Sandbox Books: The Racial Contract
Welcome to Sandbox Books! Each month, a member of the extended BRJA family will respond to the question “The Sandbox is not big enough for all of us AND our all our favorite books… If you could only bring one anti-racism/anti-oppression-related book with you into the BRJA sandbox, what would it be and why?”
To start us off, Dana Polson shares a little about her choice, the Jamaican philosopher Charles M. Mills’ iconic book The Racial Contract.
Participants of all races in BRJA workshops frequently ask some version of “why is the US still like this? We should be past this by now.” For white people, this is an example of “white racial innocence;” for Black and non-Black people of color, it reflects decades, if not centuries, of frustration that the struggle against white supremacy is ongoing and seemingly never-ending.
The “Racial Contract” is intimate with the world and so is not continually “astonished” by revelations about it; it does not find it remarkable that racism has been the norm….
The Racial Contract lays out Mill's argument that a tacit “racial contract” among white people posits whiteness as full personhood and Black and non-Black people of color as less-than-persons (at best), and is the foundation of both the modern world and of the white settler state that is the USA. Mills starts the book as follows:
White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory texts in political theory. … there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years. And this omission is not accidental. Rather, it reflects the fact that standard textbooks and courses have for the most part been written and designed by whites, This book is an attempt to redirect your vision, to make you see what, in a sense, has been there all along.
Mills, who was Jamaican and often explained the idea that race is a social construction by noting that he was considered “coloured” in Jamaica and “Black” in the US, was very clear about the ways that whiteness affects white people’s ability to understand the world.
But in a racially structured polity, the only people who can find it psychologically possible to deny the centrality of race are those who are racially privileged, for whom race is invisible precisely because the world is structured around them, whiteness as the ground against which the figures of other races – those who, unlike us, are raced – appear. The fish does not see the water, and whites do not see the racial nature of a white polity because it is natural to them, the element in which they move.
But still, if this is just a matter of seeing, shouldn’t white people, who have constructed this system over the centuries of modernity, be able to change it? Shouldn’t we be able to convince ourselves as white people of the truth of the matter and agree it’s wrong? Here we see more immense clarity from Mills, which is his strong analysis of power and the material advantage that whiteness gains for white people. Mills notes that
Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations
and that
The whole point [of the Racial Contract] is to secure and legitimate the privileging of those individuals designated as white/persons and the exploitation of those individuals designated as nonwhite/subpersons….the bottom line is material advantage.
So no – getting whites to give up whiteness is not a matter of “if only we knew.” Whiteness is about, among other things, power and material advantage. Mills’ clarity about this, he says, is necessary before we can be in a position to “tear up the racial contract” rather than simply re-write it in new ways.
