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Historical Actuality Of The Racial Contract

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Historical Actuality
What is The Racial Contract? In order to address this we must first understand the idea of a social contract. A social contract is an implicit agreement by members of a society to cooperate for social benefits (dictionary.com). This typically includes some kind of sacrifice from one or more parties in hopes of bettering life for the majority. The Racial Contract is a political philosophy and book written by Charles s that plays off the idea of implicit societal consent and argues that race is the tool used to enforce these laws. Similar to other famous philosophers, Mills agrees and builds upon the idea that societal organizations are partitioned in such a fashion that it runs off the consent of its members. Now, who is …show more content…

Mills’ Racial Contract lists and discusses ten theses about the “social contract” surrounding the world today. For the purpose of this essay we will focus on number 2, the racial contract is a historical actuality. This thesis is where much of his legitimacy is founded. Its evidence supports the idea that white supremacy not only exists, but also supports the overarching claim that racism is part of the foundation of the westernized world.
Mills begins to explain that white supremacy is overtly “apparent and foundationally shaped the past five hundred years by the realities of European domination and the gradual consolidation global white domination over the last 500 years”(20). He separates the examples into two branches, the American colonization and the European. We begin with the atrocities of the first American settlers, who were European at the time, towards the Native Americans. Many Native Americans were either killed, or forced into slavery as a subordinate to these white settlers. He then moves to African slavery both in regards to European colonialism and slavery in the United States. He mentions the irony of the suppression when it was that of the imported African slaves whose labor was required to build this "New World [US]"(20). Mills builds on the common knowledge of struggle with the abolition of slavery throughout the US. This is based on the actual documentation of legislation …show more content…

Europeans invaded Africa and not only forced themselves upon the native people but forced western ideology and white power, showing how this colonization is consistently based on the assumption of "the rightness and necessity of subjugation and assimilating other peoples to the European world view” (26). Mills then discusses how the colonialization of Africa was merely a part of the 85% European domination of the world, and Europeans are primarily whites. Thus whites oppressed and force millions of people to be

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