The Racial Contract

by Mills, Charles

• ISBN13: 9780801434549
• ISBN10: 0801434548
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-10-01
• Publisher: Cornell Univ Pr

Summary

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 domination: how it brings into existence "whites" and "non-whites", full persons and sub-persons; how it influences white moral theory and moral psychology; and now 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. Holding up a mirror to mainstream philosophy, this provocative book explains the evolving outline of the racial contract from the time of the New World conquest and subsequent colonialism to the written slavery contract, to the "separate but equal" system of segregation in the twentieth-century United States. According to Mills, the contract has provided the theoretical architecture justifying an entire history of European atrocity against non-whites, from David Hume's and Immanuel Kant's claims that blacks had inferior cognitive power, to the Holocaust, to the kind of imperialism in Asia that was demonstrated by the Vietnam War. Mills suggests that the ghettoization of philosophical work on race is no accident. This work challenges the assumption that mainstream theory is itself raceless. Just as feminist theory has revealed orthodox political philosophy's invisible male bias, Mills's explication of the racial contract exposes its racial underpinnings.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	ix
Introduction	1	(8)
Overview	9	(32)
The Racial Contract is political, moral and epistemological	9	(10)
The Racial Contract is a historical actuality	19	(12)
The Racial Contract is an exploitation contract	31	(10)
Details	41	(50)
The Racial Contract norms (and races) space	41	(12)
The Racial Contract norms (and races) the individual	53	(9)
The Racial Contract underwrites the modern social contract	62	(19)
The Racial Contract has to be enforced through violence and ideological conditioning	81	(10)
``Naturalized'' Merits	91	(44)
The Racial Contract historically tracks the actual moral/political consciousness of (most) white moral agents	91	(18)
The Racial Contract has always been recognized by nonwhites as the real moral/political agreement to be challenged	109	(11)
The ``Racial Contract'' as a theory is explanatorily superior to the raceless social contract	120	(15)
Notes	135	(28)
Index	163