Page 19 - Poetic Elevation September 2020 final

The Racial Contract is a book by the Jamaican philosopher Charles W. Mills in which he
attempts to show that, although it is conventional to represent the social contract moral and
political theories of Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Immanuel

Kant as neutral with respect to race and ethnicity, in actuality, the philosophers understood
them to regulate only relations between whites; in relation to non-whites, these philoso-
phers helped to create a "racial contract", which in both formal and informal ways permitted
whites to oppress and exploit non-whites and violate their own moral ideals in dealing with
[1]
non-whites. Because in contemporary political philosophy, white philosophers take their
own white privilege for granted, they don't recognize that white supremacy is a political sys-
tem, and so in their developments of ideal, moral and political theory never consider actual

practice. Mills proposes to develop a non-ideal theory "to explain and expose the inequities
of the actual nonideal policy and to help us see through the theories and moral justifications
offered in defense of them." Using it as a central concept, "the notion of a Racial Contract
might be more revealing of the real character of the world we are living in, and the corre-
sponding historical deficiencies of its normative theories and practices, than the raceless no-
tions currently dominant in political theory." [2][3] Wikipedia