The Racial Contract

While mainstream moral theory and political philosophy tend to focus on ideals, the Racial Contract provides a factual account of the historical record. Mills suggests that looking at the actual historically dominant moral/political consciousness allows a better prescription for the improvement of society than ahistorical abstractions of idealized accounts. The Racial Contract, thus, illuminates that racism is not a deviation from but rather the norm of Western civil society and creates a specific moral psychology for its signatories.

Noting that feminist political philosophers have identified the same general agreement among various male philosophers on the “correctness” of the subordination of women, despite whatever other political and theoretical disagreements those male philosophers might have, Mills asserts that a similar phenomenon exists among white philosophers in terms of race/racism. Their silence reveals their complicity in the Racial Contract because it demonstrates that they take the ideas of racial inferiority and racial subordination for granted. This silence engendered Mills’s deep concern with naming and making visible the system of white supremacy that the Racial Contract establishes. It supports his position in Thesis 6 that white people do not even see the racialized character of the polity because it is the “natural” environment through which they move, which renders race invisible for them.