Much of the country is in an uproar about Critical Race Theory (CRT).
One wonders what would happen if many of those individuals who are hostile to the idea of CRT knew about the Racial Contract as articulated by Black philosopher Charles Mills, who died in September.
Mills was Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, after moving from Northwestern University in 2016, where he was the John Evans Professor of Moral and Intellectual Philosophy.
Mills is considered a pioneer in Critical Race Theory and much more. His work explains how the systemic racism discussed in CRT came about. He turned the world of political philosophy upside down by placing race at the center of political theory.
In his influential book, The Racial Contract, published in 1997, and in other works, Mills takes issue with classic theories about the so-called “social contract.” Instead, he showed how white supremacy has been central to the making of the modern world. He sought to transform social contract theory to deal with race.
In bringing race into the Contract, Mills expands our view of white supremacy by showing how it developed over the centuries.
In the 17th and 18th centuries, European philosophers developed theories to explain the “modern world” and how and why humans differed from when they were in the “state of nature,” i.e., more primitive. Prominent among these philosophers were Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant.
These now classic theories were attempts to explain how and why societies and governments formed and held together. Generally, these theories held that as opposed to the lives of individuals in the unruly “state of nature,” people reached agreements between the ruled and their rulers, with rights and duties defined for each.
Political philosophy considered these arrangements to constitute a social contract. Thus, society and governments were held together by this Contract, sometimes justifying the power of a ruler and other times safeguarding the individual from oppression.
In addition to providing answers about the origins and workings of society and government, social contract theory purported to explain the justifications of socioeconomic structures and political institutions. However, Mills showed this theory to be defective in that it ignores the centrality of the Racial Contract and the role of White supremacy.
He explains how the modern world was expressly created as a racially hierarchical polity, globally dominated by Europeans. Thus, he says, “We live in a world which has been foundationally shaped for the past 500 years by the realities of European domination and the gradual consolidation of global white supremacy.”
There was no single act corresponding to the drawing up and signing of a contract. Instead, there were many acts through the centuries, including papal bulls (edicts by a Pope). A primary example is the Doctrine of Discovery which established spiritual, political, and legal justification for colonization. These actions also included theological pronouncements, European discussions about colonialism and international law; pacts, treaties, and legal decisions; academic and popular debates about the humanity (or lack thereof) of nonwhites, the establishment of formalized legal structures of differential treatment, and much more.
Per Mills, European moral and political theory, like European thought in general, developed within the framework of the Racial Contract and took it for granted. However, this is no longer admitted in mainstream opinion as there are attempts to deny or minimize the apparent fact of global White domination.
White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. The Contract is not between everybody. It is just between the people who count, “we the White people.” All whites are beneficiaries of the Racial Contract, though some whites are not signatories to it, for example, poor Whites.
Both globally and within nations, White people, Europeans, and their descendants continue to benefit from the Racial Contract. Many enlightened people respond to the anti-CRT noise by saying CRT is just history and all history should be taught, including the history of Blacks in America. The Racial Contract, as argued by Mills, details that history.
