Two pages note

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THE RAC IAL C O NTRACT

as T homas Jefferson expressed their antipathy to Negroid fea

tures .46 (Benjamin Franklin, interestingly, opposed the slave

trade on grounds that were at least partially aesthetic, as a

kind of beautification program for America. Voicing his con

cern that import ation of slaves had " bla cken'd half America/'

he asked: " W hy increase the Sons of Africa, by Planting them

in America, where we have so fair an Opportunity, by exclud

ing all Blacks and Tawneys, of increasing the lovely White

and Red ? " )47

To the extent that these norms are a ccepted, bla cks will b e

t h e ra ce most alienated from their own bodies-a fate particu

larly painful for black women, who, like all women, will (by

the terms, here, of the Sexu al Contra c t ) be valued chiefly by

their physical appearance, which will generally be deemed to

fall short of the Caucasoid or light-skinned ideal .48 Moreover,

apart from their obvious consequences for intra- and interra

cial sexual relat ionships, these norm s will a ffect opportunities

and employment prospects also, for studies have confirmed

that a "pleasing " physical appearance gives one an edge in job

competition. It is no a c cident that bla cks of mixed ra ce are

those who are differentially represented in employment in the

" whit e " world. They will, because of their background, often

tend to be better educat ed also, but an additional factor is that

whites are less physically uncomfortable with them . "If we

have to hire any of them , " it may be thought, "at least this

one looks a bit like us . "

The R a c i a l C o ntract u n d e rwrites t h e m o d e rn s o c i a l contract a n d is

conti n u a l ly b e i ng rewritte n .

Radical feminists argue that the oppression o f women is the

oldest oppression. Racial oppression is much more recent .

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Mills, Charles W.. The Racial Contract, Cornell University Press, 1999. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/westminster/detail.action?docID=3138625. Created from westminster on 2021-10-13 23:59:57.

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Whereas relations between the sexes necessarily go back to

the origin of the species, an intimate and central relationship

between Europe as a collective entity and non-Europe, " whit e "

a n d " nonwhit e " races, is a phenomenon of t h e m odern epoch .

There is ongoing scholarly controversy over the existence and

extent of racism in antiquity ( " ra cism " as a complex of ideas,

that is, as against a developed politicoeconomic system), with

some writ ers, such as Frank Snowden, finding a period " before

color prejudice, " in which blacks are obviously seen as equals,

and others claiming that Greek and Roman bigotry against

bla cks was there from the beginning.49 But obviously, whatever

the disagreement on this point, it would have to be agreed

that the ideology of modern racism is far more theoretically

developed than ancient or medieval prejudices and is linked

( whatever one's view, idealist or materialist , of causal priority)

to a system of European domination.

Nevertheless, this divergence does imply that different a c

counts of t h e Ra cial Contract a r e possible. T h e a ccount I favor

conceives the Ra cial Contra ct as creating not m erely racial

exploitation, b u t ra ce itself as a group identity. In a contempo rary vocabulary, the Ra cial Contract " constructs" ra c e . ( For

other a ccounts, for example, more essentialist ones, ra cial

self-identification would precede the drawing up of the Racial

Contra ct . ) " Whit e " people do not preexist but are brought

into existence as "whites" by the Racial Contra ct-hence the

peculiar transformation of the human population that a ccom

panies this contra ct . The white ra ce is inven ted, and one

becomes "white by law. 1 1 50

In this framework, then, the golden age of contract theory

( 1 6 5 0 to 1 8 00) overlapped with the growth of a European capi

talism whose development was stimulated by the voyages of

exploration that increasingly gave the contract a racial subt ext .

The evolution of the modern version of the contra c t , chara c -

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T H E RAC IAL C O NTRACT

terized by an antipatriarchalist Enlightenment liberalism,

with its proclamations of the equal rights, autonomy, and

freedom of all men, thus took place s imultaneously with the

massa cre, expropriation, and subjection to hereditary slavery

of men at least apparently human . This contradiction needs

to b e reconciled; it is reconciled through the Racial Contra ct,

which essentially denies their personhood and restricts the

t erms of the social contra c t to whites. " To invade and dispos

sess the p eople of an unoffending civilized country would

violate morality and transgress the principles of international

law, " writes Jennings, " but savages were exceptional . Being

uncivilized by definition, they were outside the sanctions of

both morality and law. "51 The R a cial Contra ct is thus the

truth of the social contra ct .

There is some direct evidence that it is in the writings of

the classic contra ct theorists themselves . That is, it is not

merely a matter of hypothetical intellectual reconst ruction

on my part, arguing from silence that " men" must really

have m eant " white m en . " Already Hugo Grotius, whose early

seventeenth -century work on natural law provided the crucial

theoretical b a c kground for later contra ctarians, gives, as Rob

ert Williams has pointed out, the ominous judgment that for

"barbarians, " " wild beasts rather than m en, one may r ightly

say . . . that the most just war is against savage beasts, the

next against men who are like beasts. "52 But let us just focus

on the four most important contra ct theorists: Hobbes, Locke,

Rousseau, and Kant . 53

Consider, to begin with, Hobbes's notoriously bestial state

of nature, a state of war where l ife is " nasty, brutish, and

short . " On a superficial reading, it might seem that it i s nonra

cial, equally applicable to everybody, but note what he says

when considering the objection that " there was never such a

time, nor condition of warre as this . " He replies, " I believe it

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was never generally so, over all the world: but there are many

pla ces, where they live so now, " his example being " the savage

people in many places of America . "54 So a nonwhite people,

indeed the very nonwhit e people upon whose land his fellow

Europeans were then encroaching, is his only real-life exampl e

of people i n a state of nature . ( And i n fact, it h a s been pointed

out that the phrasing and terminology of Hobbes's chara cter

ization may well have been derived directly from the writings

of contemporaries about settlement in the Americas. The " ex

plorer" Walter Raleigh described a civil war as "a state of War,

which is the meer state of Nature of Men out of communit y,

where all have an equal r ight to all things . " And two other

authors of the time chara cter ized the inhabitants of the Ameri

c a s as " people [who] lived l i k e w i l d beasts, without religion,

nor government , nor town, nor houses, without cultivating

the land, nor clothing their bodi e s " and "people l iving yet as

the first men, without letters, without lawes, without Kings,

without common wealthes, without arts . . . not civil by

nature. " )55

I n t h e n e x t paragraph, H o b b e s g o e s on to argue that " though

there had never been any time, wherein particular men were

in a condition of warre one against another, " there is " in all

times" a state of " continuall j ealousie s " between kings and

persons of sovereign authority. He presumably emphasizes

this contention in order for the reader to imagine what would

happen in the absence of a " common Power to feare. " 56 But

the t ext is confusing. How could it simultaneously be the case

that " there had never been" any such literal state-of-nature

war, when in the previous paragraph he had just said that some

were living like that now ? As a result of this ambiguity, Hobbes

has been chara c terized as a literal contra ctar ian by some com

m entators and as a hypothetical contra ctarian by others . But

I think this minor mys t ery can be cleared up once we recognize

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that there i s a tacit racial logic in the text: the literal state of

nature is reserved for nonwhitesi for whites the state of nature

i s h ypoth e tical. The conflict between whites is the conflict

b etween those with sovereigns, that is, those who are already

( and have always been) in society. From this conflict, one can

extrapolat e (gesturing at the racial abyss, so to speak ) to what

might happen in the absence of a ruling sovereign. But really

we know that whites are too rational to allow this to happen

to them . So the most notorious state of nature in the con

tractarian literature-the bestial war of all against al l-is

really a non white figure, a racial object lesson for the more

rational whites, whose superior grasp of nat ural law ( here in

its prudential rather than altruistic version) will enable them

to take the necessary steps to avoid it and not to behave as

" savages . "

Hobbes has standardly been seen a s a n awkwardly transi

tional writer, caught between feudal absolutism and the rise of parliamentarianism, who uses the contract now clas sically associated with the emergence of liberalism to defend absolut

ism. But it might be argued that he is transitional in another

way, in that in mid-seventeenth century Britain the imperial

project was not yet so fully developed that the intellectual

apparatus of ra cial subordination had been completely elabo

rated. Hobbes remains enough of a racial egalitarian that, while

singling out Native Americans for his real- life example, he

suggests that without a sovereign even Europeans could de

scend to their state, and that the absolutist government appro

priate for nonwhites could also be appropriate for whi tes.57

The uproar that greeted his work can be seen as attributable

at least in part to this moral/political suggestion. The spread

of colonialism would consolidate an int ellectual world in

which this bestial state of nature would be reserved for non

white savages, to be despotically governed, while civil Europe-

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ans would enj oy the benefits of liberal parliamentarianism .

The R a cial Contra c t began to rewrite the social con tra ct.

One can see this transition more clearly by the time of Locke,

whose state of nature is normatively regulated by traditional

(altruistic, nonprudential ) natural law. It is a moralized state

of nature in which private property and money exist , indeed

a state of nature that is virtually civil. Whites can thus be

literally in this state of nature ( for a brief period, anyway)

without its calling into question their innat e qualities. Locke

famously argues that God gave the world " to the use of the

Industrious and Rational, " which qualities were indicated by

labor. So while industrious and rational Englishmen were toil

ing away at home, in America, by contrast, one found " wild

woods and uncultivated wast[e] . . . left to Natur e " by the idle

Indians .58 Though they share the state of nature for a time

with nonwhit es, then, their residence is necessarily briefer,

since whites, by appropriating and adding value to this natural

world, exhibit their superior rationality. So the mode of appro

priation of N ative Americans is no real mode of appropriation

at all, yielding property rights that can be readily overridden

( if they exist at all), and thereby rendering their territories

normatively open for seizure once those who have long since

left the state of nature ( Europeans ) encounter them . Locke's

thesis was in fact to be the central pillar of the expropr iation

contract- " th e principal philosophical delineation of the nor

mative arguments supporting whit e civilization's conquest of

America, " writes Williams59-and not merely in the Unit ed

States but later in the other whit e settler states in Africa and

the Pacific. Aboriginal economies did not improve the land

and thus could be regarded as nonexistent .

The pra ctice, and arguably also the theory, of Locke p layed

a role in the slavery contra ct also. In the Secon d Trea tise,

Locke defends slavery resulting from a just war, for example,

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a defensive war against aggression. This would hardly be an

a ccurate chara cterization of European raiding parties seeking

African slaves, and in any case, in the same chapter Locke

explicitly opposes hereditary slavery and the enslavement of

wives arid children .60 Yet Locke had investments in the slave

trading Royal Africa Company and earlier assisted in writing

the slave constitution of Carolina . So one could argue that

the Ra cial Contra ct manifests itself here in an astonishing

inconsistency, which could be resolved by the supposit ion that

Locke saw bla cks as not fully human and thus as subject to a

different set of normative rules. Or perhaps the same Lockean

moral logic that covered Native Americans can b e extended

to bla cks also. They weren't appropriating their home conti

nent of Africa; they're not rational; they can be enslaved.61

Rousseau's writings might seem to be something of an ex

ception. After all, it is with his work that the notion of the

" noble savage " is associated ( though the phrase is not a ctually

his own ) . And in the Discourse on In equ ali ty's reconstruction

of the origins of society, everybody is envisaged as having been

in the state of nature ( and thus to have been " savage " ) at one

time or another. But a careful reading of the text reveals, once

again, crucial ra cial distinctions. The only natural savages

cited are nonwhite savages, examples of European savages be

ing restricted to reports of feral children raised by wolves and

bears, child-rearing pra ctices (we are told) comparable to those

of Hottentots and Caribs .62 ( Europeans are so intrinsically civi

lized that it takes upbringing by animals to turn th em into

savages . ) For Europe, savagery is in the dim distant past, since

metallurgy and agr iculture are the inventions leading to civili

zation, and it turns out that " one of the best reasons why

Europe, if not the earliest to be civilized, has been at least

more continuously and better civilized than other parts of the

world, is perhaps that it is at once the richest in iron and the

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most fertile in wheat . " But Rousseau was writing more than

two hundred years after the European encounter with the great

Aztec and Inca empires; wasn't there at least a little metallurgy

and agriculture in evidence there ? Apparently not: 11Both met

allurgy and agriculture were unknown to the savages of

America, who have always therefore remained savages. 1163 So

even what might initially seem to be a more open environmen

tal determinism, which would open the door to racial egalitari

anism rather than ra cial hierarchy, degenerates into massive

historical amnesia and factual misrepresentation, driven by

the presuppositions of the Ra cial Contra c t .

Moreover, to m a k e t h e obvious point, even if s o m e of Rous

seau's nonwhite savages are 11noble, " physically and psycho

logically healthier than the Europeans of the degraded and

corrupt society produced by the real-life bogus contract, they

are still savages. So they are primitive beings who are not

actually part of civil society, barely raised above animals, with

out language. Leaving the state of nature, as Rousseau argues

in Th e Social Con tract, his later a ccount of an ideal polity, is

necessary for us to become fully human moral agents, beings

capable of justice.64 So the praise for nonwhite savages is a

limited pat ernalistic praise, tantamount to admiration for

healthy animals, in no way to be taken to imply their equality,

let alone superiority, to the civilized Europeans of the ideal

polity. The underlying racial dichotomization and hierarchy

of civilized and savage remains quite clear.

Finally, Kant's version of the social contra ct is in a sense

the best illustration of the grip of the Ra cial Contra ct on

Europeans, s ince by this time the actual contract and the his

torical dimension of contractarianism had apparently van

ished altogether. So here if anywhere, one would think-in

this world of abstract persons, demarcated as such only by

their rationality-race would have become irrelevan t . But as

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Emmanuel Eze has recently demonstrated in great detail, this

orthodox picture i s radically misleading, and the nature of

Kantian "persons" and the Kantian " contra c t " must really be

rethough t . 65 For it turns out that Kant , widely regarded as the

most important moral theorist of the modern period, in a sense

the father of modern moral theory, and-through the work

of John Rawls and Jurgen Habermas-increasingly central to

modern political philosophy as well, is also the father of the

modern concept of race.66 His 1 7 7 s essay " The Different Races

of Mankind" ( " Von den Verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen " )

i s a classic pro-heredit arian, antienvironmentalist statement

of " th e immutability and permanence of ra ce . " For him, com

ments George Mosse, " ra cial make -up becomes an unchanging

substance and the founda tion of all physical appearance and

human development, including inte lligenc e . "67 The famous

theorist of personhood is also the theorist of subpersonhood,

though this distinction is, in what the suspicious might almost

think a conspira cy to conceal embarrass ing truths, far less

well known.

As Eze points out, Kant taught anthropology and physical

geography for for t y years, and his philosophical work really

has to be read in conjunc tion with these lectures to understand

how racialized his views on moral chara cter were. His notori

ous comment in O bser va tions on the Feeling of the Beau tiful

and Su blime is well known to, and often cited by, black intel

lectuals: "So fundamental is the difference between [the black

and white] ra ces of man . . . it appears to be as great in regard

to mental capa cities as in color" so that "a clear proof that

what [ a Negro] said was stupid" was that " this fellow was

quite black from head to foot . "68 The point of Eze's essay is

that this remark i s by no means isolated or a casual throwaway

line that, though of course regrettable, has no broader implica

tions. Rather, it comes out of a developed theory of ra ce and

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corresponding intellectual ability and limitation . It only seem s

casual, unembedded i n a larger theory, because white a cademic

philosophy as an institution has had no interest in researching,

pursuing the implications of, and making known to the world

this dimension of Kant's work .

In fa ct, Kant demarcates and theorizes a color-coded racial

hierarchy of Europeans, Asians, Africans, and Native Ameri

cans, differentiate d by their degree of innate talen t. Eze ex

plains : '"Talent' is that which, by 'nature/ guarantees for the

'white/ in Kant's racial rational and moral order, the highest

position above all creatures, followed by the 'yellow/ the

'black/ and then the 'red . ' Skin color for Kant is evidence of

superior, inferior, or no 'gift ' of ' talent, ' or the capa city to

realize reason and rational- moral perfectibility through

education . . . . It cannot, therefore, be argued that s kin color

for Kant was m erely a physical chara cteristic. It is, rather,

evidence of an unchanging and unchangeable moral quality. "

Europeans, to no one's surprise I presume, have all the neces

sary t al ents to be morally self-educating; there is some hope

for Asians, though they lack the ability to develop abstract

concepts; the innately idle Africans can at least be educated

as servants ahd s laves through the instruction of a split

bamboo cane ( Kant gives some useful advice on how to beat

N egroes efficiently); and the wretched Native Americans are

just hopeless, and cannot be educated at all . So, in complete

opposition to the image of his work that has come down to

us and is st andardly t aught in introductory ethics courses, full

p ersonhood for Kant is a ctually dependent upon ra ce. In Eze's

summary, " The black person, for example, can a ccordingly b e

denied full humanity since f u l l a n d 'true' humanit y a c crues

only to the white European. "69

The recent furor about Paul de Man70 and, decades earlier,

Martin Heidegger, for their complicity with the N azis, thus

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needs to be put into perspective. These are es sentially bit

players, minor leaguers . One needs to distinguish theory from

a ctual pra ctice, of course, and I'm not saying that Kant would

have endorsed genocide . But the em barrassing fa ct for th e

white West (which dou b tless explains its concealm en t) is th a t

their m ost important m oral theorist o f th e past three hundred

years is also th e founda tion al theorist in the m odern period

of th e division between Herrenvolk and Untermenschen, per

sons and s u bpersons, upon which Nazi theory would later

draw. Modern m oral theory and modern racial theory have

the same father.

The Racial Contra ct, therefore, underwrites the social con

tract, is a visible or hidden operator that restricts and modifies

the scope of its prescriptions. But since there is both syn

chronic and dia chronic variation, there are many different

versions or local instantiations of the Ra cial Contract, and

they evolve over time, so that the effective force of the social

contract itself changes, and the kind of cognitive dissonance

between the two alters. ( This change has implications for the

moral psychology of the white signatories and their chara cter

istic patterns of insight and blindnes s . ) The social contra ct is

( in its original historical version ) a specific discrete event that

founds society, even if ( through, e.g., Lockean theories of t a cit

consent) subsequent generations continue to ratify it on an

ongoing basis. By contrast the Racial Contra ct is con tin u ally

being rewritten to create different forms of the ra cial polity.

A global periodization, a timeline overview of the evolution

of the Racial Contra ct, would high light first of all the crucial

division between the time before and the time after the institu

tionalization of global white suprema cy. ( Thus Janet Abu

Lughod's book about the thirteenth-century/fourteenth-cen

tury m edieval world syst em is titled Before European Hege

m ony. ) 7 1 The time a f t er would then be further subdivided into

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the period of formal, juridical white supremacy ( th e epoch of

the European conquest, African slavery, and European colo

nialism, overt white rac ial self-identification, and the l argely

undisputed hegemony of ra cist theorie s ) and the present period

of de fa cto whi te suprema cy, when whites' dominance is, for

the most part, no longer constitutionally and juridically en

shrined but rather a matter of social, political, cultural, and

economic privilege based on the legacy of the conquest .

In the first period, the period of de jure white suprema cy,

the Racial Contract was explicit, the chara cteristic

instantiations-the expropriation contra ct, the slave contra ct,

the colonial contra ct-making it clear that whites were the

privileged ra ce and the egalitarian social contra ct applied only

to them . ( Cognitively, then, this period had the great virtue of

social transparency: white suprema cy was openly proclaimed.

One didn't have to look for a subtext, because it was there in

the t ext itself. ) In the second period, on the other hand, the

Racial Contract has writ ten itself ou t of form al existen ce. T he

scope of the terms in the social contract has been formally

extended to apply to everyone, so that " persons " is no longer

coextensive with "whites . " What chara cterizes this period

(which is, of course, the present ) is tension between continuing

de facto white privilege and this formal extension of r ight s .

The Ra cial Contract continues to manifest itself, of course,

in unofficial local agreements of various kinds ( restrictive

covenants, employment discrimination contra cts, political de

cisions about r esource allocation, etc . ) . But even apart from

these, a crucial manifestation is simply th e failure to ask

cer tain ques tions, taking for granted as a status quo and base

line the existing color-coded configurations of wealth, povert y,

property, and opportunities, the pretence that formal, jur idical

equality is sufficient to remedy inequities created on a founda

tion of several hundred years of racial privilege, and that chal-

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lenging that foundation is a transgression of the terms of the

social contra ct . ( Though a ctually-in a sense-it is, insofar as

the Ra cial Contract i s the real meaning of the social contra ct . )

Glo bally, the Ra cial Contra ct effects a final paradoxical

norming and ra cing of space, a writing out of the polity of

certain spaces as conceptually and historically irrelevant to

European and Euro-world development, so that these ra ced

spaces are cat egor ized as disjoined from the path of civilization

( i . e . , the European proj ec t ) . Fredric Jameson writes: " Colonial

ism means that a significant structural segment of the eco

nomic sys tem as a whole is now located elsewhere, beyond

the metropolis, outside of the daily life and existential experi

ence of the home country . . . . Such spatial disj unction has as

its immedia t e consequence the inability to grasp the way the

system functions as a whole . " 72 By the social contra ct's deci

sion to remain in the space of the European nation-state, the

connection b etween the development of this spa ce's industry,

culture, civilization, and the material and cultural contribu

tions of Afro -Asia and the Americas is denied, so it seems

as if this space and its denizens are peculiarly rational and

industrious, differential ly endowed with qualities that have

enabled them to dominate the world. One then speaks of the

" European mira c l e " in a way that conceives this once marginal

region as sui generis, conceptually severing it from the web

of spatial connections that made its development possib l e .

This spa ce a ctually c o m e s to have t h e chara cter it d o e s because

of the pumping exploitative causality established between it

and those oth er conceptually invisible spa ces. But by re

maining within the boundaries of the European space of the

abstract contrac t , it is valorized as unique, inimitable, autono

mous . Other parts of the world then disappear from the white

contra ctarian history, subsumed under the general cat egory

of risible non-European spa ce, the " T hird World, " where for

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reasons of local folly and geographical b light the inspiring

model of the self-sufficient white social contract cannot b e

followed.

Na tionally, within these racial polities, the Racial Contract

manifests itself in white resistance to anything more than the

form al extension of the terms of the abstract social contract

( and often to that also ) . W hereas b efore it was denied that

nonwhites were equal persons, it is now pretended that non

whites are equal abstract persons who can be fully included in

the polity merely by extending the scope of the moral operator,

without any fundamental change in the arrangements that

have resulted from the previous system of explicit de jure

racial privilege . Sometimes the new forms taken by the Racial

Contra ct are transparently exploitative, for example, the " j im

crow" contra ct, whose claim of " separate but equal " was pat

ently ludicrous . But others-the job discrimination contra ct,

the restrictive covenant-are harder to prove. Employment

agencies use subterfuges of various kinds : " In 1 9 9 0, for exam

ple, two former employees of one of New York City's largest

employment agencies divulged that discrimination was rou

tinely practiced against black applicants, though concealed

behind a number of code w ords . Clients who did not want to

hire blacks would indicate their preference for applicants who

were 'All American . ' For its part the agency would s ignal that

an applicant was black by reversing the initials of the place

ment counselor. " 73 Similarly, a study of how "American apart

h e i d " is maintained points o u t that whereas in t h e p a s t realtors

would have simply refused to sell to bla cks, now blacks " are

met by a realtor with a smiling fa ce who, through a series of

ruses, lies, and deceptions, makes it hard for them to learn

about, inspect, rent, or purchase homes in white neighbor

hoods . . . . Because the discrimination is latent, however, it is

usually unobservable, even to the person experiencing i t . One

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never knows for sure . " 74 Nonwhites then find that ra ce is,

paradoxically, both everywhere and nowhere, structuring their

lives but not formally re cognized in political/moral theory.

But in a ra cially structured polity, the only people who can

find it psychologically possible to deny the cent rali t y of ra ce

are those who are ra c ially privileged, for whom ra ce is invisible

precisely because the world is structured around them , white

ness as the ground against which the figures of other races

those who, unlike us, are ra ced-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 mov e . As Toni Morrison points out, there are

contexts in which claiming racelessness is itself a racial a ct . 75

Cont emporary debat es between nonwhites and whi tes about

the centralit y or per ipherality of ra ce can thus b e seen as

attempts respectively to point out, and deny, the existence of

the Ra cial Contract that underpins the social contra c t . The

frustrating problem nonwhites have always had, and continue

to have, with mainstream political theory is not with abstra c

tion i tself ( a f t e r all, the " Ra cial Contra c t " is itself an ab strac

tion) but with an idealizing abstra ction that abstra cts a way

from the crucial realities of the racial polity.76 The shift to

the hypothetical, ideal contra ct encourages and fa cilitates this

abstraction, since the eminently n on i deal features of the real

world are not part of the apparatus. T here is then, in a sense,

no conceptual point-of-entry to start talking about the funda

mental way in which (as all nonwhites know) race st ructures

one ' s life and affects one ' s life chan c e s .

The b l a c k l a w professor P a t r i c i a Williams complains about

an ostensible neut rali t y that is really "racism in drag, " a sys

tem of " racism as status quo " which is / 1 deep, angry, eradicat ed

from view " but continues to make people / 1 avoid the phantom

as they did the substance, " / 1 defer[ r ing] to the unseen shape

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of things . " 77 The black philosophy professor Bill Lawson com

ments on the deficiencies of the conceptual apparatus of tradi

tional liberalis m , which has no room for the peculiar post

Emancipation status of bla cks, simultaneously citizens and

noncitizens . 78 The black philosopher of law Anita Allen re

marks on the irony of standard American philosophy of law

t exts, which describe a universe in which " all humans are

paradigm rightsholders " and see no need to point out that

the a ctual U . S . record is somewhat different . 79 The retreat

of mainstream normative moral and political theory into an

" ideal " theory that ignores race merely rescripts the Ra cial

Contract as the invisible writing b etween the lines. So John

Rawls, an American working in the late twentieth century,

writes a book on justice widely credited with reviving postwar

political philosophy in which not a single reference to Ameri

can slavery and its l ega cy can be found, and Robert Nozick

creates a theory of justice in holdings predicated on l egitimate

a cquisition and transfer without more than two or three sen

tences a c knowledging the utter divergence of U.S. history from

this ideal . 80

T h e silence of mainstream moral and political philosophy

on issues of race is a sign of the continuing power of the

Contract over its signatories, an illusory color blindness that

a ctually entrenches whit e privilege . A genuine transcendence

of its terms would require, as a preliminary, the a cknowl edg

ment of its past and present existence and the social, political,

economic, psychological, and moral implications it has had

both for its contractors and its victims. By treating the present

as a somehow neutral baseline, with · its given configuration

of wealth, property, social standing, and psychological willing

ness to sacrifice, the idealized social contract renders perma

nent the l ega cy of the Ra cial Contra ct . The ever-deepening

abyss between the First World and the Third World, where

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millions-largely nonwhit e-die of starvation each year and

many more hundreds of millions-also largely nonwhite

live in wretched pover t y, is seen as unfortuna t e ( calling, cer

tainly, for the occasional charitable contribution ) but unre

lat ed to the history of transcontinental and intracontinental

ra cial exploit ation .

Finally, the Ra cial Contra ct evolves not merely by alt ering

the relations between whites and nonwhites but by shif ting

the criteria for who counts as whi t e and nonwhite. ( So it is

not merely that relations between the respective populations

change but that the population boundaries themselves change

also . ) Thus-at least in my preferred account of the Racial

Contra ct ( again, other accounts are possible )-race is debio

logized, making explicit its political foundation. In a sense,

th e R a cial Con tra c t constr u c ts its sign a tories as m u ch as they

construct it. The overall trend is toward a limit ed expansion

of the privileged human population through the " whitening"

of the previously excluded group in question, though there

may be local reversals.

The Nazi pro j ect can then be seen in part as the att empt to

turn the clock back by rewriting a more exclusivist version

of the Ra cial Contract than was globally a c ceptable at the time.

( One writer suggests ironically that this was " the att empt of

the Germans to make themselves mast ers of the master

ra ce. " )8 1 And this backtra c king leads to a problem . My cat ego

rization (white/nonwhite, person/subperson ) has the virtues

of elegance and simpl icity and seems to me to map the es sential

features of the ra cial polity ac curat ely, to carve the social

reality at its ontological joint s . But since, as a pair of contradic

tories, this cat egor ization is j ointly exhaustive of the possibili

ties, it raises the ques tion of where to locate what could be

called " borderlin e " Europeans, white people with a question

mark-the Irish, Slavs, Mediterraneans, and above all, of

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course, Jews. In the colonial wars with Ireland, the English

routinely used derogatory imagery-" s avages, " " cannibals, "

" bestial appearance "-that it would now seem incredible to apply to whit e s . 82 The wave of mid-nineteenth-century Irish

immigration into t h e United States stimulated o n e w i t to

observe that " it would be a good thing if every Irishman were

to kill a nigger and then be hung for it, " and caricatures in

the newspapers often represented the Irish as simian . European

racism against nonwhit es has been my focus, but there were

also intra-European varieties of " ra cism "-Teutonism , Anglo

Saxonism , Nordicism-which are today of largely antiquarian

interest but which were sufficiently influential in the I 9 2 o s

t h a t U . S . immigration law favored " Nordics" over " Mediterra neans. " (There is some recognition of this distinction in popular

culture. Cheers fans will remember that the " Italian" waitress

Carla [ Rhea Perlman], curly haired and swarthy, sometimes

calls the blond, " alabaster-skinned" WASP Diane [ Shelley

Long] " W hit ey, " and in the 1 9 9 2 movie Zebrahead, two black

teenagers discuss the question of whether Italians are really

whit e . ) Finally, Jews, of course, have been the victims of Chri s tian Europe' s anti-Semitic discrimination and pogroms since

medieval times, this record of persecution reaching its horrific

climax under the Third Reich .

How, then, should these Europeans be categorized, given

the white/nonwhite dichotomization ? One solution would be

to reject it for a three- or four-way division . But I am reluctant

to do so, since I think the dyadic partition really does capture

the essential struc ture of the global racial polity. My solution

therefore is to retain but " fuzzify" the categories, introducing

internal distinctions within them . I have already pointed out

that some nonwhites ( "barbarians" as against " savages " )

ranked higher than others; for example, the Chinese and ( Asian )

Indians would have been placed above Africans and Australian

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Aborigines . So it would seem that one could also rank whites,

and in fact Winth rop Jordan notes that " if Europeans were

white, some were whiter than others. "83 All whites are equal,

then, but some are whit er, and so more equal, than others,

and all nonwhites are unequal, but some are blacker, and so

more unequal, than others . The fundamental conceptual cut,

the primary division, then remains that between whites and

nonwhites, and the fuzzy status of inferior whit es is a c commo

dated by the cat egory of " off-whit e " rather than nonwhite.

Commenting on the failure of the "valiant efforts of the English

to turn their ethnocentric feelings of superiority over the

'black' Irish into ra cism , " Richard Drinnon concludes that

" the Celts remained at most ' white niggers' in their eyes . " 84

And with the exception of Nazi Germany, to be discussed

lat er, this seems to me a j udgment that could b e generalized

for all these cases of borderline Europeans-that they were

not subpersons in the full t echnical sense and would all have

been ranked ontologically above genuine nonwhi tes. The ease

with which they have now been assimilated into postwar Eu

rope and a ccept ed as full whit es in the United States is some

evidence for the correctness of this way of drawing the

distinction.

Nevertheless, these problem cases are useful in

illust rating-against essentialists-the social rather than bio

logical basis of the Racial Contract . Phenotypical whiteness

and European origin were not always sufficient for full White

ness, a cceptance into the inner sanctum of the racial club,

and the rules had to be rewritten to permit inclusion. ( One

recent book, for example, bears the title How the Irish Became

White. )85 On the other hand, there are groups " clearly" not

white who have conjuncturally come to be seen as such. The

Japanese were classified as " honorary whites" for the purpose

of the Axis alliance, the restrictive, local Racial Contract ( as

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