The Racial Contract

“All whites are beneficiaries of the Contract, though some whites are not signatories to it.”

Mills makes the distinction between whiteness as phenotype/genealogy and Whiteness as sociopolitical and economic system. The distinction plays an important role in the prescriptive aspect of his theory. Although he doesn’t fully articulate the point until Thesis 10, the idea is that people who are white can reject the terms of the Racial Contract in order to achieve the ideal society to which moral and political philosophers aspire.

“In the Racial Contract, by contrast, the crucial metamorphosis is the preliminary conceptual partitioning and corresponding transformation of human populations into ‘white’ and ‘nonwhite’ men. The role played by the ‘state of nature’ then becomes radically different.”

Where dominant contract discourse identifies the crucial metamorphosis as uncivilized man to civilized man, Mills argues that the metamorphosis is the distinction between white and nonwhite people, i.e., the distinction between persons and subpersons. The role of the state of nature is transformed by this distinction because, as Mills illustrates in later theses, the nonwhite spaces constitute actual states of nature in which the moral and legal egalitarianism of the social contract are not applicable. For Europeans, the state of nature is either hypothetical or already partially civilized so that it really only serves as a conceptual device for explaining/justifying the structure of civil society.