Mills began to write about race after the collapse in 1983 of the Grenadian Revolution. In the essay, “Race and Class: Conflicting or Reconcilable Paradigms?” Mills began to construct a theory of race in Caribbean society while conducting a critique of one of the Caribbean’s major social theorists, M.G. Smith. From this initial foray, Mills, clearly influenced by the growing academic interest in race theory, enunciated a position which began to grapple with race as constitutive of the social formations in the Americas and not as epiphenomenon. Mills’ clearest statement on race before the publication of The Racial Contract was the essay “Revisionist Ontologies: Theorizing White Supremacy,” where he laid the ground for the arguments in The Racial Contract. Mills was now following the distinct trajectory of Caribbean intellectuals who grapple with the meanings of race and class for the New World black experience. From the Caribbean experience of race, Mills moved onto the American stage, where his work on race would now probe the foundations of the western intellectual tradition. The Racial Contract should therefore be located as a major moment in the trajectory of Mills’ efforts to grapple with the phenomenon of race in western society.

The Racial Contract is an important contribution to the mainstream Anglo-American political philosophy of contractarianism. Mainstream western political theory and political philosophy have failed to explore race. To a large extent, political theorists and political philosophers who attempt to raise this issue and its meanings for the concepts of classical political philosophy are on the margins of the discipline. Mills’ work aims at challenging the conceptual whiteness of mainstream political philosophy, and inserting within that mainstream the discussion of race.

An initial review of The Racial Contract focused on what was considered to be Mills’ liberalism. It was suggested that Mills’ project of using the racial contract as an inclusionary device and bridge to the social contract was essentially a liberal one. There are some fundamental problems with such an attempt. One of these is the implication of liberalism in the western processes of colonialism, conquest, and racial oppression. In response, Mills suggested that there should be a distinction between the liberal ideals as conceived in the Enlightenment and its betrayal by whites in the historic practices of liberalism. However, the historic practices of a political ideology constitute over time its very nature as human beings negotiate the political world. Added to this, liberalism as a philosophy of history seeks to modernize spaces and construct norms of the secular modern West in these spaces through the methods of conquest and colonialism. As a western rationalist project, liberalism is rooted in free market relationships and social inequality as the fixed expression of human nature. There is therefore no detachment of the elements and ideals of liberalism from its human political practice. Mills’ attempt to separate and distinguish the practices of liberalism from its early ideals flounders. However, I do not wish to spend time rehearsing the arguments about Mills’ attempts to revise liberalism, because Mills himself accepts that his project is a liberal one. What I wish to consider is the value of Mills’ major claim to propound an adequate political theory for grappling with the complexities of racial oppression.

Mills’ first claim is that the racial contract is a rhetorical trope and a theoretical method which will allow us to understand the inner logic of racial domination and how race structures the politics of the West (6). He argues that the racial contract is a set of agreements between whites which places non-whites in a subhuman, subordinate status. Although all whites are beneficiaries of this contract, not all of them are signatories. As a conceptual claim, Mills states that the racial contract will allow us to understand that white supremacy is a political system built upon racial exclusion and domination and that this system was the hidden system of the global polity for the last 500 years (3). The proposed racial contract is therefore a theory of exclusion. Mills then claims that the racial contract is historically superior to the social contract as an explanation and description of historical reality. In other words, Mills’ project is to fashion a theory about the construction of race in western society by a critique of classical contract theory. Turning from critique to prescription, Mills suggests that one solution to racial oppression is the implementation of the ideal of the social contract in which all persons have equal moral worth. He therefore recommends that the socially constructed universal ideals of Enlightenment liberality become the real procedural terms for a society of human equality.

What are the problems with these claims? The first problem is with the nature of contract theory itself and whether or not, even in its revised form as a racial contract, it is an appropriate frame-work for grappling with the complexities of racial oppression and the racial structuring of politics. Contract theory, and in particular civil contract theory (the tradition Mills follows), is a story about the genesis of political authority, political obligation, and negative liberty. Its proponents express the political value of individual liberty as the foundation of both society and government. The classical civil social contract attempts to solve how and why there should be political obedience, on what grounds one should obey or disobey, and the legitimacy of government in human terms. The two key things about this stream of social contract theory, both in its classical and modern forms, are the notions of political obligation and the parameters for individual liberty: negative freedom.

Mills is correct to point out that the story of the original social contract in the modern world excludes blacks and women from political obligation, from the rights of negative liberty, and therefore from the rights of citizenship. For people of African descent this exclusion was based both on the notion of Africans being savages or subhuman and on the construction of racial slavery in the New World. The political system that emerged from this exclusionary social contract was obviously white male supremacist. So Mills’ trope of the racial contract is both useful and correct in offering a description of the way in which non-whites were excluded from the establishment of the liberal political system in the eighteenth century. It also means that the racial contract is historically more accurate than the social contract. However, the racial contract suffers from a problem similar to that of the social contract. Some feminists argue that intrinsic to the contract story were relations of subordination. Carole Pateman makes the point that, “Another way of reading the story ...is that the social contract enables individuals to subject themselves to the state and civil law; freedom becomes obedience ...they create what I shall call civil mastery and civil subordination.” In other words, the story of the social contract is not so much about freedom as about political subordination. This is an important reading of social contract theory because it allows us to understand the social contract story and its elaboration to be the ideological underpinning for social systems of servitude. Then there is the historical abstractness of the contract itself because of its fictitious nature. How do these criticisms apply to the racial contract?

The emergence of race as a formal constitutive factor in western society was linked to two things: racial slavery and notions of servitude transported from the discourses of Roman civil liberty. In this process of transformation, Africans became Negroes and black slavery a contract agreement between the white political and economic elite and the state. Black servitude and slavery then became distinguishable in America through the implementation of series of laws. It is indicative of the nature of liberal political practice that in one of its most revolutionary moments, the American Revolution, it established a set of legal norms which located blacks in chattel slavery. The development of anti-black racial ideas was critical for such a project. These ideas then became hegemonic, turning into norms and a central element of western society.

In the same way that the social contract cannot explain civil and political subordination and male domination in its story of the evolution of political authority in the West, so the racial contract, while being more historically accurate, is not able to adequately explain the complexities of racial formation. This means that when Mills attempts to suggest that the racial contract can explain the nature of racial oppression and goes beyond an early historical explanation, the argument collapses in two ways. First, its understanding of the nature of political systems is incomplete and, second, it is historically imprecise in grappling with the different complexities of conquest, colonialism, racial oppression, and racial slavery. Let us take the failure of historical precision first. Conquest, colonialism, and racial slavery were all systems of exclusion. All were constructed on the inferiority of the native or the slave; but they were not all the same. Recognizing this, Mills suggests that there were a series of contracts: slave contract, contracts of colonial expropriation, etc. (24–26). He further argues that these were contracts that white males made amongst themselves. What is clear is that these contracts could not be made between colonizer and native nor between slave and slave master, given their forced and involuntary character. Mills’ difficulty with these contracts is a result of his attempt to develop an overarching theory to take into account the different modalities of Europe’s subjection of the world. In this process, the racial contract becomes a static, overarching, primarily ideological construct rather than a system of power and domination.

Racial formation is a complex process with categories that are both created and transformed. It is both cultural and ideological reproduction as well as domination in the social structure. So to argue that racial oppression is the result of a racial contract is to reduce this complexity to a single factor. Let us now turn to the political system argument. Mills states without qualification that white supremacy was/is the political system that governs societies yesterday and today (3). It is an argument which, while being accurate at a moment in the historical evolution of the West, misses the reality of present day postcolonial states. Here a caveat may be offered about Mills’ usage of political systems. Political systems operate at the levels of polity, institutions, and hegemony. Mills does not spell this out in his work and therefore his contention about white supremacy as a political system is not a fully accurate description of the modern world. Perhaps in the USA the political system still retains elements of white supremacy at all levels, but not in many postcolonial states. Also, if liberalism is now the dominant political philosophy, is Mills equating liberalism with white supremacy? And if so then is the project of revised liberalism flawed? All this leads to what may be considered to be a profound flaw in Mills’ theory of the racial contract: it is a static analytical tool. It is descriptive of a historical moment, but unable to explain the processes which flow from that moment. Its power lies in describing, not theorizing, racial domination.

There is another difficulty with The Racial Contract. It is true that a theory does not have to do everything. But the theory of the racial contract claims to explain the inner logic of racial domination (6). This form of domination is not a one-way street, as indeed all forms of domination are not. How domination is constructed and its means and hegemony are to some degree shaped by the actions of those who are dominated. All of the above is evident in the works of the Indian Subaltern School and in the writings of James Scott on hidden texts. Schematically it might be said that the logic of domination has three distinct phases. The first is the actual moment itself – the engagement and the establishment of the logic. The second phase is the contestation between the masters and the dominated, and the consolidation of the system. The third is when transformations occur. Mills’ theory of the racial contract has explanatory power for the first phase – the initial moment of engagement – and its major strength lies in its unmasking of the underside of the beginnings of western modernity and its genesis in conquest and racial slavery. This makes it more historically accurate than the social contract. But it does not explain the complexities of the historical process afterwards because it collapses them into a single overarching frame. In doing this, the theory of the racial contract misses the second phase of the logic of domination, the contestation and the political ideas of the dominated which emerge from this contest.

So let us look at what happens in this phase. Those who are dominated oftentimes attempt to be included into a contract of citizenry with all its rights. In the colonies, the rights of citizenship are sought through political freedom and notions of foundational equality. In the USA, the 1960s civil rights movement was in this mold. In South Africa political freedom and formal foundational equality became the ideological frame for the dismantling of apartheid. One of the most profound insights to emerge from these struggles of black people in different sites is the way in which the struggles for political equality and the rights of citizenry challenged the foundational structure of the society and gave new forms to old questions. This means that political values like the meanings of equality and freedom are themselves transformed.

So the character of the struggle of people of color raises fundamental political issues. This would suggest that the nature and the logic of racial and colonial domination raise other questions besides those of political obligation and the rights of citizenry. It is the fact of these different questions, other than those raised by the contract theory, which makes the theory of the racial contract such an inadequate tool for grappling with the inner logic of racial domination. It is not just the fact that blacks are racially dominated that we (blacks and other people of color) need to come to grips with; this has been so for 500 years, although the modalities of this domination constantly change. Of importance to contemporary political philosophy is the fact that this domination has resulted in the creation of critical political ideas about classical political values, and new questions about the meaning and dimensions of human freedom. The black critical intellectual tradition, from the slave narratives to the civil rights freedom movement, tells us this. Concretely this means that a missing element of the theory of the racial contract is the entire tradition of black critical writers from Equiano to Du Bois to Fanon.

But one might well ask, of what importance is this tradition to the arguments about the nature of racial domination? Everything, since a central notion of racial domination is the creation of a universal (read white western male) intellectual terrain and parameters which set the ground for theorizing. It would have been useful while exposing the canonical figures of the western intellectual tradition for Mills to acknowledge that figures like Cugoano and Equiano had raised some of the central issues about the nature of colonialism and equality. These former slaves began a distinct tradition in counterpoint to western modernity, liberalism, and western political thought. Their writings critiqued the eighteenth-century notions of the contract, particularly its English version, and exposed its exclusion of Africans. Mills’ lack of attention to the critical tradition of black writers leads him to make the following point: “it is no accident that the moral and political theory and practical struggles of nonwhites have so often centered on race, the marker of personhood and subpersonhood, inclusion or exclusion from the racial polity” (111). This is a partial reading of the black critical tradition. It is true that within the tradition many of the critical writers begin at race, but they do not end there. Let us recall some of the markers of this tradition in the twentieth century. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, C.L.R. James’s Black Jacobins, Franz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth, Amlicar Cabral’s Return to Source, Julius Nyerere’s Arusha Declaration – all these did not center on race but raised profound questions about classical political values. Indeed, for two of these writers, Cabral and Nyerere, race is not an issue at all; instead the authors focus on the organization of society and polity. And for those works that one might call black vindicationist, e.g., Black Jacobins, the question is this: what are the political ideas, the new categories that emerge from this process of vindication? Thus a fundamental difficulty with the theory of the racial contract is that it fails adequately to analyze the consequences of the real inner complexities of racial domination. This theory cannot grapple adequately with the issue of racial human bondage and the nature of the colonial/racial subject since it wishes only to correct the exclusionary nature of the social contract. This is a critical failing, since Mills says he wishes to take black political theory into the mainstream (132).

The third difficulty with the theory of the racial contract is the matter of race, power, the nature of racial oppression and their relationship to human existence, and Mills’ notion of an “epistemology of ignorance” (19). Historically there was no “epistemology of ignorance” in the racial contract between whites, as if somehow whites were not aware of the fact that they were involved in the racial oppression of blacks. The contradiction between the ideals of human white male equality and the lack of conferral of human equality on African slaves was not a slippage or a deceitful act; it was calculated in the same way the profits of a labor system were calculated. Mills’ use of this notion is itself somewhat contradictionary, since he eloquently and forcefully makes the point that racial oppression was not marginal to western society. An “epistemology of ignorance” would suggest that oppression could be solved when new knowledge is posited. What this argument ignores are the power relationships involved in racial domination and the issue of white privilege. I would suggest that there is a logical need for Mills’ use of this notion rooted in his liberal project. Such a notion is grounded in J.S. Mill’s work, which suggests that a liberal society grows and develops by accretions of knowledge, particularly in contestation with received opinion. A better question might perhaps be the one which Hannah Arendt asked when faced with Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism: what is the nature of the banality of evil and how does it occur? What do we need to do to understand it and what therefore is the character of mass complicity in such projects?

Mills’ work raises the issues of slavery, of race, and of the silences of western political philosophy on these matters. By focusing on the contract and using it as a mode of analysis, the volume misses some of the central questions which are posed by the critical black tradition – conceptions of equality and of the nature of freedom within the human community. As a result, The Racial Contract remains at the level of correction for western mainstream Anglo-American political philosophy. It is an important corrective. Mills’ ‘x-ray’ on the social contract hopefully will force white mainstream political philosophy to face the issue of race. But black radical theorists also have the task of excavating the philosophical notions that have emerged from our struggles against human bondage and its legacies. This is what will enrich political philosophy.