The Racial Contract

Regardless of age, skin color, or ethnicity, Charles Mills' concepts regarding the invisible contract of white supremacy is an eloquent truth about modern society. Citizens go through day to day life with a misconception that the fight for equality was somehow miraculously won with desegregation and Martin Luther King Jr.'s "I Have a Dream" speech. However, The Racial Contract throws that notion right out the door. Unfortunately, unless you are engaged in the current injustices regarding racial tensions, the concept is lost. Charles Mills fully admits his "contract" is not a tangible text of racist beliefs, but the text is a detailed description of the subconscious ideologies of superiority that truly dictate political agenda. Unfamiliar with the work of Mills until my Junior year in college, I have to say that Mills accomplished his goal of redirecting pigeon-holed ideas, at least with myself. I would recommend The Racial Contract to anyone who believes in the power of knowledge. Although, I caution readers who would read this book for the simple sake of saying you read it. Unless you are open to thought provoking ideas and enlightening truths this book is not for you, only because it deserves an open mind and respect toward a heartbreaking realization that the land of the free really isn't as free as we would like to think.

I'm not sure this book needs much of a review. Most folks who have gotten this far are probably already predisposed towards buying this book anyway. Other reviews of this book treat the book exactly the way Mills has covered the subject matter. I will not be as eloquent. This book is quite simply the most truthful book ever written on the subject. "The Racial Contract" should be required reading for everyone that can read. Its message is not finger pointing, or condescending in tone. It is not apologetic at all. It could be a wake up call for Eurocentric civilization... if it is read!

"White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today." So begins The Racial Contract, and in the mere 133 pages that follow this line the book deftly marshals evidence from the Western political tradition and general history to effectively place race at the heart of political theory. It centrally elucidates the ways in which the social contract has unspoken suppositions which in actuality make it a handshake between whites to exploit the lands, labors and bodies of nonwhites. These suppositions include the understanding that the peoples and places it "races" are not fully human--an idea that has legitimated 500 years of Western atrocities and exploitations exacted upon countries with peoples of color. Thus it also calls into question the popular idea that racism is merely a misguided worldview, and says rather that it is solidly within the epistemological, political and moral understandings of the West.

Mills places his theory firmly within the liberal conception of rights and so explores the ways in which such rights (as to life and labors) have been systematically alienated from nonwhites. Hence, those who have called this work a "deconstruction" or anti-Enlightenment are quite wrong. Mills: "Though it may appear to be such, the 'Racial Contract' is not a 'deconstruction' of the social contract.... The 'Racial Contract' is really...pro-Enlightenment...and antipostmodernist" (129). The reason that this is so important to Mills' project is that he is not proposing that ethics are relative or that there are no ethical norms that can coherently be placed at the center of a political project. He proposes that there are such norms but that they have been systematically denied to nonwhites. He also puts forth the very unpostmodern idea that there is a correct metanarrative of history--one that identifies white supremacy and conquest as the unnamed political system making the world what it is today. Hence, this work is more correctly placed in the tradition of the "radical and to-be-completed Enlightenment" (129). (In other words, if prospective readers are looking for contemporary continental thought--go to [my favorites] Zizek, Foucault or Fanon, not to Mills.)

I hope that this does not sound too academic or technical. I have read plenty of dry and boring theoretical texts, and this simply is not that. I stayed up until four in the morning finishing The Racial Contract in one sitting--it is perhaps my favorite book read thus far in college. Anyone concerned about the problems of race--whether familiar with political theory or not--can (and should) read this book and get a tremendous amount from it.

A must read.

In The Racial Contract, Mills places race in context of much larger societal patterns. His approach allows us to see the systemic nature of the problem. Given this context, one can have a more objective conversation about constructs relating to racism.

As a black person, The Racial Contract helped me understand why racism exists, why it's so difficult to reverse and how we all play a role in the system.

Reader beware. Unless you are an academic, the first third of the book can be tough going. It's worth pushing forward. Mills' writing gets easier to navigate.

this book really opened my eyes....being a philosophy major, i have always been bombarded with western european thought and its influences on culture. the thing that has always been praised the most is the wonder of the Enlightenment. it has been heralded as doing more for the individual than any other age, BUT.....

mills clearly and passionately shows how this is simply not the case...

read it