a colonial contract that was used to vindicate the oppression of many Africans, Native Americans, Asians, Pacific Islanders, and others, in their own homelands.

Their agreeing to the racial contract is implicit in Whites’ complicity of silence, which Mills [Page 621]thinks is the conceptual, juridical, and normative equivalent of signing. The racial contract is thus fundamentally an exploitation contract. The actual racial contract, unlike the older, imagined social contract, is primarily economic, though it also secures to Whites a host of psychic, social, political, and cultural privileges. For example, the racial contract rationalizes European exceptionalism and entitlement. Its economic structures work independently of individual ill will. The racial contract is also continually being rewritten, with today's de-emphasizing the supposed biological inferiority of non-Whites and stressing their cultural inferiority.

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