The Racial Contract by Charles W. Mills

Author:Charles W. Mills
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2021-12-26T00:00:00+00:00

The Racial Contract has to be enforced through violence and ideological conditioning.

The social contract is, by definition, classically voluntaristic, modeling the polity on a basis of individualized consent. What justifies the authority of the state over us is that “we the people” agreed to give it that authority. (On the older, “feudal” patriarchal model, by contrast—the model of Sir Robert Filmer, Locke’s target in the Second Treatise—people were represented as being born into subordination.)88 The legitimacy of the state derives from the freely given consent of the signatories to transfer or delegate their rights to it, and its role in the mainstream moralized/constitutionalist version of the contract (Lockean/Kantian) is, correspondingly, to protect those rights and safeguard the welfare of its citizens. The liberal-democratic state is then an ethical state, whether in the minimalist, night-watchman Lockean version of enforcing noninterference with citizens’ rights or in the more expansive redistributivist version of actively promoting citizens’ welfare. In both cases the liberal state is neutral in the sense of not privileging some citizens over others. Correspondingly, the laws that are passed have as their rationale this juridical regulation of the polity for generally acceptable moral ends.

This idealized model of the liberal-democratic state has, of course, been challenged from various political directions over the past century or so: the recently revived Hegelian moral critique from the perspective of a competing, allegedly superior ideal, a communitarian state seeking actively to promote a common conception of the good; the degraded version of this in the fascist corporatist state; the anarchist challenge to all states as usurping bodies of legitimized violence; and what has been the most influential radical critique up till recently, the Marxist analysis of the state as an instrument of class power, so that the liberal-democratic state is supposedly unmasked as the bourgeois state, the state of the ruling class.

My claim is that the model of the Racial Contract shows us that we need another alternative, another way of theorizing about and critiquing the state: the racial, or white-supremacist, state, whose function inter alia is to safeguard the polity as a white or white-dominated polity, enforcing the terms of the Racial Contract by the appropriate means and, when necessary, facilitating its rewriting from one form to another.

The liberal-democratic state of classic contractarianism abides by the terms of the social contract by using force only to protect its citizens, who delegated this moralized force to it so that it could guarantee the safety not to be found in the state of nature. (This was, after all, part of the whole point of leaving the state of nature in the first place.) By contrast, the state established by the Racial Contract is by definition not neutral, since its purpose is to bring about conformity to the terms of the Racial Contract among the subperson population, which will obviously have no reason to accept these terms voluntarily, since the contract is an exploitation contract. (An alternative, perhaps even superior, formulation might be: it is neutral for its

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