The Racial Contract

Paper Summary:

The paper explains that Charles Mills's critique of the racial contract suggests that non-white people have been oppressed because of limitations put upon them by whites looking to ensure and maintain an unjust and unequal treatment and categorizing of anyone who is not white. The author points out that gender and class have also determined hierarchical relationships, but race is the identity that has been most important in determining vulnerability to exploitation. The paper relates that the racial contract sets the parameters for white morality as a whole, so that competing Lockean and Kantian contractarian theories of natural rights and duties, or later anticontractarian theories, such as 19th-century utilitarianism, are all limited by its stipulations.

From the Paper:

"Charles Mills' views the historic "Racial Contract" as a set of agreements between whites to categorize non-whites as sub persons of inferior moral and legal status than that of whites. This contract gives whites the right to exploit non-whites and deny them the opportunities provided to whites as well as portrays non-whites as designated to serve whites. Mills believes that for most of the modern era, whites have has as little obligation to recognize the rights of non-whites as they have had to recognize the rights of non-humans."

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