The Social Contract By Charles Mills

In 1997, Charles Mills wrote his book The Racial Contract to put his own philosophical spin on his response to how the role of race is portrayed in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s earlier book The Social Contract. Mills uses his book as a platform to discuss how white supremacy is still prevalent in today’s society. He uses the beginning of European expansionism and how the Europeans began their worldly domination that would eventually lead to a society heavily influenced by racist individuals to set context for the book. Mill’s book put this contract that is widely unacknowledged (in his opinion) into light to show how that European expansion and domination brought forth the ever occurring battle between “whites” and “non-whites.”
One way that Mills expresses how white supremacy has taken over since the start of our nation is through use of language that I believe to be a bit outdated coming from the generation I live in. Term’s such as “savage” and “barbarian” (Mills, The Racial Contract) are found throughout the novel as a way for Mills to show readers how whites have referred to non-whites for centuries. To put the word “savage” into context Mills writes: “white men who are [definitionally] already part of society encounter

20) once they dominated a huge part of the globe. White Europeans coined these terms as a way to show that non-whites simply cannot survive in this society and that non-whites needed them in order to survive. Nothing about how the white Europeans treated the non-whites was fair. While I know that slavery and racism were the societal norms centuries, even decades ago; I truly believe that my generation is of a different mindset. While I think some of the points Mills presents are relevant, I do think some of them are a bit extreme for today’s times. He paints all whites as being racist and supremacists, which I can only speak for myself in saying is simply not