54 pages • 1 hour read
Charles W. MillsThe Racial Contract
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3: “’Naturalized’ Merits”
Thesis 8 Summary and Analysis: “The Racial Contract historically tracks the actual moral/political consciousness of (most) white moral agents”
While mainstream moral theory and political philosophy tend to focus on ideals, the Racial Contract provides a factual account of the historical record. Mills suggests that looking at the actual historically dominant moral/political consciousness allows a better prescription for the improvement of society than ahistorical abstractions of idealized accounts. The Racial Contract, thus, illuminates that racism is not a deviation from but rather the norm of Western civil society and creates a specific moral psychology for its signatories.
Noting that feminist political philosophers have identified the same general agreement among various male philosophers on the “correctness” of the subordination of women, despite whatever other political and theoretical disagreements those male philosophers might have, Mills asserts that a similar phenomenon exists among white philosophers in terms of race/racism. Their silence reveals their complicity in the Racial Contract because it demonstrates that they take the ideas of racial inferiority and racial subordination for granted. This silence engendered Mills’s deep concern with naming and making visible the system of white supremacy that the Racial Contract establishes. It supports his position in Thesis 6 that white people do not even see the racialized character of the polity because it is the “natural” environment through which they move, which renders race invisible for them. The naturalness also draws in the argument from Thesis 5 regarding whose bodies are normed as the standard against which all others are measured.
Posing the question of what’s necessary to identify and understand the racialized ethic and how it skews white morality, Mills identifies white people’s inability to see their own immorality as cognitive dysfunction. To support this point, he draws on the research of Alvin Goldman regarding the applications of cognitive science to moral theory. Mills explains how Goldman’s three subject areas apply to white cognition. Goldman’s cognitive materials used in moral thinking and their determination by the cultural environment are exemplified in Mills’s theory by the way that the intellectual climate produced by the Racial Contract prompts white people to not only take for granted the legitimacy of the racial order, but also to simultaneously deny that any racial order exists. Goldman’s “judgements about subjective welfare” (95) and the impact of comparison on those judgments is expressed by the way that whiteness is reciprocally defined to nonwhite identity, so that white people assess their own welfare and privilege based on nonwhite welfare or lack thereof. This second area suggests that any advancements on the part of nonwhite communities in terms of racial equity are perceived as a loss of privilege by white people. This belief supports Mills’s argument in Thesis 7 that nonwhite resistance to racial inequality poses an ontological threat to white people’s conceptions of themselves.
Finally, Goldman’s third area regarding the “role of empathy in influencing moral feeling” (95) finds expression in the way that the Racial Contract’s prescription for the exploitation of nonwhite people cultivates “patterns of affect and empathy that are only weakly, if at all influenced by nonwhite suffering” (95). The idea of weakened empathy is supported by the examples Mills provides in earlier theses regarding the brutal treatment of nonwhite populations that stands in direct contradiction to contract theorists’ claims about moral and just behavior. Although, as Mills has shown throughout the text, the brutal treatment is not actually much of a contradiction when the Racial Contract is brought into view and Personhood vs. Subpersonhood is understood as the basis for the differential application of moral norms. What Mills describes as “partitioned moral concern” (96) exemplifies the “Herrenvolk ethics” that undergird various philosophers’ theories, regarding whatever divergences in details those theories may exhibit. The bottom line is their “adherence to the Racial Contract” (96).
The Epistemology of Ignorance, then, is defined by the cognitive distortion, or the skewed moral/political philosophy of white agents, and it explains the “historical record of European atrocity against nonwhites” (98). Mills provides a plethora of examples of these historical atrocities, further supporting Thesis 2 where he demonstrates the Racial Contract as a historical reality. He argues that these historical facts necessitate a rewriting of the ideal Kantian norm of the value of all human life in order to reflect the actuality—that white life is the most valued. Bringing the Racial Contract into view, thus, answers the question of how white people could have treated nonwhite people so horrifically throughout history despite white people’s purported ideals because it exposes the social ontology that the contract establishes and maintains. Here, Mills connects the epistemological and ontological dimensions of Whiteness. White signatories to the Racial Contract have existed this way because of the moral psychology that the Racial Contract prescribes.
The examination of the moral psychology prescribed by the Racial Contract exposes the Jewish Holocaust not as an aberration of the norm, but rather an adherence to it. For Mills, the Holocaust was unique only in that the application of the Racial Contract was turned against other Europeans, but the experiences of nonwhite people in the Americas, Africa, and Asia have demonstrated that the massive brutality and terror of European agents against entire communities is not an anomaly. To illustrate the point, Mills cites Adolph Hitler, who himself located his Nazi policy “within the long trajectory of European racial conquest” (105). Not only does the discussion exemplify the unintended consequences of white supremacist ideology, or what could be called “blowback,” but it also illuminates that the cognitive distortion of white supremacy, while destructive to nonwhite populations in an obvious way, is also destructive to white people as it can be turned inward. This implies that white people ought to have an interest in eradicating white supremacy.
The suggestion is a significant transition point to the final section of Thesis 8, where Mills posits that the Racial Contract “opens a theoretical space for white repudiation of the Contract” (106). This is where the distinction between whiteness and “Whiteness” becomes important. As Mills has already asserted in Thesis 1, being white—that is, being beneficiaries to the Racial Contract—does not automatically imply a commitment to the sociopolitical system and economic structure of Whiteness or being signatories to the Racial Contract. He provides examples of white people “who have recognized the existence and immorality of Whiteness as a political system, challenged its legitimacy, and insofar as possible, refused the Contract” (107). The distinction between whiteness and Whiteness, thus, allows space for white people to stand in solidarity with nonwhite communities, who as the next thesis demonstrates, have always had a more realistic view of the contradictions between the ideal and the reality. It also implies that while the cognitive distortion is pervasive, it is not an intrinsic quality for those raced as white. This recalls the suggestion in Thesis 7 that Whiteness is learned, and therefore, deconditioning and unlearning is possible.
Thesis 9 Summary and Analysis: “The Racial Contract has always been recognized by nonwhites as the real moral/political agreement to be challenged”
In Thesis 9, Mills elaborates on The View from the Bottom. Where The Epistemology of Ignorance is defined by cognitive distortion, evasion, and denial of the racial reality, The View from the Bottom is an epistemology focused on the realities of racism. According to standpoint theory, “a perspective from the bottom up is more likely to be accurate than one from the top down” (109). Mills’s theory, then, is a version of standpoint theory in terms of race. In contrast to the white population, nonwhite people, who constitute the objects of the Racial Contract, are able to see the terms of the social contract more clearly, especially its contradictions regarding ideal vs. reality. This explains why nonwhite theorists in moral and political philosophy focus less on the details of mainstream theory and more on “the metatheory, the Racial Contract, in which they are embedded” (110). Mills identifies the crucial question for nonwhite theorists as who counts as full persons, bringing attention to the Personhood vs. Subpersonhood theme.
An important characteristic of nonwhite theory is not the establishment of a separate theoretical space in moral and political philosophy, but rather drawing orthodox and unorthodox spaces together through a unifying conception of “race” on which personhood and political membership are predicated. As discussed in the Contextual Analysis, Mills himself exemplifies this political and scholarly pursuit by drawing simultaneously on the classic contract tradition and the Critical Race Theory (CRT) tradition to put forth his analysis. Noting that the question of Personhood vs. Subpersonhood is the crucial matter around which nonwhite theory pivots, Mills provides several examples of “Native American, black American, and Third and Fourth World anticolonial thought” (111) that challenge the “inherently equal” claims of classic contract theory by drawing attention to the experiential realities of nonwhite communities.
In this discussion, Mills again hints at what can be considered the unintended consequences of white supremacist ideology. With race being the primary category around which global political power is forged and consolidated, nonwhite communities have responded in turn with attempts to forge racial unity among themselves. The rise of “Pan-Indianism, Pan-Africanism, Pan-Arabism, Pan-Asianism, [and] Pan-Islamism” (113) illustrate this phenomenon of responding to white racism by attempting to forge solidarity within one’s respective raced group. This is, perhaps, an example of the “blowback” that Mills discusses in Thesis 8 with respect to the Jewish Holocaust and the implication of white supremacy being turned inward, except here, the suggestion is that white supremacy challenges itself by the very fortification of race as the sole or most important identifier and indicator of group belonging. In other words, white supremacy sets itself up to be challenged by those whom it defines as its opposition.
Mills also notes that “international white racial solidarity was generally demonstrated in the joint actions to suppress and isolate slave rebellions and colonial uprisings” (114), and he provides examples. This recalls Thesis 7 where he discusses the white response to nonwhite resistance. Any solidarity and resistance among oppressed people require the “appropriate” response of re-asserting white supremacy as the order of the global polity. It also builds upon Thesis 3 and Thesis 6 in tandem. In Thesis 3, Mills establishes Europeans as a single unit, a virtual global community, and in Thesis 6, he discusses intra-European conflict and the moving borders of whiteness. Here in Thesis 9, he calls attention to the way that such intra-European conflict is put aside in favor of their global solidarity in order to suppress nonwhite resistance and assert European/white power.
While nonwhite resistance around the world has manifested in communal and “overtly political battles—for emancipation, decolonization, civil rights, [and] land rights” (118), Mills asserts that there is also a deeply personal dimension to the nonwhite struggle, given the ontological inferiority asserted by the Racial Contract and internalized by nonwhite people. Where Mills mentions this personal dimension, this acceptance of subpersonhood status, in Thesis 7, here, he elaborates on it by posing the question of what is required for nonwhite people to assert themselves politically. For Mills, the answer is “claiming the moral status of personhood” (118) and learning basic self-respect. This also involves an epistemological dimension because nonwhite must learn to trust their own cognitive powers and that they are accurately perceiving reality and capable of producing “concepts, insights, modes of explanation, [and] overarching theories” (119) that challenge mainstream conceptual frameworks based on white mythology. Furthermore, the body politic is required to challenge the Racial Contract, given its aesthetic dimension that renders nonwhite bodies impolitic.
Mills’s discussion of The View from the Bottom in Thesis 9 articulates not only why the view is necessary in terms of moral and political philosophy, but it also prescribes ways for that view to become morally and politically salient so that global society can be driven towards its purported ideals.
Thesis 10 Summary and Analysis: “The ‘Racial Contract’ as a theory is explanatorily superior to the raceless social contract”
In the concluding thesis, Mills makes the case for supplementing mainstream contract discourse with his theory. While he concedes that some might argue his theory is unnecessary because contract discourse is a hypothetical reasoning exercise, he argues that because contract theory aims at transforming the nonideal to the ideal, clarity of fact is required for accurate prescription. Unlike mainstream contract theory, the Racial Contract theory does not obscure history or present racism as a deviation from the norm. Instead, it begins from the uncomfortable reality of historical facts that show racism to be the norm that governs society. Thus, it is both descriptive and prescriptive.
The reflexiveness of political theory requires that theorists understand “how the structure and workings of the actual polity may interfere” (123) with their perception of the social reality about which they theorize. This alludes to the cognitive distortion discussed in Thesis 8 and the themes of The Epistemology of Ignorance and The View from the Bottom. The cognitive distortion of the dominant group, especially their inability to see their ontology and epistemology as political issues that are not natural, but rather constructed, necessitates alternative views that expose the dominant discourse as “foundationally deficient” (123). In short, the Racial Contract theory, as well as other oppositional contract theories, make political what has been construed as apolitical by the dominant group whose embodiment invisibilizes the political structures that grant them privilege and prompts their silence on crucial issues.
Racial Contract theory allows the naming and recognition of white supremacy. Such naming and recognition, then, exposes the reality of race and demystifies race. Here, Mills identifies his text as an example of Critical Race Theory (CRT), given CRT’s aim of naming white supremacy and showing that while race is sociopolitical, as opposed to biological, it is nonetheless real with material implications. Mills, then, asserts that “race” and “white supremacy” must be incorporated into the discourse vocabulary for the development of adequate sociopolitical theory.
Mills posits that the Racial Contract theory demystifies race by exposing white supremacy as a political system, not an intrinsic quality of people who are white, alluding to the distinction between whiteness and Whiteness that he deals with in Thesis 8. This distinction is significant because it suggests that white racism is not unique, but rather the main historical development that exists. Mills supports this point by mentioning Japan’s imperialist and racist history, calling back to Thesis 6 where he identifies them as “honorary whites” to illustrate the moving borders of whiteness. Whiteness, then, does not describe color or biology; it describes a “set of power relations” (127). This culminating point illustrates the overarching aim of Mills’s text. In naming and describing white supremacy and its implications, he seeks to articulate how such a political system, or any system rooted in inequality and injustice, precludes the ideals on which the social contract is founded.
Mills is also clear that his aim is not to deconstruct or obliterate social contract theory or Enlightenment ideals, but rather to engage with them and present an oppositional view that shows how the racial ideas undergirding the classic theory belie the ideals. In this engagement, Mills lies within the tradition of oppositional materialist critique and the Black oppositional tradition. What these traditions share is their attempt to close the gap between reality and ideal. Mills closes Thesis 10 by asserting that the continued denial of the Racial Contract and its reality, or what would be the continued display of The Epistemology of Ignorance, will only allow the Racial Contract to persist and for the ideals to remain unrealized.
