Category Archives: Civic Issue

The Racial Contract – Part 2 (History)

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“All whites are beneficiaries of the Contract, though some whites are not signatories of it.”

I didn’t quite understand this point Mills made in The Racial Contract at first. After all, how could it be that I am the beneficiary of a contract which I never signed, and the terms of which were never dictated to me for my consideration? Once I got to reading the rest of his book, however, it’s more clear what he was talking about. Mills’ point is a very important one in terms of historical fact, but it might also help us understand modern points of view on certain subjects: namely, affirmative action.

Now, I know what you may be thinking: “Why give preference to one race over another in college admissions? After all, the playing field is level, now that the Civil Rights Act has been passed. I know there was discrimination in the past, but now I’m the one being discriminated against, aren’t I?” While I’m not trying to put words into anyone’s mouth, I would like to unpack this sentiment somewhat to show what I mean.

Perhaps the crux of this is the idea that the playing field is, in fact, level. The problem with this notion is the tacit assumption that the modern day exists as a “neutral baseline” as Mills puts it, that “That’s just the way it is” and the existing order should not be questioned. This is severely problematic when we begin to understand just the extent to which history and past events shape our present reality.

Think about it like this: For hundreds of years of U.S. history, blacks were considered either not human at all (property, “chattel”), or as second-class citizens who did not deserve the full complement of rights and privileges accorded normal citizens. This reality unquestionably led to problems with employment, disproportionate poverty, disproportionately poor education, and numerous other economic disadvantages. After this long history, in 1964, the Civil Rights Act declared major forms of discrimination against minority groups to be illegal. Now what? Did that enormous wealth inequality simply dissipate, and bring African Americans to the same level as the whites who had been benefiting from their suffering for so long?

The only reasonable answer to this question is no. While some of the previous inequities have been addressed in the legal and political realm, there is still a whole lot to be addressed elsewhere. Equality now exists as an assumed “equality of opportunity,” an abstraction that is not always applicable. Open discrimination is now prohibited, but more subtle forms have taken its place, such as Mills’ example of the codes used by certain employers to refrain from hiring blacks even though the specific racial information was not present. Even discounting discrimination, there is still a huge wealth gap, which takes an extremely long time to close. Affirmative action is an attempt to address the inequality that came from hundreds of years of oppression and second-class citizenship.

Whether or not you agree with the policy of affirmative action, I hope that you at least acknowledge that there is a reason behind it, and that the present should not be taken as an established norm that just “is what it is.” By beginning to question what is behind the things we take for granted, we might be able to better understand the truth, rather than seeing the present day, and the eras of slavery and Jim Crow as simply separate sets of facts.

For an interesting historical overview of affirmative action, and a look toward President Obama’s view on it, you can take a look at this news story from my online deliberation source: http://www.theroot.com/blogs/blogging-beltway/how-will-obama-handle-affirmative-action

Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1997. Print.

The Racial Contract – Part 1 (Intro)

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“White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.” These are the words that begin Charles W. Mills’ The Racial Contract, a philosophical treatise that focuses on situating the political realities of race and how it relates to the development of the modern world. In a sense, it could be viewed as a theory of history, but it is clear that the racial policies and established by the institution of white supremacy in history carry on to the present day in one form or another. Mills breaks his theory of the racial contract into several sub-sections, which help to further define the racial contract as a theoretical concept. What is the racial contract, you may ask?

First, we need to take a step back and talk about a much older philosophical concept, namely the social contract. In brief, the social contract is the concept that governments, are founded upon a fundamental agreement between the government and the governed. The theory goes something like this: When humans began, they existed in what is known as a state of nature, in which every man had full rights to do whatever he chose. Though every man possessed these rights, the ability to exercise them was much less certain due to the constant infringement of others on his property. Recognizing this, people decided they would live collectively, and trade the uncertain right to do whatever they wanted, for the stability and security to practice a smaller number of rights. This is the fundamental social contract, the trading of full freedom for the benefits of living collectively (such as stability and security).

What Mills is doing with this concept is pointing out the underlying assumptions of the times in which it was written, namely that the only “real” people were white people. The four main proponents of the social contract that Mills deals with are Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant. All lived in times of prevailing racist sentiment, and all understood that the “humans” to which they had referred, the signatories of the social contract who enjoy equal treatment, are exclusively white. Thus, Mills uses the language of contractarian philosophical ideas to present a new contract: that between “humans” (white people) and “sub-humans” (non-white people). In other words, the racial contract is Mills’ attempt to order the prevailing white supremacist sentiment using the terms of the previous social contract, in order to analyze the bitter realities of our world in an attempt to hopefully correct them at some future point.

The terms and dimensions of the racial contract are many, and Mills’ philosophical prose can be extremely dense, but I don’t doubt one underlying theme of The Racial Contract, that race is more important to our daily lives than we think. To that end, I’m going to pick out the pieces from Mills’ text that I like the most, or that I think illustrate a good point, and then I’ll build up from there and explain its significance to everyday life as I see it. Here’s hoping we can all learn something.