The Racial Contract

A short, deliberately provocative book that uses the language of social contract theory to describe white supremacy as a political system. Mills argues that the contract stories of Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Kant were, in practice, underwritten by a racial contract: an agreement among people counted as white to treat non-white people as less than full persons and to justify their exploitation. The book has three chapters. The first sets out the racial contract as political, moral and epistemological, and insists that it is historical rather than hypothetical, visible in colonialism, slavery and segregation. The second shows how the contract norms space, marking some lands as wilderness or savage, and norms individuals, creating a category of subpersons. The third argues that the concept has explanatory merits over mainstream political philosophy, which treats race as a marginal issue. Mills also introduces an epistemology of ignorance, an inverted way of knowing that lets beneficiaries misunderstand the world they have made. Critics question whether a single contract can capture varied histories of racism.

It shows how race was built into modern political thought and gives readers the idea of an epistemology of ignorance, now central to the critical philosophy of race.