"Charles Mills's treatment of the biases in western philoso­ phy in The Racial Contract is a tour de force

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"Charles Mills's treatment of the biases in western philoso­ phy in The Racial Contract is a tour de force." -Award Statement, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America "To take the arguments that Mills makes in The Racial Contract seriously is to be prepared to rethink the concept of race and the structure of our political systems.T his is a very important book indeed, and should be a welcome addition to the ongoing discussions surrounding social con­ tract theory.... It would be an excellent critical comple­ CHARLES W. MILLS ment to any course that covers the history of social con­ tract theory or that deals with issues surrounding race and racism."-Teaching Philosophy The Racial Contract CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON This book is dedicated to the blacks, reds, browns, and yellows who have resisted the Racial Contract and the white renegades and race traitors who have refused it. Copyright © 1997 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850. CONTENTS First published 1997 by Cornell University Press. First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1999 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION 1 Printed in the United States of America 1. OVERVIEW 9 Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.comellpress.cornell.edu. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mills, Charles W. (Charles Wade) The racial contract / Charles W. Mills. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-3454-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-IO: 0-8014-3454-8 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-8463-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-IO: 0-8014-8463-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Race relations. 2. Racism. 3. Social contract. 4. White supremacy movements. 5. Political science-Philosophy. 1. Title. HTI523.M56 1997 305·8-DC21 Cloth printing IO 9 8 7 6 5 4 Paperback printing IO 9 8 7 6 5 ix The Racial Contract is political, moral and epistemological 9 The Racial Contract is a historical actuality 19 The Racial Contract is an exploitation contract 3 I 2. DETAILS The Racial Contract norms (and races) space 41 The Racial Contract norms (and races) the individual 53 The Racial Contract underwrites the modern social contract 62 The Racial Contract has to be enforced through violence and ideological conditioning 81 41 3. "NATURALIZED" MERITS 91 The Racial Contract historically tracks the actual moral/ political consciousness of (most) white moral ?gents 91 The Racial Contract has always been recognized by nonwhites as the real moral/political agreement to be challenged 109 The "Racial Contract" as a theory is explanatorily superior to the raceless social contract 120 NOTES 135 INDEX 163 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS T he history that inspires this short book goes back a long way, and I have been thinking about that history, and how to incorporate it into a philosophical frame­ work, for a long time. Along the way debts, some of which I have incurred many I have certainly forgotten, and this list of acknowledgments is only partial. First of all, of course, to my family: my parents, Gladstone and Winnifred Mills, who brought me up to give equal respect to people of all races; my brother, Raymond Mills, and my cousin, Ward Mills, for consciousness-raising; my uncle and aunt, Don and Sonia Mills, for their role in Jamaica's own 1970S struggle against the legacy of the global Racial Contract . My wife, Elle Mills, has supported my work from the outset, sometimes having greater faith in me than I had in myself. Special friends, past and present, should also be cited: thanks to Bobs, for old times' sake; to Lois, a friend indeed, and a friend in deed; to Femi, fellow Third worlder, for numerous conversations since our days in grad school together about how philosophy in the academy could be made less academic. Horace Levy, my first philosophy teacher, and for many years the mobile one-person philosophy unit of the Mona campus of ix AC KNO WLEDGMENTS AC KNO WLEDGMENTS the University of the W?st Indies, deserves particular mention, critiqued by members of the Politically Correct Discussion as do Frank Cunningham and Danny Goldstick of the Univer­ Group of Chicago (PCDGC ); I have benefited from the criti­ sity of Toronto, who welcomed me to the Philosophy Depart­ cisms of Sandra Bartky, Holly Graff, David Ingram, and Olu­ ment graduate program there more years ago than any of us femi Taiwo. Jay Drydyk read the manuscript and gave valuable cares to remember. John Slater's confidence in me and support input and encouragement . I have also benefited from audience of my candidacy, despite my almost nonexistent undergradu­ feedback at the following presentations, from 1 9 94 to 1 9 96: ate background in the subject, were crucial. To all of them, I the Institute for the Humanities, UIC; the Society for the am obligated. Humanities, Cornell University; a colloquium at Queen's Uni­ I originally started working on these issues on a 1989 junior versity; a panel at the annual meeting of the Society for Phe­ faculty summer research fellowship at the University of Okla­ nomenology and Existential Philosophy; and a conference homa. A first draft was written in my 1 9 93-1994 year as a titled "The Academy and Race" at Villanova University. Fellow of the Institute for the Humanities, University of Illi­ I have consistently received special encouragement in the nois at Chicago (UIC ), and the final draft was completed during project from feminist theorists: my friend Sandra Bartky, Paola my sabbatical in the spring term of 1 9 97. At both my previous Lortie, Sandra Harding, Susan Babbitt, Susan Campbell, and and my present institution, I have been fortunate to have had Iris Marion Young. I have also learned a great deal over the a series of Chairs who have been very supportive of applica­ years from feminist political theory and obviously owe a debt tions for grants, fellowships, travel, leave, and sabbaticals: John to Carole Pateman in particular. My focus on race in this book Biro and Kenneth Merrill at the University of Oklahoma; Rich­ should not be taken to imply that I do not recognize the reality ard Kraut, Dorothy Grover, and Bill Hart at UIe. Let me say of gender as another system of domination. how deeply grateful I am to them for that support. In addition, Alison Shonkwiler, my editor at Cornell "University Press, I have made endless requests for assistance from Charlotte was highly enthusiastic about the manuscript from her very Jackson and Valerie McQuay, the UIC Philosophy Depart­ first reading of it, and it is in large measure her conviction ment's invaluable administrative assistants, and they have that persuaded me there was indeed a book here, and that I been endlessly patient and helpful, greatly facilitating my should write it. For her energy and drive, and the keen editorial work. eye that has undoubtedly made this a better book than it would I thank Bernard Boxill, Dave Schweickart, and Robert Paul otherwise have been, I express my deep appreciation. Wolff for their letters of endorsement for my application for Finally, as a stranger in a strange land, I have been welcomed the UIC Humanities Institute Fellowship that enabled me to here by the American Philosophical Association Committee begin the original manuscript. It was Bob Wolff's suggestion, on the Status of Blacks in Philosophy. I would like to single seconded by Howard McGary Jr., that I go for " a short, punchy out and thank Howard McGary Jr., Leonard Harris, Lucius book" that would be accessible to an audience of nonphiloso­ Outlaw Jr., Bill Lawson, Bernard Boxill, and Laurence Thomas, phers. Hope this is punchy enough for you, guys. for making me feel at home. As a beneficiary of affirmative An earlier and shorter version of this book was read and x action, I would not be in the American academy today were xi AC K NO WLED GMENTS it not for the struggles of black Americans. This book is in part a tribute to, and a recognition of, those struggles, and, more generally, of the international black radical tradition of political resistance that they exemplify. c. W. M. The Racial Contract xii INTRODUCTION When white people say "Justice," they mean "Just us." -black American folk aphorism W hite supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory, or even advanced, texts in political theory. A standard under­ graduate philosophy course will start off with plato and Aris­ totle, perhaps say something about Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli, move on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Marx, and then wind up with Rawls and Nozick. It will introduce you to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism, representative government, socialism, welfare capitalism, and libertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political thought and runs the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years. And this omission is not accidental. Rather, it reflects the fact that standard textbooks and courses have for the most part been written and designed by whites, who take their racial privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political, as a form of domination. Ironi­ cally, the most important political system of recent global history-the system of domination by which white people 1 THE RACIAL CONTRACT have historically ruled over and, in certain important ways, continue to rule over nonwhite people-is not seen as a politi­ INTRODUCTION debates over multiculturalism, canon reform, and ethnic di­ would correspond to feminist theorists' articulation of the centrality of gender, patriarchy, and sexism to traditional moral and political theory. What is needed, in other words, is a recognition that racism (or, as I will argue, global white supremacy) is itself a political system, a particular power structure of formal or informal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties. The versity racking the academy; both demographically and con­ ceptually, it is one of the "whitest" of the humanities. Blacks, notion of the Racial Contract is, I suggest, one possible way of making this connection with mainstream theory, since it for example, constitute only about 1 percent of philosophers in North American universities-a hundred or so people out of more than ten thousand-and there are even fewer Latino, uses the vocabulary and apparatus already developed for con­ tractarianism to map this unacknowledged system. Contract talk is, after all, the political lingua franca of our times. , We all understand the idea of a "contract/ an agreement between two or more people to do something. The "social contract" just extends this idea. If we think of human beings , as starting off in a "state of nature/ it suggests that they then cal system at all. It is just taken for granted; it is the background against which other systems, which we are to see as politicat are highlighted. This book is an attempt to redirect your vision, to make you see what, in a sense, has been there all along. Philosophy has remained remarkably untouched by the Asian American, and Native American philosophers.! Surely this underrepresentation itself stands in need of an explana­ tion, and in my opinion it can be traced in part to a conceptual array and a standard repertoire of concerns whose abstractness typically elides, rather than genuinely includes, the experience of racial minorities. Since (white) women have the demo­ graphic advantage of numbers, there are of course far more female philosophers in the profession than nonwhite philoso­ phers (though still not proportionate to women's percentage of the population), and they have made far greater progress in developing alternative conceptualizations. Those African American philosophers who do work in moral and political theory tend either to produce general work indistinguishable from that of their white peers or to focus on local issues (af­ firmative action, the black "underclass") or historical figures (W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke) in a way that does not aggres­ sively engage the broader debate. What is needed is a global theoretical framework for situat­ ing discussions of race and white racism, and thereby challeng­ ing the assumptions of white political philosophy, which 2 decide to establish civil society and a government. W hat we have, then, is a theory that founds government on the popular consent of individuals taken as equals.2 But the peculiar contract to which I am referring, though based on the social contract tradition that has been central to Western political theory, is not a contract between everybody ("we the people"L but between just the people who count, the people who really are people ("we the white people"). So it is a Racial Contract. The social contract, whether in its original or in its contem­ porary version, constitutes a powerful set of lenses for looking at society and the government. But in its obfuscation of the ugly realities of group power and domination, it is, if unsupple­ mented, a profoundly misleading account of the way the mod­ ern world actually is and came to be. The "Racial Contract" as a theory-I use quotation marks to indicate when I am 3 THE RACIAL CONTRACT talking about the theory of the Racial Contract, as against the Racial Contract itself-will explain that the Racial Contract is real and that apparent racist violations of the terms of the social contract in fact uphold the terms of the Racial Contract. The "Racial Contract," then, is intended as a conceptual bridge between two areas now largely segregated from each other: on the one hand, the world of mainstream (i.e., white) ethics and political philosophy, preoccupied with discussions of justice and rights in the abstract, on the other hand, the world of Native American, African American, and Third and Fourth World3 political thought, historically focused on issues of conquest, imperialism, colonialism, white settlement, land rights, race and racism, slavery, jim crow, reparations, apart­ INTRODUCTION tractarianism and focuses instead on the justification of the basic structure of society.5 From its 1650-1800 heyday as a grand quasi-anthropological account of the origins and devel­ opment of society and the state, the contract has now become just a normative tool, a conceptual device to elicit our intu­ itions about justice. But my usage is different. The "Racial Contract" I employ is in a sense more in keeping with the spirit of the classic contractarians-Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.6 I use it not merely normatively, to generate judgments about social justice and injustice, but descriptively, to explain the actual genesis of the society and the state, the way society is struc­ heid, cultural authenticity, national identity, indigenismo, Af­ rocentrism, etc. These issues hardly appear in mainstream tured, the way the government functions, and people's moral psychology.? The most famous case in which the contract is used to explain a manifestly nonideal society, what would be political philosophy,4 but they have been central to the political struggles of the majority of the world's population. Their ab­ termed in current philosophical jargon a "naturalized" ac­ count, is Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality ( 1755). Rousseau sence from what is considered serious philosophy is a reflec­ tion not of their lack of seriousness but of the color of the argues that technological development in the state of nature brings into existence a nascent society of growing divisions in wealth between rich and poor, which are then consolidated and made permanent by a deceitful "social contract."B W hereas the ideal contract explains how a just society would be formed, ruled by a moral government, and regulated by a defensible moral code, this nonideal/naturalized contract explains how.an unjust, exploitative society, ruled by an op­ pressive government and regulated by an immoral code, comes into existence. If the ideal contract'is to be endorsed and emu­ lated, this nonideal/naturalized contract is to be demystified and condemned. So the point of analyzing the nonideal con­ tract is not to ratify it but to use it to explain and expose the inequities of the actual nonideal polity and to help us to see through the theories and moral justifications offered in defense of them. It gives us a kind of X-ray vision into the real internal vast majority of Western academic philosophers (and perhaps their lack of seriousness). The great virtue of traditional social contract theory was that it provided seemingly straightforward answers both to factual questions about the origins and workings of society and government and to normative questions about the justifi­ cation of socioeconomic structures and political institutions. Moreover, the "contract" was very versatile, depending on how different theorists viewed the state of nature, human motivation, the rights and liberties people gave up or retained, the particular details of the agreement, and the resulting char­ acter of the government. In the modern Rawlsian version of the contract, this flexibility continues to be illustrated, since Rawls dispenses with the historical claims of classic con4 5 THE RACIAL CONTRACT logic of the sociopolitical system. Thus it does normative work for us not through its own values, which are detestable, but by enabling us to understand the polity's actual history and how these values and concepts have functioned to rationalize oppression, so as to reform them. Carole Pateman's provocative feminist work of a decade ago, The Sexual Contract, is a good example of this approach (and the inspiration for my own book, though my use is somewhat different), which demonstrates how much descriptive/ex­ planatory life there still is in the contract.9 Pateman uses it naturalistically, as a way of modeling the internal dynamic of the nonideal male-dominated societies that actually exist today. So this is, as indicated, a reversion to the original "an­ thropological" approach in which the contract is intended to be historically explanatory. But the twist is, of course, that her purpose is now subversive: to excavate the hidden, unjust male covenant upon which the ostensibly gender-neutral so­ cial contract actually rests. By looking at Western society and its prevailing political and moral ideologies as if they were based on an unacknowledged "Sexual Contract," Pateman offers a "conjectural history" that reveals and exposes the normative logic that makes sense of the inconsistencies, cir­ cumlocutions, and evasions of the classic contract theorists and, correspondingly, the world of patriarchal domination their work has helped to rationalize. My aim here is to adopt a nonideal contract as a rhetorical trope and theoretical method for understanding the inner logic of racial domination and how it structures the polities of the West and elsewhere. The ideal "social contract" has been a central concept of Western political theory for understanding and evaluating the social world. And concepts are crucial to cognition: cognitive scientists point out that they help us to categorize, learn, remember, infer, explain, problem-solve, 6 INTRODUCTION generalize, analogize.lO Correspondingly, the lack of appro­ priate concepts can hinder learning, interfere with memory, block inferences, obstruct explanation, and perpetuate prob­ lems. I am suggesting, then, that as a central concept the notion of a Racial Contract might be more revealing of the real character of the world we are living in, and the corresponding historical deficiencies of its normative theories and practices, than the raceless notions currently dominant in political the­ ory.ll Both at the primary level of an alternative conceptualiza­ tion of the facts and at the secondary (reflexive) level of a critical analysis of t?e orthodox theories themselves, the "Ra­ cial Contract" enables us to engage with mainstream Western political theory to bring in race. Insofar as contractarianism is thought of as a useful way to do political philosophy, to theorize about how the polity was created and what values should guide our prescriptions for making it more just, it is obviously crucial to understand what the original and continu­ ing "contract" actually was and is, so that we can correct for it in constructing the ideal "contract." The "Racial Contract" should therefore be enthusiastically welcomed by white con­ tract theorists as well. So this book can be thought of as resting on three simple claims: the existential claim-white supremacy, both local and global, exists and has existed for many years; the concep­ tual claim-white supremacy should be thought of as itself a political system; the methodological claim-as a political system, white supremacy can illuminatingly be theorized as based on a "contract" between whites, a Racial Contract.. Here, then, are ten theses on the Racial Contract, divided into three chapters. 7 OVERVIEW I w:ll s?art with.m overview oJ the Racial Contract, high· lighting its differences from, as well as its similarities to, the classlcal and contempor?ry sociill contract. The Racial Contract i.s political, moral, and epistemological; the Racial Contract is real; and economically, in determining who gets what, the Racial Contract is an exploitation contraCt. , ." . The RacIal Contract is political, moral, and eplstemologlcal. The "social comraet" is actually several contracts in one. Contemporary contraCtarians usually distinguish, to begin with, between the political contract and the 'moral contract, both. before going on to make [subsidiary] distinctiens within I contend, however, that the orthodox social contract also tacitly presupposes an "epistemological" COntraCt, and that for the Racial Contract it is crucial to make this expliclt" The political contract: is an a.COOUnt of the origins of govern? ment and our ?litical obligations to it. The subsidiary distinc? tion sometimes made in the politiCAl contrAct 1s: between. the contract to establish society jt:hcrcby taking "natural;" pteso- 9 C,/£R,/IEW \ cja] in dividuals OUt of the state oi nature and reconstfueting way they should he-the normative-sinee indeed one of its and constituting them as members of a collective body! and the complaints about white politieal philosophy Is precisely its contraCt tocstzhlish the state (thereby transferringontrightor V dele t g relationship or trust the rightS and powers we ? have In the s;:ate of nature to a sovereign govetrung entity).l ga m lU t1 adhere. A preliminary characterization would tun something like this: by whieh the citi" The Raeial ContraCt i s that set of formal or informal agree­ ments Ot meta-agreements (highet-level contracts aboilt con­ cussedj of the relationship betwee n the mand contraet ane. tracts) which set the limits of the contracts' validity) between sr :ue· of· na.ture morality. In modern versions of the conu·act, the members of one subset of humans, henee£onh designAted mo st notably Rawls's of course, the political contract largely by (shifting) "racial" [phenotypicalfgenealogieal/cultunill cri­ vanishes, modern anthropology having long superseded the teria el, C1., C3 ". as "whitc/ and coextensive (mAking nai ve social origin histories of the ClAssic contracta:ians . The due aHowance for gender differentiationl with the class of focus is then almost excl.nsively on the mor",1 contract, This full persons, to categorize the remaining subset of hum:tlls is not concei.ved of as an actual historie:al event that took place as "nonwhite" and of a different arul ,inferior mOfOli st,;ttus, on leaving the state of nature. Rather, the s late of nature subpersons, so that they have a subordinate?ciV:il standing in ? survives only in the attenuated form of whnt Rawls culls the the white or white-ruled politics the whit "original position," and the "contract" is apun:ly hypothetical inhabit or establish or in transactions ?s aliens with these exercise (a thought experiment) in establishing what a just polities, and the moral and juridical rules normitlly'r6guhiting i "b"sic structure" I prescrihing norms for cogniti.on to which its signatories must the moral code estabUshed for the SOcletYI distinction here is between !;wo interpretations (to be cis. , $