"Charles Mills's treatment of the biases in western philoso phy in
The Racial Contract is a tour de force."
-Award Statement, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America
"To take the arguments that Mills makes in
The Racial
Contract seriously is to be prepared to rethink the concept of race and the structure of our political systems.T his is a very important book indeed, and should be a welcome addition to the ongoing discussions surrounding social con tract theory.... It would be an excellent critical comple
CHARLES W. MILLS
ment to any course that covers the history of social con tract theory or that deals with issues surrounding race and racism."-Teaching
Philosophy
The Racial Contract
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON
This book is dedicated to the blacks, reds, browns, and yellows who have resisted the Racial Contract and the white renegades and race traitors who have refused it.
Copyright © 1997 by Cornell University All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
CONTENTS
First published 1997 by Cornell University Press. First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1999
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS INTRODUCTION
1
Printed in the United States of America
1. OVERVIEW
9
Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. For further information, visit our website at www.comellpress.cornell.edu. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Mills, Charles W. (Charles Wade) The racial contract / Charles W. Mills. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-3454-9 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-IO: 0-8014-3454-8 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-8463-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) ISBN-IO: 0-8014-8463-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Race relations. 2. Racism. 3. Social contract. 4. White supremacy movements. 5. Political science-Philosophy. 1. Title. HTI523.M56 1997 305·8-DC21 Cloth printing IO 9 8 7 6 5 4 Paperback printing IO 9 8 7 6 5
ix
The Racial Contract is political, moral and epistemological 9 The Racial Contract is a historical actuality 19 The Racial Contract is an exploitation contract 3 I 2. DETAILS The Racial Contract norms (and races) space 41 The Racial Contract norms (and races) the individual 53 The Racial Contract underwrites the modern social contract 62 The Racial Contract has to be enforced through violence and ideological conditioning 81
41
3. "NATURALIZED" MERITS
91
The Racial Contract historically tracks the actual moral/ political consciousness of (most) white moral �gents 91 The Racial Contract has always been recognized by nonwhites as the real moral/political agreement to be challenged 109 The "Racial Contract" as a theory is explanatorily superior to the raceless social contract 120 NOTES
135
INDEX
163
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T
he history that inspires this short book goes back a long way, and I have been thinking about that history, and how to incorporate it into a philosophical frame
work, for a long time. Along the way debts, some of which
I have incurred many
I have certainly forgotten, and this list
of acknowledgments is only partial. First of all, of course, to my family: my parents, Gladstone and Winnifred Mills, who brought me up to give equal respect to people of all races; my brother, Raymond Mills, and my cousin, Ward Mills, for consciousness-raising; my uncle and aunt, Don and Sonia Mills, for their role in Jamaica's own 1970S struggle against the legacy of the global Racial Contract .
My wife, Elle Mills, has supported my work from the outset, sometimes having greater faith in me than
I had in myself.
Special friends, past and present, should also be cited: thanks to Bobs, for old times' sake; to Lois, a friend indeed, and a friend in deed; to Femi, fellow Third worlder, for numerous conversations since our days in grad school together about how philosophy in the academy could be made less academic. Horace Levy, my first philosophy teacher, and for many years the mobile one-person philosophy unit of the Mona campus of
ix
AC KNO WLEDGMENTS
AC KNO WLEDGMENTS the University of the W�st Indies, deserves particular mention,
critiqued by members of the Politically Correct Discussion
as do Frank Cunningham and Danny Goldstick of the Univer
Group of Chicago (PCDGC ); I have benefited from the criti
sity of Toronto, who welcomed me to the Philosophy Depart
cisms of Sandra Bartky, Holly Graff, David Ingram, and Olu
ment graduate program there more years ago than any of us
femi Taiwo. Jay Drydyk read the manuscript and gave valuable
cares to remember. John Slater's confidence in me and support
input and encouragement . I have also benefited from audience
of my candidacy, despite my almost nonexistent undergradu
feedback at the following presentations, from 1 9 94 to 1 9 96:
ate background in the subject, were crucial. To all of them, I
the Institute for the Humanities, UIC; the Society for the
am obligated.
Humanities, Cornell University; a colloquium at Queen's Uni
I originally started working on these issues on a 1989 junior
versity; a panel at the annual meeting of the Society for Phe
faculty summer research fellowship at the University of Okla
nomenology and Existential Philosophy; and a conference
homa. A first draft was written in my 1 9 93-1994 year as a
titled "The Academy and Race" at Villanova University.
Fellow of the Institute for the Humanities, University of Illi
I have consistently received special encouragement in the
nois at Chicago (UIC ), and the final draft was completed during
project from feminist theorists: my friend Sandra Bartky, Paola
my sabbatical in the spring term of 1 9 97. At both my previous
Lortie, Sandra Harding, Susan Babbitt, Susan Campbell, and
and my present institution, I have been fortunate to have had
Iris Marion Young. I have also learned a great deal over the
a series of Chairs who have been very supportive of applica
years from feminist political theory and obviously owe a debt
tions for grants, fellowships, travel, leave, and sabbaticals: John
to Carole Pateman in particular. My focus on race in this book
Biro and Kenneth Merrill at the University of Oklahoma; Rich
should not be taken to imply that I do not recognize the reality
ard Kraut, Dorothy Grover, and Bill Hart at UIe. Let me say
of gender as another system of domination.
how deeply grateful I am to them for that support. In addition,
Alison Shonkwiler, my editor at Cornell "University Press,
I have made endless requests for assistance from Charlotte
was highly enthusiastic about the manuscript from her very
Jackson and Valerie McQuay, the UIC Philosophy Depart
first reading of it, and it is in large measure her conviction
ment's invaluable administrative assistants, and they have
that persuaded me there was indeed a book here, and that I
been endlessly patient and helpful, greatly facilitating my
should write it. For her energy and drive, and the keen editorial
work.
eye that has undoubtedly made this a better book than it would
I thank Bernard Boxill, Dave Schweickart, and Robert Paul
otherwise have been, I express my deep appreciation.
Wolff for their letters of endorsement for my application for
Finally, as a stranger in a strange land, I have been welcomed
the UIC Humanities Institute Fellowship that enabled me to
here by the American Philosophical Association Committee
begin the original manuscript. It was Bob Wolff's suggestion,
on the Status of Blacks in Philosophy. I would like to single
seconded by Howard McGary Jr., that I go for " a short, punchy
out and thank Howard McGary Jr., Leonard Harris, Lucius
book" that would be accessible to an audience of nonphiloso
Outlaw Jr., Bill Lawson, Bernard Boxill, and Laurence Thomas,
phers. Hope this is punchy enough for you, guys.
for making me feel at home. As a beneficiary of affirmative
An earlier and shorter version of this book was read and
x
action, I would not be in the American academy today were
xi
AC K NO WLED GMENTS it not for the struggles of black Americans. This book is in part a tribute to, and a recognition of, those struggles, and, more generally, of the international black radical tradition of political resistance that they exemplify. c.
W.
M.
The Racial Contract
xii
INTRODUCTION
When white people say "Justice," they mean "Just us." -black American folk aphorism
W
hite supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory, or
even advanced, texts in political theory. A standard under graduate philosophy course will start off with plato and Aris totle, perhaps say something about Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli, move on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Marx, and then wind up with Rawls and Nozick. It will introduce you to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism, representative government, socialism, welfare capitalism, and libertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political thought and runs the ostensible
gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years. And this omission is not accidental. Rather, it reflects the fact that standard textbooks and courses have for the most part been written and designed by whites, who take their racial privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political, as a form of domination. Ironi cally, the most important political system of recent global history-the system of domination by which white people
1
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
have historically ruled over and, in certain important ways, continue to rule over nonwhite people-is not seen as a politi
INTRODUCTION
debates over multiculturalism, canon reform, and ethnic di
would correspond to feminist theorists' articulation of the centrality of gender, patriarchy, and sexism to traditional moral and political theory. What is needed, in other words, is a recognition that racism (or, as I will argue, global white supremacy) is itself a political system, a particular power structure of formal or informal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties. The
versity racking the academy; both demographically and con ceptually, it is one of the "whitest" of the humanities. Blacks,
notion of the Racial Contract is, I suggest, one possible way of making this connection with mainstream theory, since it
for example, constitute only about 1 percent of philosophers in North American universities-a hundred or so people out of more than ten thousand-and there are even fewer Latino,
uses the vocabulary and apparatus already developed for con tractarianism to map this unacknowledged system. Contract talk is, after all, the political lingua franca of our times. , We all understand the idea of a "contract/ an agreement between two or more people to do something. The "social contract" just extends this idea. If we think of human beings , as starting off in a "state of nature/ it suggests that they then
cal system at all. It is just taken for granted; it is the background against which other systems, which we are to see as politicat are highlighted. This book is an attempt to redirect your vision, to make you see what, in a sense, has been there all along. Philosophy has remained remarkably untouched by the
Asian American, and Native American philosophers.! Surely this underrepresentation itself stands in need of an explana tion, and in my opinion it can be traced in part to a conceptual array and a standard repertoire of concerns whose abstractness typically elides, rather than genuinely includes, the experience of racial minorities. Since (white) women have the demo graphic advantage of numbers, there are of course far more female philosophers in the profession than nonwhite philoso phers (though still not proportionate to women's percentage of the population), and they have made far greater progress in developing alternative conceptualizations. Those African American philosophers who do work in moral and political theory tend either to produce general work indistinguishable from that of their white peers or to focus on local issues (af firmative action, the black "underclass") or historical figures (W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke) in a way that does not aggres sively engage the broader debate. What is needed is a global theoretical framework for situat ing discussions of race and white racism, and thereby challeng ing the assumptions of white political philosophy, which 2
decide to establish civil society and a government. W hat we have, then, is a theory that founds government on the popular consent of individuals taken as equals.2 But the peculiar contract to which I am referring, though based on the social contract tradition that has been central to Western political theory, is not a contract between everybody ("we the people"L but between just the people who count, the people who really are people ("we the white people"). So it is a Racial Contract. The social contract, whether in its original or in its contem porary version, constitutes a powerful set of lenses for looking at society and the government. But in its obfuscation of the ugly realities of group power and domination, it is, if unsupple mented, a profoundly misleading account of the way the mod ern world actually is and came to be. The "Racial Contract" as a theory-I use quotation marks to indicate when I am 3
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
talking about the theory of the Racial Contract, as against the Racial Contract itself-will explain that the Racial Contract is real and that apparent racist violations of the terms of the social contract in fact uphold the terms of the Racial Contract. The "Racial Contract," then, is intended as a conceptual bridge between two areas now largely segregated from each other: on the one hand, the world of mainstream (i.e., white) ethics and political philosophy, preoccupied with discussions of justice and rights in the abstract, on the other hand, the world of Native American, African American, and Third and Fourth World3 political thought, historically focused on issues of conquest, imperialism, colonialism, white settlement, land rights, race and racism, slavery, jim crow, reparations, apart
INTRODUCTION
tractarianism and focuses instead on the justification of the basic structure of society.5 From its 1650-1800 heyday as a grand quasi-anthropological account of the origins and devel opment of society and the state, the contract has now become just a normative tool, a conceptual device to elicit our intu itions about justice. But my usage is different. The "Racial Contract" I employ is in a sense more in keeping with the spirit of the classic contractarians-Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.6 I use it not merely normatively, to generate judgments about social justice and injustice, but descriptively, to explain the actual genesis of the society and the state, the way society is struc
heid, cultural authenticity, national identity, indigenismo, Af rocentrism, etc. These issues hardly appear in mainstream
tured, the way the government functions, and people's moral psychology.? The most famous case in which the contract is used to explain a manifestly nonideal society, what would be
political philosophy,4 but they have been central to the political struggles of the majority of the world's population. Their ab
termed in current philosophical jargon a "naturalized" ac count, is Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality ( 1755). Rousseau
sence from what is considered serious philosophy is a reflec tion not of their lack of seriousness but of the color of the
argues that technological development in the state of nature brings into existence a nascent society of growing divisions in wealth between rich and poor, which are then consolidated and made permanent by a deceitful "social contract."B W hereas the ideal contract explains how a just society would be formed, ruled by a moral government, and regulated by a defensible moral code, this nonideal/naturalized contract explains how.an unjust, exploitative society, ruled by an op pressive government and regulated by an immoral code, comes into existence. If the ideal contract'is to be endorsed and emu lated, this nonideal/naturalized contract is to be demystified and condemned. So the point of analyzing the nonideal con tract is not to ratify it but to use it to explain and expose the inequities of the actual nonideal polity and to help us to see through the theories and moral justifications offered in defense of them. It gives us a kind of X-ray vision into the real internal
vast majority of Western academic philosophers (and perhaps their lack of seriousness). The great virtue of traditional social contract theory was that it provided seemingly straightforward answers both to factual questions about the origins and workings of society and government and to normative questions about the justifi cation of socioeconomic structures and political institutions. Moreover, the "contract" was very versatile, depending on how different theorists viewed the state of nature, human motivation, the rights and liberties people gave up or retained, the particular details of the agreement, and the resulting char acter of the government. In the modern Rawlsian version of the contract, this flexibility continues to be illustrated, since Rawls dispenses with the historical claims of classic con4
5
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
logic of the sociopolitical system. Thus it does normative work for us not through its own values, which are detestable, but by enabling us to understand the polity's actual history and how these values and concepts have functioned to rationalize oppression, so as to reform them. Carole Pateman's provocative feminist work of a decade ago,
The Sexual Contract, is a good example of this approach (and the inspiration for my own book, though my use is somewhat different), which demonstrates how much descriptive/ex planatory life there still is in the contract.9 Pateman uses it naturalistically, as a way of modeling the internal dynamic of the nonideal male-dominated societies that actually exist today. So this is, as indicated, a reversion to the original "an thropological" approach in which the contract is intended to be historically explanatory. But the twist is, of course, that her purpose is now subversive: to excavate the hidden, unjust male covenant upon which the ostensibly gender-neutral so cial contract actually rests. By looking at Western society and its prevailing political and moral ideologies as if they were based on an unacknowledged "Sexual Contract," Pateman offers a "conjectural history" that reveals and exposes the normative logic that makes sense of the inconsistencies, cir cumlocutions, and evasions of the classic contract theorists and, correspondingly, the world of patriarchal domination their work has helped to rationalize. My aim here is to adopt a nonideal contract as a rhetorical trope and theoretical method for understanding the inner logic of racial domination and how it structures the polities of the West and elsewhere. The ideal "social contract" has been a central concept of Western political theory for understanding and evaluating the social world. And concepts are crucial to cognition: cognitive scientists point out that they help us to categorize, learn, remember, infer, explain, problem-solve, 6
INTRODUCTION
generalize, analogize.lO Correspondingly, the lack of appro priate concepts can hinder learning, interfere with memory, block inferences, obstruct explanation, and perpetuate prob lems. I am suggesting, then, that as a central concept the notion of a Racial Contract might be more revealing of the real character of the world we are living in, and the corresponding historical deficiencies of its normative theories and practices, than the raceless notions currently dominant in political the ory.ll Both at the primary level of an alternative conceptualiza tion of the facts and at the secondary (reflexive) level of a
critical analysis of t�e orthodox theories themselves, the "Ra cial Contract" enables us to engage with mainstream Western political theory to bring in race. Insofar as contractarianism is thought of as a useful way to do political philosophy, to
theorize about how the polity was created and what values should guide our prescriptions for making it more just, it is obviously crucial to understand what the original and continu ing "contract" actually was and is, so that we can correct for it in constructing the ideal "contract." The "Racial Contract" should therefore be enthusiastically welcomed by white con tract theorists as well. So this book can be thought of as resting on three simple claims: the existential claim-white supremacy, both local and global, exists and has existed for many years; the concep tual claim-white supremacy should be thought of as itself a political system; the methodological claim-as a political system, white supremacy can illuminatingly be theorized as based on a "contract" between whites, a Racial Contract.. Here, then, are ten theses on the Racial Contract, divided into three chapters.
7
OVERVIEW
I
w:ll s�art with.m overview oJ the Racial Contract, high· lighting its differences from, as well as its similarities to, the classlcal and contempor�ry sociill contract. The
Racial Contract i.s political, moral, and epistemological; the Racial Contract is real; and economically, in determining who gets what, the Racial Contract is an exploitation contraCt. , ."
.
The RacIal Contract is political, moral, and eplstemologlcal.
The "social comraet" is actually several contracts
in
one.
Contemporary contraCtarians usually distinguish, to begin with, between the political contract and
the 'moral contract, both.
before going on to make [subsidiary] distinctiens within
I contend, however, that the orthodox social contract also tacitly presupposes an "epistemological" COntraCt, and that for the Racial Contract it is crucial to make this expliclt" The political contract: is an a.COOUnt of the origins of govern� ment and our �litical obligations to it. The subsidiary distinc� tion sometimes made in the politiCAl contrAct 1s: between. the
contract to establish society jt:hcrcby taking "natural;" pteso-
9
C,/£R,/IEW
\
cja] in dividuals OUt of the state oi nature and reconstfueting
way they should he-the normative-sinee indeed one of its
and constituting them as members of a collective body! and the
complaints about white politieal philosophy Is precisely its
contraCt tocstzhlish the state (thereby transferringontrightor
V dele t g relationship or trust the rightS and powers we � have In the s;:ate of nature to a sovereign govetrung entity).l ga
m
lU t1
adhere. A preliminary characterization would tun something like this:
by whieh the citi"
The Raeial ContraCt i s that set of formal or informal agree ments Ot meta-agreements (highet-level contracts
aboilt con
cussedj of the relationship betwee n the mand contraet ane.
tracts) which set the limits of the contracts' validity) between
sr :ue· of· na.ture morality. In modern versions of the conu·act,
the members of one subset of humans, henee£onh designAted
mo st notably Rawls's of course, the political contract largely
by (shifting) "racial" [phenotypicalfgenealogieal/cultunill cri
vanishes, modern anthropology having long superseded the
teria el, C1., C3 ". as "whitc/ and coextensive (mAking
nai ve social origin histories of the ClAssic contracta:ians . The
due aHowance for gender differentiationl with the class of
focus is then almost excl.nsively on the mor",1 contract, This
full persons, to categorize the remaining subset of hum:tlls
is not concei.ved of as an actual historie:al event that took place
as "nonwhite" and of a different arul ,inferior mOfOli st,;ttus,
on leaving the state of nature. Rather, the s late of nature
subpersons, so that they have a subordinate�ciV:il standing in
�
survives only in the attenuated form of whnt Rawls culls the
the white or white-ruled politics the whit
"original position," and the "contract" is apun:ly hypothetical
inhabit or establish or in transactions �s aliens with these
exercise (a thought experiment) in establishing what a just
polities, and the moral and juridical rules normitlly'r6guhiting
i "b"sic structure"
I
prescrihing norms for cogniti.on to which its signatories must
the moral code estabUshed for the SOcletYI
distinction here is between !;wo interpretations (to be cis.
,
$<;,.epistemological,
The mo ra: l contract, on the other hand, 1$ rhe foundatlOn of
zens arc supposed to regulate their behavior. The subsidiary
1
orherworldiness, its ignoring of bask political realities,) But the Racial Comract, as we will see,.1s'
would be, with a schedule of rights, duties,
and liber ties that shapes citizens' moral psychology/ concep tions of the right, notions of self-respect, ete.l
Now the Racial Contraet-and the "Racial Contract" as a
either
the behavior of whites in their dealings with one'another either do not apply at all In dealings with non,whiteS .or apply
li.lUI�
in a qoalified form {depending in 'part'on chilngmg historical cireumstanecs and what partieu lar variety of nonwhite is in
theory, that is, the distanced, eri tical examinationoi the Racial
volved:, but
Coutraet�follows the classieal model in being both soeiopo·
is always the differential privileging of tbe whites as II group
litical and moraL It explains how soeiety was ereated or cru
wirh respect to the nonwbites as a group, the expl oitation
cially transfo[med, how rhe individuals in that sodety were
of their hodies, land, and resources/ and the denial of equal
in any ease the general purpose of the Contract
reconstituted, how the state was eseabll.<;hed, a.nd how a par
socioeconomie opportunities to theuL All whites are
ticular mora l code and a cerrain moral psychology were
ciaries of the Contract, though some whites are oot signatories
brought inro existenee, lAs 1 have emphasized, the flRacinl
to it.;
benefi
COntract'" seeks to account for the way things are and how
It wm be obvious, therefore, tbat the Racial Contra ct lS not
tbcy came to be that Way-the descriptive-as well as the
a contract to which the nonwhite subset of humans can be a
10
11
>
;H5 RACIAL Cm,rpJlCT
phosis is the preliminary conceptual partitioning and corres-
gcnuineiy consenting pany (thougll/ dcpcndillg again on the
ponding transformation of huma.n populations into " wrote "
circumstances, it rn-aysometjmes be politic to pretend that this
and "nonwhitel' men, The role played by the "state of nature"
is the casel. Rather, it, is a COntract between those categorized as
then becomes tadicaUy different.ln the white settler state, its
;vhite ovet the nonwhit es, who are thus the objects�-r;ltlier than the subjects o f the agreement,
I
The logic of the classic social can trAct, pohtical, mora!, and
epistemoLogical, then undergoes a corresponding tefraetion,
�
with shifts, accordingly, in the key terms and prinCiples,
Politically, the commct to estaWish society
mcnt, thereby transforming abstr
denjzens of the state 01 nature into sOc1
politically oblig ated to il neutral state, becomes the founding of
role is not ptimarily to dematcate the (temporarily) prepoliti-
cal state of "all" men (wh o are really white·menJ, but rather the permanently pIepolitic.aI state or, perhaps better, nOl1Political
state (insofar as "pre-" suggests eventual internal movement tow�dl of nonwhite men. The establishmen t of society thus
i mpl ies the denial that
,
ex:(st�d; the creation
of society requires the intervention of whit� , me n, who are
thereby positioned as already sociopoliti9al�ei;ngs., White men
a racial polity; whether white settler s t
who are [deflnitionally) already part of sQciety encounter non
sometimes called "sojourner colonies," the establishment of
nature characterized in termsofwildern'ess',:ju'ngLe, waste l and .
populations already are or can be made sparse: or what are
whites who are not, who are "s
These the white men bring partially jnto society as, sub orru-
wh ite presence and colonial rule over existing societies
:which ate somewhat more po pul ous,
or
nate citizens o r exclude o n reser V
whose jnh
are mote resistant to being made sparseJ.1n addition, the coto·
of or exterminate. In the colonia! case, admittedly preeristiJ.:tg
new polities, so that its own citizens are altered.
s tagn ant, corrupt) a.re taken over and run lor·the " benefit" or
/
but :for one re
nizing mother country is
the nonwhite nath'es, who are deemed ehildlike, �pable of
from "natuxal" nt
self·rule and handling their own3.£fairs, arul tpus
of the state of nature to the citizenoTthe cr;ated sOciety. Thi$
appj::�pila.telY
wards of the state. Here the natives are u:�a:UY·.61iar�'�t�r11id·'
as "barbarians" rather than "savages," :'their ''State "�f nature
change can be mote or less extreme, depending on tlle theorist
,
being somewhat ruther away {though not, of cO�Yse" as remote
involved. For Rousseau it is a dramatic transformation, by
which
and lost in the past-if it ever existed hi tlIe' first place
citizens bound by jus tice and scl1-prescribed laws. For Hobhe.�
as the Europeans' state of nature l. But in tim�,s of crisis the
look out primarily for themselves learn to constrain their self
tends to shrink or collapse, for this techrricaldistinction w ithin
i t is a somewhat more laid-b,lck afi
conceptual distanee between the two, barbarian and savage,
intetcst for their own good,l But in.aIl cases th e origmal "state
the nonwhite population is vastly less jmpoFtant tha.n the
of no-lure" supposedly indicates the condition of all men, and
central distinction between wlutes and nonwhites.
the social metamorphosis affects them nU in the S
In both cases, tben, though il� different ways, the Racial
In the Racial Contract, by contrast, the crucial metam or·
Contract estahlishes a racial polity, a racial state, and a racial
l'
"
'
. ,.' ;. ,:
;;
13
OVERVIEW
"lfE RAClhL COMRACT
�
juridical system, where the Status of whites and nouwhites
interests without con.fliet with those other people who are
is clearly demareated , whether by law or cusw;n. And the
doing d.e slime thing.5
purpose of this state, by contrast with the neutral strite of
The Racial Contract can ttcco mmodate both version s , but
c1:Jsslc contt.:lctarianism, is, inter alia, specifIcally ro mamtain
as it is the former version (the contract as described in Locke
and reproduce this racial o rder, seeuring the privileges an d .
and Kant) rather than the latter version ,the contraet as de
advantages of the full white citizens And maintaining the sub
scribed in Hobbesl which repre sents the mainstream of t he
ordination of nonwhites. Correspondingly, thc "consent" ex
contract tradition, t fceus on that on e.6 Here, the good polity
pected of the white eitizens is in part coneep tualized as a
is taken to rest on a precx:lsting moral fouu datio n, Obviously,
consem, whether ",,-plieit or t ac it, to thc racial order, to white
this is 11 far more attraetive conception of a political system
supremacy, whateould be co.lled Whitenc.�s. To the extent rho:t
than Hohbes1s view. The ideal o f an obje eti� l
those phemny picaUy/genealogieally/culturaHy categorized as
which we should aspire in out political activism goes back in
white fail (0 li"c up to (he CIVic and political responsibilities of Whiteness, they
From the inception, th en, race is in no way an "afterthought," a "dev iatio n " from ostensibly raceless Western ideals, but rather a central sh apin g constitucnt of those ideals. In the social ContraCt naciition, there are two main possible
- relations
between the moral eontraet and the po l itical con
trllct. On the firs t view, the motal contract represents preex istmg o b jee ti vist
mOlality Itheological or secul(1Ij and thus
constrains the terms of the political contra<:;t. This is the view fo un d in Locke and Kant_ In oLl;cr words, there is an Qbjeetive moral code in thc state of nature itself, even if the.tc arc n o
f
�
policemen and judges to en orce it. So any society, govern
(
code to be superior to another or for ind icti ng il society's
ment, and legal system that arc estabHshed should be based on th:n moral code. On the second view, the political c on tr a et
cremes morality as a conventionalist set of rules. So there is no independent objective moral criterion for judging one moral
� y just polis to
the Western tradition all the Way to Plato. In the medieval Christian woddview which continued to influence eon
tr o:c rarhmism well into thc modern period, there is a "natural law" immanent in the str ucture of the universe which is sup
posed to direet us moraIly in striving for thjs ideal.' rFor the later, secular versions of contr3-ctllriatrisn1, the idea would simply be that people have rights and d uties even ill the state ot nature beeause of their nature as human bei n gs.) So it is
wrong to s teal, rape, kin in the state of nature even if there arc no IHlman laws written down saying it is wrong. These
moml pr inciples must constrain the human laws that are made and the eivH rights that are assigned once the polity is estab lished. In part, then, the political COntract simply' codifies a morality that already exists, writing it down and filliilg in the details, so we don't have to rely on a divinely'irnplanted moral
sense, or conscience, whose perceptions may on occasion be distorted by self-interest. W hat is right and wrong, just and unjust, in socicty will largely be determined by whllt is right and wrong, just and unjust, in the state of natmc.
established morality as uniust. On this conception, whieh is
The character 01 this ob jeetive moral foundation is therefore
famously attributed to Hobbes, morality is JUSt a set of rules
obviously cruciaL For the mainstream of the eo ntm ctllrian
for expediting the rational pursuit and coordination of our own
tradition, it is the
14
freedom and equality of all men in the 15
CVEflV;EW
Etaw of nature" As Locke writes in the Second
Treatise,
understand Political Power right, and derive it from its Origi
subpersons-niggers, mjuns, ehinks, wogs, greasers, blaeruel
nal, we must consider what State all Men arc naturally ius and
�OWSt kaIRrs, coohes, abos, dinks, googoos, gooks-are biologi.
that is, a Statc of petfect Freedom to order their Actions.... A
cally destined never to penetrate the normative rights ceiling
also of Equality. wherein ali the Power and ,unsdicrion
estabHshed lor them below white persous. Henceforth, then,
StaW
is reciprocal, no one having more than another."� For Kant,
whether openly admitted ot not, it is taken for &'!anted that
similarly, it isourequal moral personhood,� ContractarLanisUl
the grand ethical theories propounded in the development of
is {supposedly) oommitted
to moral egalitarianism,
Western moral and political thought are of restricted scope,
the moral
equality ol all men, the notion that the imerests of all men
explicitly or imphdtly intended by their proponei\ts to b e
matter equally and all men must have equal rights, Thus,
restricted to persons, whites. The terms of the Ratial Contraet
contractarianism is also committed to a prineipled and loumia t:onal opposition to the traditionalist hierarchical ideology of
"
set the parameters for white morality as a whole,
$0
that
competing Lockean and Kantian contrnctarian theones of
the old feudal order, the ideology of inhereut ascribed s:mU$
natural rights and duties, or later aJ1tieontractarian theories
and natural subordination, It is this language of equalIty which
such as nineteenth-eentury utilitarianism, are all limited by
echoes in the American and French Revolutions, thc Ded:ml'
its stipulations.
tion of Independence, and the Declatation of the Rights of
Finally, the Racial Contract requires its own peculiar moral
Man. Alld il is dus moral egalitarianism that must be rctniued
and empirical epistemology, its norms and procedures for de·
in the allocation of rights aua liberdes in civil society, When
termining what COunts as moral and factual knowledge of the
in a modern Western society people insist on their rights atl;:]
wodd.
freedoms and �xpress their outrage at not beIng treated equally,
usual to speak of there being an "epistcmologiea1" cammet,
it is to these classie ideas that, whethe:t· they know it or not,
hut there is an epistemology assoeiated with contractarianism J
they are appeDling.
in the form of naturaf law. This provides us with a moral
In
the standard accounts of contractarianisrn it is not
But as we wm sec in greater detail later on, the color-coded
compass, whethet in the traditional version of Locke-the
morality ot the Racial ContrAct restricts the possession of this
light of re.1son implanted in us by God 50- we ean discern
natural freedom and equality to wmte men. By virtue of their
objective right and wrong-ar in the revisionist version of
complete nonrecognition, or at best inadequate, myopic reoognition, Ot the duties of natural law, nonwhire..<1 arc approprhnely
Hobbes---the ability to assess the objectively optimal pruden tial eourseofaetion ,and whatlt requires of us forsell-interested
relegated to a lower rung on the moraUadder (the Great ChHin
cooperation with others. So through our natural rnculties we
of 13dng).1° They arc designDted as born unfree and unequal.
come
l .
tively appropriately known as "subjeet races" And these
"To
A partitioned social ontology is therefore created,
a
universe
to
kn ow reality in both its factual and valuational as
pects, the way things objeetively are and what is objectively -
Umer-
good or bad about them, I suggest wc can think or this as an
mtmscbun, who may variously be black, red, brown, ydlow
idealized consenSus about cognitive norms and, in this respect,
slaves, aborigines, colonial po pulations
an agreement or "eontract" oisorts. There is an understanding
divided between persons and racial subpersons,
but who are collec-
-
16
17
OVERVIEW
frE RACIAL CO�Tf!ACT
about what counts as a correct, objective illtcrpl'etat�on Of the world, and for agreeing to this view, one is {"contractUally"; granced full eognitive standingjn the polity, the oHidal epistc� mic community.!l Bue/or the Racial Contraet things nre necessanly more com plieated. The requirements of "objective" cognition, foctual and mOlo}. m a raeial poll ty are in a sense more demonding in that officially sanctioned reality is divergent from actual reality. So here, it could be said, one has an agreement to misinterpret the world. One has to learn to see the world wrongly, but with the assurance that this set or mistaken perceptions will be validated by white epistcmic authority, whether religious or secular, Thus in effect. on matters related to race, the Racial Con tract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epIstemology, an epis t em olo gy ofignorance, a particular pattern of localized
population, countries that never were, inhabited by people who never were-CaHbans and Tontos, Man Fridays and Sambas-hut who attain a virtual reality through thelr exis tence in travelers' tales, folk myth, popular and highbrow fic tion, colomal reports, schol arly theory, Hollywood cinema, living in the white imagination and determinedly imposed on their
and global cognitive dys/unctlOns (which are psychologically and SOCially /ullctional), producing tlw ironic outcome that
whites Will iJ1general be unable to understand the world they
Tho Racial Conlract Is a historical actuality.
themselves hove made, Part of what it menns to be constructed as "white" [the metamorphosis of the sociopolitical contract),
Thc social contract in its modern version 1)(IS iong since
part of what it requires to achieve Whiteness, success tully
, given up any pretensions to be able to explain the historical
to beeome a white person (one imagines a ceremony with
origins of sodety and the state. Whereas thc classic con
certificates attending the successful rite of passage: "Con
tractarians were engaged in a project hoth descriptive and
gratulations, you're now an official white person!"), is a cogni
prescriptive, the modern Rawls·insplrcd eontract is purely
tive model that precludes self-transparency and genuine
prescriptive thought experiment, And even Patcrnan's Sexual
a
understanding of soeial realities. To a significant extent, then,
Contnlet, though its focus is the rcal rother than the ideal! is
white signatories will live in an invented delusional world,
not meant as a literal account of what men in 4004 B.C. decided
a r acial £antasyhmd, a "eonsensu
to do on the plains of: Mesopotamia, Whatever aeeounts for
William Gibson's famous characterization of cybersp.lce,
what Frederick Engels onee ealled "the world historical de/eat
though this particular hallucination IS located in real space.\!
0/ the female sex"a-whether the d cve10pm en t of an economic
There will be white mythologies, invented Orients, invented
surplus, as he theorized, Or the male dlsoovery of the capadty
Airicas, invented Americas, with a correspondingly fabricated
to
18
rape and the female disadvantage of being the childbearing
19
O\'£lW:r.w
THE P}'CIAL CO\TP.ACT
half of the species, as radical feminists have argued-it is
of fomtalized legal structutes of diffetential treatment; and
dearly lost in antiquity.
thc routinizatlon of informal illegal or quasi-legal practices
i
�
By contraSt, ironically, the Racial Contr
effectively sanctioned by the complicity of silence and govern
know explored as sueh, has thc best claim to be1ns;m actual
ment fai lure to intervene and punish perpetra:tors�which col
historical fact. Far from being lost in the mists of the a.ges, it
lectively can be seen, not just metaphoricaUy but close to
is clearly historically locatable i n the series of events marking
literally, as its conceptual, juridical, and normative equivalent_
the creation of the modern world by European colonialism
Anthony Pagden suuests that a diVision of the European
and the voyages of "discovery" now increasingly and more
empires in:o their main temporal periods should recognize
approptiately called expeditions of conquest. The Columbian
"two distinct, but interdependent histories'l: the colonization
quinccntellary a few years ago, with its accompanying debates,
of the Americas, 1492 to the 1830S, and the oi;cupatiol� of
polemics, controversies, counterdemonstrations, and out·
Asia, Africa, and thc Pacific, 1730$ to the period after World
pourings of revisionist literature, confronted many whites
War fl. If In the first period, it was, to hcgin with, the nature
with the uncomfortable fact, hardly discussed in mainstream
and mor
moral and political theory, that we live in a world whjcll has
to be determined, and then that of the imported African slaves
been foundationally shaped for thc past five hundred years
whose labor was tequircd to build thls "New World." In the
by rhe realities of European domination and the gradual COll·
secoud period, eulnunating in for mal Eutopean eoloo1al rule
solidation of global white SUptcma� Thus not only is the
over most of :he world by thc early twentieth CCntury, it was
Racial Contract "real," but-whereas the social com tact is
the char-deter of colonial peoples that becam.e cruciaL But in
charaeteristically taken to be estahlishmg the legjtlmacy of
an cases "nee" is the common conceptual denominator that
the nation-stllre, and codifying motality and law within jts
t
gradually came to signify the respective global statuses of
boundaries,·--the Racial Contract is global, involving a tec,
superiority and inferiority, privilege and subordination. There
tonic shift of the ethicojurldieal basis of the plal!et as a whote,
is an opposition of us against them with multiple overlapping
be1:l\feen "mel!" and "natives, "IS
ilized versus wild,lsavage/barbarians lculture!, Cluishaus ver
the division oj the world, as jeau-Paul Sattre put it long ago,
Europeans thereby emerge as "the lords of humau kind," the "lords of all the world.." with the increasing power to
determine the standing of the non.Europeans who a'ce th eir
subjects.l� Although no single act literally corrcsponds to the drawing up and signiug of a contract, there is a series of acts- papal bulls and other theolOgical pronouucementSi European discussions about colonialism, "discovery, " and intetnational law; pacts, treaties, and legal decisions; academic and popular debates about the humanity of nonwhites; the establishment ,.
dimensions: EurolJeans versus non-Europeans tgeography), civ
sus heathens :religionl. But they all eventually coalesced Inw the basic opposition of white versus nonwhite. A Lumbee Indian legal scholar, Robert WIlliams, has traced the c...olution of the Western Jegal ptL'>ition on the tights of native peoples from its medieval antecedents to the beginnings of the m.odcrn pe riod, showiug how it is consiStently based
on the assumption of "the rightness and neeessity of subjugat iog and assimilating other
peoples
to Ithe Europeanl
woridview.
21
OVERVIEW
TP.5 MOt.l CONTRACT logical one, with nonnlltivc inelusion and exclusion manifest .
incomprehcnsib,e to ., non�Spanish �'PCaker, reading tllp
iug itself as che demarcation between Christians and hearhens.
docu:nent pIOvided sufficient justification for dispossession
The pope's powers over the SOCietas Christiana, the universal
of land and immediate ensl:wement of the indigenous pen_
Christian commonwealth, were seen as "extending not only
pie. [Bartolome de] Las Casas's famous comment on the
over aU Christians withIn the universal
requerJmiento
commonwealth, hut
was tbar one does not know "v.rhethe.r to
over untegenetatcd hearhens and infidels as well,It and dus
I'Hlgh or cry at rhe absurdity of jr." , . , Wlulc appearing to
policy would subsequently underwrite not merely the Cru·
respect "rights" the requerimiento, in faet, takes them
sades "gainst Islam but the later voyages to rhe Ameneas. Sometimes papal pronouncements did grant rights and ratio
I
:'
l'
nality to nonbelievers. As a resuit of dealing with the Mongols
In effect, then, the Catholic Church's deelara�ions cither for
in the thirteenth eentury, for example) Pope Innocent IV "con
mally legitimated conquest 'or could be easily circumvented
ceded that infidels and hC
where a weak prim., facie moral barrier was erected.
right to eleet their own secular leaders,
JJ
and Pope Paul ill's
The growth of the Enlightenment and the rise of secnlarism
itS37) stated that Native Amer:'cans
did not cballenge this stri1tegic dichotomization (Christian/
were rational beings, not to be rreared as "dumb brutes created
infidel) so much as translate it into othcr forms. Philip C\ll'tin
[or our serviee" bur "as truly men . . . capable of understanding
refers to the characteristic "exceptionalism in Euxopcan
famous Sublimis Deus
()
l
the Co.tholie faith.11l� But as Williams pOints oue, the latter
thought flbout the non-West," "a conception of the wodd
qU
largely based on self-identifieation-and identification of 'the other people."12Z Similarly, Pierre van den Berghc describes the
of the Christi
"Enlightenment diehotomization'" of the normative theories
.ti"l irrationality. .... Even more remarkably, in rhe case of Native Ametienns
of the period.2.1 "Race" gradually bccat:1e the foroal marker of
this
disadvamagc, after illl, was that it could always be overcome through conversion). Thus a eategory crysrallized',over time
Reql1ctimiento, a long statCInent read aloud to them in,
of
course, a language they did not undetst<md, failing which
mi'
chis differentiated status, replacing the religious divide (whose
humanoid human i"sa:vages, tI " barbarians") and who are
in European rhought to represent entities who arc
sent a just war eould lawfully be waged ag:
but not fully
author Wtltes:
identified as such by being members of,the general set of nonwhire races. Influenced by the ancient Roman distinction
The requeri:miel1!o is the ptorotypiC
between the civllized within and the barbarians outside the
dfying conquest. InformingtheIndians that rheir ]�nds ','lere
empire, the distinction between full and question�mark hu
entrusted by Christ to the pope and rhenee to the kings of
mans, Europeans set up a two-tiered moral code with onc set
Spo.in, the document offers freedom Iron sla",ety
fot rhose
Indians who accept Spanish rule. Even though it wasentirely
22
of rules for whires and another for nonwhltes.14 Co:respondingly, various moral and legal doctrines were
23
OVEHViE\,/
THE flAC1AL CONTRACT
)
than u centuty before b een regarded as heings.
which eall be seen as specific manifcst
bud fOf
conrraet.
lOn was llt thllt time fixed
propounded
the white race, either in sodal or polidcal relations, and far inferjor, that they had no rights
was honnd to respect; find that the negro might justly and
ponion of
occupied by them, not in vittue of uny conquest of, or ces sion by, the Indian natives, bUt as
right
D-equired by discovery_ . . " The t itle of the Il)dians was nol tre:ltcd as il right of propcr ty and dominion, but tiS a mere right 01 oceupancy. As infidels, heathens, ,\lnd saVD-gcs, theywerc not allowed to possess :he prerogatives belonging to absolute, smrcre:gn, and independent nations. The territory over which thcy wandered, tlr.d whieh they used for thcir tflmpe� tary and fugjtive: purposcs, was, in respcet to Christj;ms, deemed as if ir were inhabited only by brute animaIs"]� it
contract gave Europeans the right to enslave NativeAmericans and Africans at a t ime when slavery was dead or dying out in Europe, based on doctrines of the inherent inferiority of these peoples. A classic Statement of Similarly.
the slavery
the slavery ronuilct is the 1857
DIed Scott
v.
SfIJ'l/ord U.S.
and
, _
This opin·
universal in the
civilized
the whitc racc. It was regurded as an axiom in
morals;1s well as in politics, which no one thQtlghtof disput
idemifies as the
an absolute dominion over the whole rcnitories afterwards
so which the white mill!
lawfully be redu ced to slavery fot his benefit. "
The "Doctrine of Discovery," for example, what Wi lliam s
"paradigmatic tenet informing and derer mining contemporary European legal djscourse respecting re lations with Western tribal societies, II was central to thc c:
lUOfe
oi an inferior order, and altogetber unfit to llSSOClllte with
ing, or supposed to
(
be open
to dispute.�;
FinaHYJ there is the colomal. contract, which l eg itiI.ruitcd
.1 Eu r opcan rule ovcr the na:ion s in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific.
I
Consid er, for ins tance, this wonderful examplc, almOSt litef� any "contmctarbm" in
theorist
Jnles
character,
hom th e French imperial.
Harmund \ r845-19.21), who d evised the notion
.
of association:
Expansion by conquest, however necessary, seems espe
to the conscience of to transpose democratic institutions into 5llch a setting is aberrant nonsense. Tiro subject people afC nor and cannot become citizens in the democratic sense of the term " . " . It is necessary, then, to accept as a prinClple and point of departure tbe faet that there is a hierarchy of races and civiJiutioll.$, ;md that we belong to tbe superior race and dvilization. , . . The basic legitimation of conques t ovcr native pcoples is the convietion of om superiority, not cially
unjust
and
distUrbing
demoeracies, , . . Dut
merely our metharuc.al, economic, .and military superiority,
,
but our mora l superiority. OUJ'dignity rests on rha t quality and it underli es our right to direct the res t of humanity,
Supreme Court decision of Chief Justiee R.oger Taney, which stilted that blacks
24
What js therefore necessary is a ''''Contract'' of Association":
25
THe MCtAl COtlTHAGT
Whbout blling into Rousseauan reveries, it is worth noting thm assoeiation implies a concrnct, and this idell, though nothing more than an illustration, js more appropnatcly applied to,the coexistence of tWO profoundly different soelt,:.
des thrown sharply and artifidnlly into contact than it is to the single society formed by naturAl proeesses whlch
Rousseau envisaged. This is how the terms of tbis implicit agreement c;m be conceived. The Europc;;m conqueror hrings order, foresight, and sccurity to a human society which, though ardently aspiring for these rund,;l1nental va! ues w:irhaut: which no community CAn make progress, still ll1cks the aptitude to achieve thcm [rom wi.thin itself. , Wah these mental and material instruments, wbich :it :llcked and now receives, it gaius the idea and <1mbidon for a better existence, and thc meanS of achieving it. We will obey you, say the subjects, if you begin by proving yourself worthy, We will obey you if yOU can succeed in convincing us of the superiority of that c:iviliziltion of whieh you t:llk
,ion from European Enlightenment hutTulnism. Racher, it needs to be realized that, in keeping with the: Roman prece dent, European humanism usually meant thatonlyEuropeans were buman. European moral and political theory, like: Euro pean thought in general, developed within the hamework ot the Racial Contract and, as a r u le, took it for gt,mted. As Edward Said points out in Culture and Imperialism, \\'C must not see cnltute as "antIseptically quarantined from its worldly afffiiations." But this occupational blindness has in fact in fected mos: "professional humanists" land ecrtauHy most phi· losophersj, so that "as a result [they are] unable to make the eonnectio:r. between the prolonged and sordid cruelty of prac, tiees such as slavery, colonialist and racial oppression, and imperial subjection on the one hand, and the poctry, Bction, philosophY of the society that engages in these practiccs on the other. ,m By the ninetecnth century, conventional white opinion casually assumed the uncontroversial vali&ty of,a hierarchy of "higher" and "lower," "master" and "subject"
so much.""
races, for whom, it is obvious, different rules must a.pply.
Indian laws, slave codes, and colonial native acrs formally
hierarchical poli ty, glohally dominated by EutOpeans, A 1969
codified the subordinate status 01 nonwhites and (ostensiblyl xcgulated the�r rreatUlent, creating a juridical space fox non Europeans as a sepax;lte category of beings, So even if there waS sometimes an attempt to prevent "abuses" {and these codes were honored far more often in the breach than the
J
OVERvlEr,l
observance!, the point is that " abuse" as a concept presupposes as a norm the legitimacy of the subordination. Slavery and colonialism arenol conceived as wrong in their denial of auron omy to persons; whar is wrong is the improper administration
01 these regimes. [t would be g fundamental error, then-a potnt to which 1
wiH n:tum-'to see racism as anomalous, a mysterious devia· 2£
The modern world was thus expressly creaccd as a racially Foreign AffaiIs article WOrth. rereading today reminds us that as late as the 1940$ the world "was still by and Jarge a \Vestern white-dominated worJd. The long-established patterns of white power and nonwhite non-power wese still the generally aee.epted order of things. All thc accompanying assumptions ;lnd mythologies about r,;tee and color were still mostly taken for granted.
.
_
. (Wlhite supremacy was a generally assumed
and accepted state of affairs in the United States as well as
in Europe's empires!'.;!'; But statements or sueh frankness are rare or nonexiStent in mainsue.;tm white opinion today, whieh generally seeks to rewrite the past so as to deny or minlm(ze the obvious bct of global white domination.
27
OVERVIEW
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
Yet the United States itsclC of course, is a whitc settler
emtion Rhodesia Inow Zimhabwe) and South AIric� is well
thl'Ough a combi nation of milit ar y force, disease, and a "cen
known, not so familiar may be the faet that the United States, , Canada, and Australia all maintained "whitej immigration
tury of dishonor" of broken uea:i:es.): The expropriation In�
policies until a few decades ago, aud uative peoples in all three
valved literal genocide fa word now unfortuuately devalued
countries suffer high poverty, infant mortality, and suicide
by h)tpcrbolic overuse) of a kind that some recen� revisionist
rates.
st,!te on territory expropria.ted from its aborginal inhabitants
historians have argued needs to be seen as compara.bIe to the Third Reich'sP Washington, Father of the Nationt was, under
standably, known somewbRt differently co the Senecas as "Tmvn Destroyer. ".l.i In the DeclAration of Independence, JcI.
Elsewhere, in latin America, Asia, And Alriea, large pans of the worM were colonized, that is, formally brought: under
the :rule of one or another of the EUfOpe,1n powers tor, lat er, Ll)e United StatesJ: the early Spanish :rod Ponugu�sc empires
terson characterized Native Americans as "mctciless Indian
in the Amerieas, the PluJlppmes, and south Asia; the jealous
Savages," and in the Consti tution, blacks, of course , appear
competition from Britain, France, nnd HoUand; the British
only obliquely, through the famous "60 percen t so2ution."
conquest of India; the French expansion i nto Algeria and Indo
Thus, as Ri chard Drinnon concludes: "ihcFr:llncrs mnnifcsrly
cbina ; the Duteb advance into Indonesi.a; the Opium Wars
established a
were
against Chlna; the late nineteenth-century IIscr,amble for AI·
not men created equal-in the white polity . . , they were
rica"; the U.S. war against Spam, seizure ufCuba, Puerto Rico,
government under which non.Europcans
Philippines, and altJtexlltion of Hawa.ii.J�
The pace of
nonpeoples."·� Though on ,a smlll ler scale and not always so
and the
ruthlessly (or, in thc case of New Zealand, because of more
ehangc this eentUl'y has beeu sn dramatic that it is easy to
successful indi genous resistance], whnt are standardly elassi
forget that less than a hundred years ago, in I9I4, "EUl'ope
fied as the other wbite settler states-for example, Canada,
beld agrand total of roughly 8 5 pereent of the earth as colonies,
Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia, ,and South Africa�were all
protee tora tes, dependencies, dominions, and commonwealths,
founded on similar polieies; the extermination, displacement,
No other a ssocia ted set of eolomes in hi story was as large,
andiorherding onto rcservations of the aboriginal populatlou,·t>
none so totally dOminated, none so unequal in power to the
Plerre 'fan den Bcrghe bas coined tbe illuminatiug pbrase "Her
Western metropolls.";w One could say that the Racial Contract
renvolk democracies"
to
deseribe these politics, which cap.
tures perfectly the dichotomization of the Rneial ContracL;&
Their subsequent evolution has been somewhat different, hut
ereates a. mmsnational white polity, a virtual commun ity of
people linked by their eictzenship ln Europe at home and abroad (Europe proper, tbe colonial greater EUl'ope, And the "frag
defeuders of South Africa's system of apartbeid often af!,'ued
ments" of Euro-America, Eurn Austrah a, etc.!, and constituted
that u.s. criticjsm was hypocritical in light of its own history
in opposition to their indigenous subjects, In most of Africa
·
of jim crow, especially since de facto segregatlon remains sui
flnd Asia, where colonia! rule ended only alter World War n,
fieicndy entrenched that even today, forty yea.rs after Brown
rigid "color bars" maintained the separation between Europe,
Board of Education, tWO Americ,m SOciologists ean til Ie
ans and indigenes. As European, as white, one knew oneseH
th ei r srudy American ApartheidY ihe racist record of preHb.
to be a memher of the superior race, one's skin being one's
v.
28
29
nlE �C:fo,t CONTMC�
QVERVIE',I(
passport: "Whatever a white man did must in some grotesque
toRght under theirrcspectivebanncts, and thes)'stemof white
fashion be 'civilized,"'.\!) 50 rhough there were local variations
domination itself rarely being challenged. !The exception, of
so for most
in the Racial Contrllct, depending on circumstances and the
course, is Japan, which esC4lpeO colonization, and
partICular mode of exploitation-Jor example, a bipolar racial
of the twenticth eentury has had a shifting and ambivalent
system in the (Anglo) United States, llS agains t a subtler color
relationship with the global white polity,) The legacy of this
hierarchy in IIberianJ latin Ameriea·-lt remains the Cilse dUll
world is, of course, still with us today, in the economic, politi
the white tribe, as the global representative of civiliz�tion and
cal, and cultural domination of the planet by Europeans .and
modetnity, is generally on top of the social pytamid.'!
their descendants. The fact that this racial structure, clearly
We live, then, in a wotld buHt on the Racial Contract. That
political in character, and the struggle against it, equally so,
we do lS simultaneously quite obvious if yon think abou: it
have not for the most pan been decmed approp!iate subject
{the dates and details of colonial conquest, the constitutions
matter for mainstream Anglo·American political philosophy
of these states and their exelusionary juridical mechanisms,
and the fact that rhe very eoncepts hegemonic in the discipline
the histories of oHkial racist ideologies, the battles against
are re1raetory to an understanding Ot these realities, rcveal at
slavery and eoloniaHs01, the formal and informal structures
best, a disturbingprovineialisfil and an ahistoricity profoundly
of disctimination, are all within recent historieal mcmory
at odds with the radically foundational questioning on which
lind, or course, massively documented in otherdisciplinesl and
philosophy prides itself and, at worst, .l complicity with the
nonobvlous, since most whites don't think about it or don't
terms of the Racial Contrae� itself,
.
,:
think about it as the outcome Or a history of political apples sian but rather as just " th e way things are." iI/you sa.y we're
conquered
the world? Why
would you put it thtlt wayl'''iIn the Treaty of Tordesillas ( 1494,1
TIle- Raelal Contract it an exploitation conlruel that ereates global European economic dominalion and nalfonal
while racial prlllilege.
whieh divided rhe worldbetween Spain and Portugal, the Vall,l dolid ISpainj Conference \ 1 5 50-1 S 5 1 ) to decide whetber Native
\ /
The classic social contract, as I have detailed, is prjmarily
Americans were really human, the laler debates over Afriean
ffioral/polirical ln nature, But it is also economic in the back
\ISS4-ISS51
ground sense that the point of leaving the state of nature is
\
to partldon Africa, the vurious inrer-European pacts, treaties,
in pan to secure a stable environment for the industrious
I
and informal arrangements O!l policing their eolonies, the
appropriation of the world. IAftcr all, one famous dc£nition
post-World War I discussions in Versailles after a war to makc
or polities is [hat it is about who gets what and why.) Thus even
the world stlfe for democracy-we see for should sec) with
in Locke's motalized state of nature, whexc people generally do
complete clarity a world bemg governed by white people. 50
obey natural law, h e is concerned abou t the safety of private
siavery and abolitionism, the Berlin Conference
chief end
though there is als!) internal conflict-disagreements, battles,
pIOfW.Ity, indeed proclaiming that "the great and
cve.,'1 world wars-the dominant movers und shapers will be
therefore, of Mens uniting into Commonwealths, and putting
Europeans at home and abroad, with non-Europea.ns lining up
themselves under GO\'crnmcnt, is
30
the Preservation of their 31
(
J
, .
THE nACIAL CONTFlACi
OVERVIEW .
Property. '"',1! And j n Hohhes's famously amoral and unsafe stll te of nature, we are told that "there is no place for Indusuy; bcclluse tbe fruit thercof lS uncertain; and consequently no Culturc of the Earth!"! So part of the point of bringing sociery into existence, with Its laws and enforcers of the law, is to protect what you have accumul
'. .
,
ignared as nonwbitefsubpcrsons. There are other benefits ae eming hom the Racial Contmctr-far greater political inr1uence, cultural hegemony, the psychic payoff that comes from knowil1,g one is a member of the HerrerJvolk (what w. E. B. Du Bois onee called "rhc wages of whitencss"J0i4-but �he botrom line is material advantage. Globally, the Racial Contract creates Europe as the continent that dominates the world/ locally, within Europe and the other continents, it desig· nates Europeans (1.5 the privileged [;ICC. The challenge of explaining what has been called "the E.uro· pean milaele"-tbe rise of E.urope to global domination-has. long exercised both academic and lay opinion"�; How is it that a iormerly petipheral legion on the outskirts of the Asian land mass, at the far edge of the trade routes, remote from the grCiit civilizations of Islam and the East, was ahle in a century or tWO to tlchicve globaL political and ceonontic dominance? The explanations historically given hy Europeans themselves have varied tremendously, from the straightforwardly racist and geographically determinist to thc more subtly environmental ist and cultutalisL But what they have ail had in common, even those influenced by Marxism, is their tendency to depict this development as essentially autochthonous, their tendency to privilege some set of internal variahles and cQrrespondingly downplay at ignore altogether the role of colonial conquest and Africa.n slavery. Europe made it on its own, it is said, becouse of rhc peculiar characteristics of Europe and Europeans, Thus wherc evolved rnees clsewhere, the thesis of European specialness and exccpdonaJism is still presupposed, It is still assumed that
TH� RACIAL CONTRACT
rationalism and science, innovativcness llnd inventiveness found their special home here. as against the intellectual stag nation and traditiona.lism of the rest of the world, so that Europe was thcrefore destined in advancc to occupy the special. position in global histoty it 11.<15. james maur calls this the theory, or "supet-theory" (an umbrella coveting many dHfcr. ent versions: theological, cultUral, bioiogistic, geograpruC
OIJERIJIEW
in Mexico and Peru, the profits from plantation- slavery, the fortunes made by the colonial eompanies, the gencra� social and economic stimulus provided by the opening up of the "New World") was to a greater or lesser cxtent crucial in enabling and then consolidating the takeoff of what had previ ously been an econornie backwater. It was hn {rom the ease tl1at Europe was specially destined to assume economie hege mony; therc wcre a number oi centers in Asia and Africa of a eomparable le....el of development which could potentially have evolved in the same way. Rut the Europc3:fj .u;eent closed offthis developmentpathfor 9thets because it forcibly inserted them into a coloniol network whose exploitative relations and CXHi\eti....c mechanisms pr�vcnrcd autonomous growth. Overall, then, colonialism "lies at the heart" of the rise of Europe,'o The eeonom;,e unit of analysis needs to be Europe as a whole, since it is not always the case that the eolonizing nations dirccdy involved always benefited in the long term, Impel'in! Spain, for example, still feudal in eharacter, suffered massive inflation from its bullion iruports, But through trade and fin
THE RAe:,,!.. C\ltlTMCI
Today, correspondingly, though formal decolonization has taken place and in Atriea and Asia black, brown, and yellow na:ivcs Me in office, ruling independent nations, the global
duced by the Rncial Contract and in turn reinforces adherence to
it in its signatories and benefieiaries.
Moreover, it is not mcrcly that Europe and the former white
economy is essentially dominated by the former colonial pow.
settler states nre glohally dominant but that vtithin them,
ers, their offshoots !Euro-Unite:d States, Eum,C
where there is a significant nonwhite presence [indigenous
their jnternationnl financial institutions, lending agencies, and oorporntions· IAs previously observed, the notablc cxception, whose history confirms r�thct than challenges the rule, is Japan, which escaped colonization nnd, after rhe Meiji Rcstora tion, successfully embarked on its own industrializarion.; Thus one could say that the world is essentially dominated by white capitaL Global figures on incomc and property owner. ship are, oicourse, broken down nationaUy rather than raeially, but if a ttansnational racial disag&'Tegation wcre to bc done, it would reveal that whites control a percentagc of the world's wealth grossly disproportIonate to rheir numbers, Since there is no reason to think thar the ehasm betwecn First 1lUd Tbird Worlds (which largely coincldes with rhis racial division) is going to be bridged-vide the abjeet failure of various United Nations plans from rhe "development decade" of the 1960s:
�
onward-it seems undeniable that for years to come, the lanet will be white dOlUlnilted, With thc collapse of communlsm and the defe
peopies, dcseendants of imported slaves, voluntary nonwhite immigT
eolor-coded distribution of wealth and poverty has been pro-
black households earned sixty-two cents for every dollar
3&
37
OVERVIEW
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
earned by white households, the comparative differential with
insurance, I!tc.06 Many of these, by their very nature, are diffi
regard to wealth is mueh greater and, arguably, provides a
cult to qu,mtifYi moreover, there arc eosrs in anguish and
more realistically negative picture of the prospects for closing
suffer ing that ean never J;eally be compensated. Nonetheless,
the racial gap: "Whites possess nearly twelve times as mueh
those that do lend themselves to calculation offer some re
median net worth as blacks, or 543,800 versus $3,700. In an
markable figures. (The figures are unfortunately dated; readers
evcn starker contrast, perhaps, the average white household
should multiply by a faetor that takes fifteen years of inflation
controls 56,999 in net financial assets while the average blaek
into acconnt.) If one were to do a calculation of the cumulative
household retains no NFA nest egg whatsoever./I Moreover,
benefits (through eompound interest) from lahor market dis
the analytic focus on wealth rather than income exposes how
erimination over the forty-year period from 1929 to 1969 and
illusory the much-trumpeted risc of a " black middle class"
adjust for inflatioll, then in r983 dollars, the figure would
is: "Middle-class blacks, for cxample, earn seventy cents for
be over $1.6 trillion.�7 An estimate for the total of "diverted
every dollar earned by middle-elass whites but they possess
income" from slavery, 1790 to 1860, compounded and trans
only fifteen cents for every doll�r of wealth held by middle
lated into 1983 dollars, would yield the sum of S2.1 trillion
class whites." This huge disparity in white and black wealth
to 54.7 trillion.5H And if one were to try to work out the
is not remotely contingent, aecidental, furtuitous; it is the
cumulative value, with compound interest, of unpaid slave
direct outcome of Amcrican state policy and the collusion
labor before 1863, underpayment since 1863, and denial of
with it of the whitc citizenry. In eHect, "materially, whites
opportunity to acquire land and natural resources available to
and blaeks constitute two nations, II;; the white nation being
white settlers, then the total amount required to eompensate
constituted by the Amcrican Racial Contract in a relationship
bla cks 1/ could take more than the entire wealth of the
of structured racial exploitation with the hlack (and, of course,
United States."59
historically also the rcd) nation.
So this gives an idea of the eentrality of racial exploitation
A collection of papers from panels organized in the 1980s
to the U.S. economy and the dimensions of the payoff for its
by the National Economic Associntion, the professional orga
white beneficiaries from one nation's Raeial Contraet. But
nization of black eeonomists, provides some insight into the
this very centrality, these very dimensions render the topie
mechanics and the magnitude of sueh exploitative transfers
t,l boo, virtually undiscussed in the debates on justiee of most
and denials of opportunity to accumulate material and human
white political theory. If tbere is such a baeklash against af
capital. It takcs as its title The Wealth of RlIces-an ironie
firmative action, what would the response be to the demand
tributc to Adam Smith's famous book The Wealth of Nations
for the interest on the unpaid forty aeres and
and analyzes thc diffcrent varieties of diserimination to which
issues cannot be raised because they go to the heart of the real
blaeks have been subjected: slavery, employment discrimina
nature of the polity and its strueruring by the Racial Contraet.
tion, wage discrimination, promotion discrimination, white
White moral theory's debates on justice in the state must
monopoly powcr discrimination against black capital, racial
therefore inevitably have a somewhat fareieal au, sinee they
price discrimination in eonsumer goods, housing, serviccs,
ignore the central injustice on whieh the state rests. lNo won-
38
39
der a hypothetical comroctarianism that evades the actual circumstances of the
polity's founding is preferred!)
Both gl.oinlHy and within particulur nations. then, white people, Europeans and their descendants, con t inue to hcneflt
from the Racial Contra ct, which creates a world in their cuI. tural image, political states diffcrentiully fllvoring their inter ests, an econOmy strucrured n.round tJle rueh.l exploItation of others and a mornl psyehoJogy Inot lust in whites but some ,
DETAILS
times in nonwhites alsol skewed consciously or unconsciously toward pri....ileging them, ta.king the stiltus quo of differential racial entitlement as normativelY Legitimate, and ,not to hc inves tigated funher.
S
O
that gives us rhe overview. Let lIS now move to Il
cl oser examin:ul0n
of the details ilnd workings of the
Racinl Contract: its norming of spaee and the rsub)pcr
son, its relation to the "offleial" soeial eontraet, and the terms of its enforcement.
The Racial Gonlracl norms {and races] space, demarcating civil and
wild spaces. Neither space nor the individual is usually an object of
explicit and detailed nanning for the mainstream social con
tract. Spa cc is JUSt them. t"ken for granted, and the individual is ta citly posited as the White adult male, so that aU intHviduals arc obviously equal. Bllt for the Racial Comract, space itself
and the individuals thcrem are not homogeneous; so explicit normative distinctions necessarily have to be made. 1 will treat the norming of space and the person separntely, though exegesis i s complicated by the fact that they arc bound up together. The norrning of space is partiaHy done in terms of the racing 01 space, the depiction of Space as dominated by 40
41
nET
THE ?ACIAL CONTRACT
indiViduals (whether persons o r suhpersons! oj it ccnain rAce.
man of the wood, sllvaticus,
At the some time, the norming of rhe individual is partially
whose
nchicved by spacing tt, that is, representing it as imprinted v/jth ,he characterlstics of a certain kind of SpaCe, So this.is a mmually suPPOrting cnaracterlzlItion that, for subpersODs, becomes a ci:rcuJar indietment: "You tile What you are in {Mrt because you originllte hom a certain kind of space, and that SpllCC has those propenies i n pan because it i s inhabited by creotures like yoursc1L" The supposedly abstract but actUally white social contract characterizes IEuropeanl space basically as prcsociopolitical :'( the sta tc of nature") and postsociopolitical :the locus oj Itcivil society"J, But th,s characterization docs not reflect negatively on the charaetcIlstics of the space itself or its denizerlS. This spa ee is our space, a space in which we �we white people) are
nomo
sylvestr.L�, the man
being wildness, wilderness, has so deeply penetrated
that the door to civilization, to the political, is barred) !You hut you can't can ta ke the Wild Man out or the wilderness, is take the wilderness out of thc Wild Man,) The Wild Man
o a crucial figllIC (n medieval thought, Ul'::! domestic a lltIp de lwithin Eutope) of civilization, and is one of the conceptual anteeedents of the Inter cxtra-Eutopean "savages."l As Hayden
tes White poillts out, tbe creation of the "Wild Man" iUustra the "the technique of ostensive self-definition by neg.lltion("4 not. is one eharacterization of oneself by reference to what in Who arc we! We are the nOllsnvnges, Thus it is really here, social al mythie the the real·lifc Racial Contract, as against play contract, rhat rhe "state of nature" and tOe "natural" , nature of state the in their ,decisive theoretical role, They are
ily choose to lelive it, thenceforth estahlishing institutions
"found and we are not . Englishmen, writes Roy HarveyPearce, neivi· t u u b , nmeht enviro in America ilot only ,m uncivilized natutal lized men-natural men, as it WIIS slI id, living in a
transforming its character. But th ere is nothing innate in the
world."5
at home, a cozy domestic spaee. At a cettain Stage, !white; Jlcople seeing the disadvantages of the state of nature volUntu
or rhe persons thllt eonnOles intrinsic defect. By contrast, In loe social <:ontract's ilppucadon to nOll Europe, where it becomes the Racial COiltract, both Spaee and its inhabitants are a l ien. So this space and these indjvidl1als need to be explicitly theorized about, since lir tUnis 011tj they
space
lirc both defective in a Wily that requires external intervention to be redeemed \insoiar, that is, as redemption is possible). Europeans, Ot ilt least fuB Europeans, were "civilized," and thjs condition was manifested in the character of the SpaCes they inhllhited,l Non-Europeans were "savagest " ilnd this cou�
" wood, fJ
so
that the savage is thc wild
Correspondingly, ule Raeial Contract in its eatty ptecon
qUCSt versions mllSt neeessarily involve the pejorative charac teriza tion of the spaces that need tamin& the spaces in whieh the raeial polities arc eventu a lly going lO be eonstrueted. The Raeial Contra cr is thus necessarily more openly material than the socia ! conrract. These strange landscapes isa unlike those at home:, this alien flesh [so different from out own!, must he mapped and subordinated. Creating the eivil and rhe politieal here thus requires an aetive spatial snuggle (this space is resistant) against the savage and harharie/ an advaneing of the frontier agai.nst opposition, a E.uropeanization 'Of the world. "Europe,'-' as Mary Louise Pratt notesl 'Iearne to see itself as a 'pJanerary process' rather than simply a regi'On of the world. "t Spaee must be normed and raced at the macrolevel (entire 43
OE7AllS
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
countries and eontinentsl, the loca] level :eity neighhorboods),
Athena that ancient Egypt waS a significant culrural influenee
and ultimately even the microlevel of the body itself :the
on ancient Creece, and that it waS ro a large extent a black
contaminated
civilizatlOo, one can surely inter that at jeast some or the
white bodyl.
resistance to the idea in establishment white sehoiarship
There arc tWO main dimensions to this nonning; the epistc mological and the moraL
comes from the apriorisrle presumption that no such achieve ment eou1:l really hove come from black land ultimately " sub
The epistemological dimension is the corollary of tlle pre
Saharan"l Africa,� [The phrase "sub-Saharan Africa" is itself,
emptive restriction of knowledge to European cognizers,
in fa Ct, agcograpllic marker morivated bythe Radal Contract ·1
which implies thaI in certa,in spaces real knowledge (knowl
Finally, the cultural achievements of others may simply be
edge of science, universals) is not possible. Significant cultural achievement, intellectual progress, is thus denied to those
approptiated by Europe without acknowledgmer:t, in effeet denying the reaiity that "/the Wcst' has always 'bcen a multi
spaees, which are deemed (failing European intervention) ro
cultural creation."?
be permanently locked into a cognitive state of superstition
This norming is, of course, also lmnifested i.ll the vocabulary
and ignorance. Valentin Mudimbe refers to this as an "eptstc
of "discovery" and "explotation" still ln use until recently,
mologieal ethnocentrism." Countervailing evidence may thcn
hasically implying that if no white person has beeu there be
be treated in different ways. It may simply be destroyed, as
fore, then cognition cannot really have taken place. In Heart
for eXilmple the invading Spanish conquistadors burned Aztee manuscripts. It may be explained away as resulting from the
of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's Marlow pores OVOl' the globe and notes that "there were many blank spaces on the earch. olD
intervention of oursiders, for example from a previously un
And this blankness Signifies nor merely that Europeans have
known contact with whites: "Since Africans eould produce
not artived but that these spaces have not ar,dved, a blankness
nothing of value; the rechniquc of Yorubn statuary must have
of the inhabitants themselves. Afriea is thus the IIDark Conti
come from Egyptians; Benin an must bea Portuguese creation}
nent" because of tbe paucity of (rememberedj European con
the architeetural achievement of Zimbabwe was due to Arab
tact with it. Com:spondiugty, there are rituals of naming
tecbnici<ms; and Hallsa and Buganda srarecraft were inven·
which serve to seize the terrain of these "New" Worlds and
tions of whire invaders.'" IThink of that favorite of carnies,
ineOtporate them into our world: New England, New Holland,
advenmre novels, B·movics-thelost white tribe whose legaey
New France-in a word, tlNew E.u ropes," "cultura.l-spatiai ex�
is discovered in some faraway, otherwise benighted place on
tenslonlsJ of E.urope."n They ilte domesticJted, transformed,
the earth, and which is responsible for whatever eulture the
made familiar, made a part of our space, brought jnto the
hapless nonwhite natives may possess.) Sometimes even. an
world of Europeau (which is human! cognition, so they can be
extraterrestrial origin may bcsought, as the desert drawings in
knowable and known. Knowledge, science, and the ahility
South America have been attributed roalicn visitors. Similarly,
to apprehend the world intellectually are thus restricted to
independently of the eventual outcome of the controversy
Europe, which elnerges as
recently stimulated by the claim of Martin Bernal's BlacF.
least fa! the European cognitive agent! who will b c the one to
t.he global locus of rationalIty; il t
4.
THE RACIAL
wmACi
O:TMlS
validate local knowledge claims. Tn order fot these spaces to
ttansformed'-;1 testimony to the superior rnorul eharaeteris
be known, European perception is required,
tics of this space and its inhabitants. (Hobbes's paradigmati
Momlly, vice ano virtue are spatialized, flrsr on the mac· rolevel of a moral cartography that accompanies the litemi
but as we will see later, ir is really only literal for non
European mappjug of the world, so that entire regions, coun tries, indeed continems, are invested with moral qualities.
Thus Mudimbe dC$crihes the "geography of monstro;Hty" of
early Euwp!;an cartography, which, in a framework still largeiy theologieal, panitlOns the known world and points out Where There B� Dragons.") Non-Europe;1n space is thus demonized in a way th'lt implies the need fot Europeanization if moral redemption is to bc possible. The link hetween the cognitive and the maritI. of course, connects the failure to perceive l1atu fill law with moral flaw: the darkness of the Dark Contlncm is not merely the absence of a European presence but a blind ness- to ChriStian light, which nc.cesso.tily results in moral blackness, supers-tition, devil worship. Appropriately, then, one of the medieval cartographic troditions was the mappa mundL the map of the ""orld organized not on a grid system,
but around thc Christian cross, with Jeruso.lem at the eenterP SimIlarlY, European settlers in America described the area beyond the mountains as "Indian country,'1 "the D;1rk and Bloody Ground .
_ _
a howling wilderncss inhabhed by 'savages
and wild be.1$ts, ,tt or sometimes even " Sodom and Gomormh.
IJ
And the society they saw themselves foundjng WitS, rone spondingiy, sometimes refcrtoo to uS "New Canaan."!� The non-European state of nature is thus actual, a wild and racialized plnce that was originally chamcterizerl ;1S cursed with a theological blight as well, all unholy hmo. The European state of nature, by cont-rast, is eirher hypothetical or, H actual,
cally ferocious state of nature may appeat to be an exception, europeans, so that it actually confirms rather than challenges the ruk] Because o( th.is moralrzation of spacel the journey upriver or in general the journey into the interior in imperial
literature-the ttip away from the outposts of civilization into
native territoty--acquires deep symbolic significance, for it is the expedition into hath the geographic llnd the' petsonal heart of darkness, the evil Without which correlates with the
evil witbin. Thus in Apocalypse Now, Funeis Ford Coppokt's rewriting of Conrad in the eonte.xt of Vietnam, Willatd's [Nillrtin Shcenj jOUrllCY upnVer to find Kurtz {Marlon Branda), 1979
whose stages are sartorially marked tiu:ough the gradual strip
ping away of the [eivilizedJ uniform of the US. army to the final mud-caked, machete-carrying �e indistinguishable
from the ('.-ambodian vUlagers eeremonially killing the buffalo,
is both a norm�tivc descent mto moral corruption and a eogni
tive ascent to the realization that the war eould have been won only by abandoning the restraints of Euro-American civi� lization las demonstrated in My L:ti presumably) and embrae ing the " sl'lVageryn of the North Vietnamese aImy.15
The battle against this savagery is in ;1 sense permanent
contaminated by) the n(>n�Europe:lnized space around them. So it is not merely that space is normatively eharaeterizedon
the mnero1evel before eonquest and colonial settlement but ,
dmt even afterward, nn tbe local l evcl, there are: divisions,
generally a tamet aiiair, a kind of garden gone to seed, which
the European city and the Native Quartet, Whitetown and
may need some clipping but is really already partlaUy domesti
Niggertov."11/Darkto:wn, suburb and inner dty. David Theo
cated .and just requires a few moilifieations to be appropriately
Goldberg comments, "Powcr in the polis, and this is especially
46
41
D€TA'lS
THE MC!Al CONTPAC
true of racialized power, reflecrs und refines the spatial rela
here!" The Racial Contract demareatcs spacej reservlngprjvi
tions of irs inh<1b[fun tS,"l� Part ot the purpose of the eolor barl
leged spaces for its fust-cl<1sS eitizens.
the color linetapartheidliim crow is to maintain these spuees
The other dimension of moral appraIsal and nmming, which
in ril",i; ploce, to have the cheekcrboard of virtue and vice,
is of course the one th..t becomes more central with seculariza
light and dark space, OillS and tlmirs, cle;trly dem,neated so that the human geography prescribed by the fuiciHl Contract c.1n be preserved, For here the moral topography is different and the dvilizlnglflission as yet Incompiete, Of this partitioning of space and person, Frantz Fanon writes: "'The eoloniul wOI�d is a world cnt in two, . . " The settlers' town is u town of white
I "
I
people, of foreigners, , . , iThe native town I is a town of niggers and dirty Arabs. . , . This world divided into compartments, this world CUt in two is inhabited by two different species/Ill In raCT, rhe imilnacy of the connection between place
or the inner cities, and the correspondiug pattern of "wltite flight" to suburban vanillu sanctuary: our spaee/home spaee! civilized space. In Amelica, South Aillca, and elsewhere, the
tiOn, IS not traditional Christian vicc and virtue but the emer gent capitalist/Protestant ethic of settlement and industry. Franke Wiltner argueS that the ideology of "progress and mod ernization" has served for five hundred yeilfS as the dominant justificution of Western displacement and killing of the
�
"Fourth World" of indigenous pCQples.'� Here, spac
America. " 19 The central and mutually complementary myths, as FrHncis iennings points out, are the twin ideas of "virgin lands
unpoopled land, inhabited at most by "varmints," "critters," "humt1n beasts," who are an obstacle to development, rather
white space is patrolled for dark intruders, whose very pres·
than capable of development themselves/ and whose extermi·
ence, independently of whut they may or may nor do, is a
nation Drat least clearing awo.y is t1 prerequiSite tor civilization.
blot on the reassuring civilized whiteness of the home space.
A numbers game is played, involving the systematic underw
COllsider the curfew laws in segreguted neighborhoods eatlier
eounting of the ahoriginal population, often hy a factor of ten
in U·S, hist-'Ot'Y land nrgunbly the continuing informal police practices now), the notices that used to be posted outside
or morc, since by definition " large populations are Impossihle in savage societies. Ull (And when they arc no longer large, one
"sundown" towns_UNiggcr, don't let the sun set on you
will nol want to admit how large they Once were. I Riehard
49
CHAtS ie..!;., those of the inner cityjareintrinsicaliydoomed to welfare
Drinnon desenbes how many European settlers in the United Stares thought of themselves as "inland Crusoesfl in an "un
dependency, high street: crime, ullderduss status/ because of
peopled" wilderness, eharacterized by Theodore Roosevelt as
the charlleteristies of its
"[he red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the world huM
nomie system has no role in Cleating these problems. Thus
"ll Similarly, SWl!y.
"A. t the time of fhst settlement in the Aus
one of the interesting consequences of the Racial Contract is
tralian colonies aU lands were deemed to be waSte l
that the politicol space of the pollty is not coextensive with
inhabitantst so that the larger eoo
the property of the Crown. "lS In South Aftica, the trekbO$rS
its geogUlphica1 space;, In entering these {datkl spaces, one
went on exterminatory hunting expeditions and subsequently
is entering a region normatively discontinuous with white
"bragged about theit bag of Bushmen
political space, where the rules are different i n ways ranging from dHferential funding (school re.<:ources, garbage collection.
their eateh.'nI So the basie sequence ran something like this:
infrastluetur...t rep...ir) to the absence of police' protection.
there arc no people there in tlle fust plaeeJ in the second place,
Finally, there is the microspacc of the body itself (wmcll in
they're not improving the land, and in the thixdplace-oops! they're already ail dead auyway (and, honestly, thCl'e really
a sense is thc foun dation of all the other levelsJ, the fact,
weren't that ruany to begin with!, SO there arc no people tllere,
to be deall with in greater detail 1atef, that ,the persons and subpersons, the citizens nud noncitizens, who inhabit these
as we said in the first plaee. Since the Racial Contract links spaee with race and race
polit�cs do so embodied in envelopes of skin, flesh, h...ir, The
with personhood, the white raced space of the polity is in
nonwhite body ennies a halo of blackness around it which
a sense the geographical loeus of the poliry propel', Where
may actually make some whites physically uncomfortable. lA
indigenous peoples were permitted to survive, they were de·
black American architect of the nineteenth century trained
nied full or Ilny membership in the political community, thus
himself to read arehitectural blueprints upside-down because
becoming foreigners in tbeir own eountry, Drjnnon deserihes
he knew white cl:ients would be made uncomfortable by having him on the same side of the desk as themselves.) Part of this
this remarkable urull Melvi liean politielll confidence trick:
feeling js sexual.: the bJack body in particular is seen a$ pata. digmatically a body, 11 Lewis Gordon sU&gcstS that the black
liThe country was tull o(reeent nrrivnls from theEast,mysteri· ous impostors pretending to be natives and denying renl rwtives their hurrutnity."15 Similarly, an
"presence is a form of absence. , . . Every black person becomes
Austtal ian historian eould
write in 1961: "Before the Gold Rush there were, after all,
limb of an enormous black body: 'rUE: BLACK BODY."ih Whites
few foreigners of any one race in Austraiia-except ror the Aborigines, if we m'IY, sheepishly I hopei call them foreigners
-may get to be "talking heads/' but even when bLacks' heads ',;uctalking. onelS always Uncomfortably aware of the bodies to
after a manner of speaklng. >lUi (Where did you guys eome from,
.
anyway? You/re not from around here, ate you!) This nced
....
spaee will also mark the geographic boundary oJ the stare's full obligations. On the ioeat leve1 of spatialization, nonning then mauifests itself in the presumption thar certain spaces
50
' ,
>:;hi'h iliese heads areattnched, {So blacks ate at best "talking
�::·::s.nl
�
Early rock and roU was viewed by some white conser·
as 0. communist plot because it brought the rhythms
the mack hody into the white bodHy space; it began the . u=.y subversion of that sp,aee. These are, literally,
51
jungle
\
:tlE M:)IAl ::;ONTRi>.CT
DETAILS
rhythms, telegraphed from the $ptlee of saVager}', threatening
there is a sense in which the rcal polity is the virtual white
the civllized space of the white poliry and rhe carnul integriry
polity, then, without pushing the metaphor tOO far, one could
of its inhabitants. So when in the r950S wllite artists did cover
say that the nonwhite body is a moving bubble of wilderness
versions of "tace records," songs on the jim-crowed rhythm
tn whitepolitical space, a nodeofdiseontinultywhich is neces
and hlues charts, they were silnHlzcd, cleaned up, rhe rhythltls
sarily in permanent tension with it.
rearranged; rhey were made recognizably "white.'" More generally, there is also the basic social requirement of disringuishingon the level ofcvcrydilY interaction tun inter·
The RacIal Conlnet norlnS land
action raking place not an some abstract plane but ..¥ithin this
personhood ami subpersanliand.
races) the Individual. J3stab!!stdng
raeilllized space) personi>erson from person-subpcrson soclal intercourse Thus in the United States, from the epoch of
In the disincarnate poHltcal theory of the orthodox social
slavery and 11m crow to the modern period of formili liberty
comract, the body vanishes! beeomes theoretically unimport.
but continuing racism, the physicill interilctions between whites ;:::md blacks ate C'.lretully regulated by a shiiting tilc1lll. etiquetre that is ultimately determined by the current fotm of the Racial Contraet. In her study of how white women's lives are shaped b y race, Ruth Frankenberg describes thc re
ant, just as the physical spaee inhabited by that body is osten· sibly theoretically unimportant. But this disappeilring act is jU$t
sulting "racial social geography," the personal "boundary
presupposed i\S the somatic norm, In a political dialogue be
mainrenance" rhat reqllired that one "always maintained .)
tween the owners of such bodies, the details of their flesh do
sep�ratcncss," a self·eonscious "boundary demarcation or
not matrer since they are judged to be equally rational, equally
physical spaee.u�� Conceptions 01 one's white self mapa micro·
capilble of perceiving natural law or theix own self-interest.
geography of the acceprable roures through raeial SPace 01
But as feminist theorists have pointed out, the body is only
one's Own personal space. These travcrsals of spaee arc im
irrelevant when it's the {whitel maJe body. Even for Kant,
printed with dominarion: prescribed postures of deference and
who defines "persons" simply as rational beings, without any
submission for the bhlck Orher, the body languilge of ll!)nupplt
apparent restrictions of gender or race, the female body demar·
mess Ina "reckless eyeballing"}; traffic-codes of ptiority ("my
cates one as insufficiently rational to be politically anything
space can walk thtough yours and you must step aside"); un
more than a llpassive" citizen,;;l Similarly, the Racial Conrract
writren rules for derermining when to acknowledge thc non·
isexpUeitly predicated on ll.l,ohtics of the bodywhienis related
white presence and when nor, dictaring spaccs of intimacy
to the body politie through re:strlctions on which bodies are
and distance, zones ot comfort and diseomfort :/ltfiUS far and
"pontic." There are bodies impolitic whose owners are judged
no farther"!; and finally, of course, antimiscegenation laws and
incapable of forming or fully entering imo ;] body politic.
lynching to proscribe
The distant intellectual antecedent here, of course, is Aris
penetration 01 bJack ioro white space.:IO If, as I earlier argued,
totle, who, in The Politics talks about "natural slaves," who
52
53
OETM.S
THE RA:;I�l CCNTR4(i7
reduced it to .a homily, deprived i t of the shattering political .force it once had. But what needs to be emphasized )5 that it is only white persons land really only white males) who have !:>een able to take this for granted, for wbom it ean be an unexciting truism. As Lucius Outlaw underlines, European liberalism restricts "egalitarianism to equality among equals, " and blacks and others are omo!ogieally excluded by race from the promise of "the liberal project of modernity. "JI The terms of the Raeial Comract mean that nonwhite s1.1bpersonhood is ellShrined simoltaneously TNith white personhood. So in order to understand the workings of the polities struc tured by the Radar Contract, I believe, we need to understand subpersonhood also. Subpersons are humanoid entities who, because of racial phenotYpe/genealogy/eulture, are not fully human and therefore bave <1 different and inferior schedule of (' tights and liberties applying to them, In other words, it is ,J
possible to get away with doing things ro subpersons that one eouid not do to person.s, because they do not have the same
rights as persons. Insofar as racism is addressed at all within mainstream moral. and political philosophy, it is usually treated in a footnote as a regrettable deviation from the ideal. But treadng it this Way makes it seem contingent, accidental, reSidual, removes it from our understandmg. Raee is made to seem marginal when in fact race has been central. The notion of subpersonhood, by contrast, makes the Racial Contract explicit, showing that to characterize things in terms of "de. viations " :is i n .1 sense misleading. Rather, what is involved is compliance with a nor m whosc existence it is now embar. rassing to admit. $0 instead of l)fetending [hat thc social eon. tract outlines the ideal that people tried to Iive up to but which thc)' occasionally (tlS with aU ideals) fell short of, we should suy fI'aukly that for whites the Racial Conuaet represented the ideal, and what is involved is nOt devi:ttion from the : ffc.
56
tiveJ norm hut adherence to the actual norm. (Thus, I pointed Ollt earlier "exccption.uism " was the rUle.) The "Racial Con tract" as a theory puts race where it bdongs-at eemer stage·� and demonstrates how the polity was in fact a racial one, It white-supremacist state, for which differential white racial entitlement and nonwhite Tileial subordination were deftrtin& thus inevitably molding white moml psychology and moral lbeorizlng_ , the degra. This is most dearly the case, of course, for blacks ,been 'poimed darion of racial slavery meaning, as has often y oLan.cient out, that for the first time land unlike the slaver slavery ac Greece and Rome or the medieval Mediterranean)
t in general, per· quired a color. But for the colonial projec
ct raceS. Jt sonhood would be raced, hence the concept of "subje s and non· The erucial conceptual divide :is between white central cut this onee whites, persons and subpersons, thongh le, vari· has becn made, other internal distinctions an� possib as ear " rians, "barba eties of subpcrsonhood ("savagest! versus of the .Racial lier noted) corresponding to dUferent variants g's native ltiplin Thus nialj. Contract !c:x:propriation/slave!colo chi1dlt� could have more than one iaee-"half devil and hall
kinds might so that while (ior the c)""Propriation contraetl some Australial cas, simply have to be extel'minated ias in the Ameri eon tract) .a and South Atriea), for others las in the colonial might lead Asia} paternalist gUidance las in coionial Africa and
But in all them (as "m�norsJJ! ilt least partway to civilization. entities with g dealin cases, the bottom line was that one was omy and seli not on the same moral tier, incapable of auton raey," rule. "Negroes, Indians, and [KRffirs! cannot bear dcmoe the Phantom, concluded John Adams,l-P. :Think of Tarzan and tbe black jun. ruling s She and Sheena, white kings and q�een ut iLl gle, laying down the law to the lesser breeds witho rization catego the of n Moreover, the dynamic interrelatio 51
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
DETAILS
meant, as Hegelians would be quick to recognize, th.;tt the c,Hegories reeiprocally de(ennined eaeh otber. Being a person, being whitc, meam-dcfinitionally-not bejng a subperson, llOt having the qualities thnt dragged one down to tile next ontological level, In the ido::a l Kanctan world of �he raeeless soc);ll contract, persons can exist in ::ht;; nbstraet; jn the non. ideal world of the naturalized Racial Contract, persons
iHC
necessarily related to subpcxsons. For these are Identities as "contrapuntal ensembles," requiring their opposites, with the "secondariness" of subpersons b� as Said phra.ses it, "'pala dorically, essentia l to the primariness of the European. "J9 Where slavery was practiced, as in tbe United States and tlle Americas, so that a sustsined reiation betwcen races obtained, whiteness and blackness evolved in a forced intimacy of l.oath. ing in which they determined each other by negation and self-reeognition in part through tbe eyes of the ot!U',I. In his pIizewinning book on the evolution of the idea of freedom, Orlando Patterson argues that freedom has been generated from the experience of slavery, that the slave establishes the norm for JlUmans.�D Part of the preSCnt-d:lY probl�rn in trying to assimilate black Americans into the body politic is. the deep encoding i n thc natioual psyche of the notion that, as Toni Morrison points Out, Americanness dcnnitionally means \\'hiteness; European immigrants who came to America ;in the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries proved their assimi· lation by entering the club of whiteness, affirming their en· dorsement of the Racial ContraeL�l The longtime joke in the black community is that the fhst word the German or Scandi n,lVian or Italiau learns on Ellis Island fresh off the boat is "nigger." Black American, At:dean AmerIcan, is oxymorouie, wIliIe White American, Euro-American, l$ pleonastic, White· ness is defined in part in respect to an oppositional darkness. so that white self-conceptions of identity, pCtsouhood, aud
self·respect ure then intimately tied up with me' repudiation of the blaek Other. No matter how poor one _was, one was still able to affirm the whiteness that distinguished one from the subpersons on tite other side of the color Bne. Then:: is also 3 cognitive dimension that :is likcwiseenritmu ous with thc Aristotelian traditiou. Historically the.paradigm indIcator of snbpersonhaod has been deficient Iationality, the inability to exercise in full the characteristic classically thought of as distinguishing us {lOrn animals. FoI the social contraet, a rough equality in men's eognitive powe.�s or.at least
a nccessary groundflooI capability of detecting the-imrnanent ' moral structuring of the universe luatural law), or what is rntiunaUy reqnired far social cooperation, is eIucial to the argument. For the Racial Contract, correspondingly, a basic
inequality is asserted in the C.;tpacity ofdifferent human groups [0
know tbe world and to detect natural law. Suhpersons arc
deemed cognitivdy interior, lacking in the essential rational. ity that would make them fully human. In the early !theologieal)vcrsions of theRaeial Contract, this difference was spelled out in terms of heathen unwillingness to recognize God's word. One early sevcnrccn th-century minister characterized NativeAmerieans as "having littleo-f Humanitic but shape, ignotant of Civilitie, of ArtS, of Religion, more brmish than the beasts they hum. more wild and unmanly Ithani that unmanned wild CounIrey, which they range father than inliabite; capuvated also to Satans tyranny."4! In lateI, secular verSIons. it is a meed incapaeity rorrationality, abstr-act thought, cultural development, eiviliza.tion in general lgener atlng those clark cognitive spaces on Europe's mapping of the world), In philosophy one could trace this eommon thtead through Locke's speculatioIls on the incapacities of primitive minds, Davld Hume's denial that any other race but whites had created worthwhile civilizations, Kant's thoughts On the
59
QUAilS r.,[ fACIAL ccrfrAAc�
rarionaliry differentials between blacks and whites, Voltaire's polygene de conclusion that blacks were a dIstinct ;tnd less able species, lohn Stuan Mill's judgment that those races "in their nonage" were fi t only for tldespotism. " The assumption
of nonwhite intellectual inferiority was widespread, even if not always tr icked out in the pseudoscientific appatatus that DarWinism would later make possible. Once this theoretical advance h
�
pltuJationism, and finaliy, of course, iQ theory- the i :ature p ut ativ ely correlated withjntelligcnce varyil1& but thedesitcd outCome of confirming nonwhite intellectual inferiority aI, ways achieved,',l cogniZing <1bility ate vatious, Since, as ment ioned, it precludes cultural achievement, itlnvites the intervention of thosc who
are capable of cuJtme, Sinee i t precludes tne m oral develop
�ecessary
epistemic
betshipjn the IIculturnl" raelsm, where partial mcm nr to whlcb nonwhites cxtc community is granted based all the mte Western culture.) showthemsclvcs capablc ofmastcringw involves a specific Finall.y, th e norming of the individual also ing. Judgments oimoraI norming of the body, an aesthetic norm wstlnet from judgments of worth are obviously coneeptually ieal tendency to con· aes.thetie worth, but there is a psycholog ...entions oi, children's £late the t....o, as illustrated by the con their cast."of h<1r'ldsome jand somc adults'l f;liry tates, with ins. Harmannu's Hoe· heroes, Ueamifut heroines, and ugly villa " somatic norm image," tilik argues that aU societies have a s.H And George Mossc deviation from which triggers alarm nt involved " the establish paints out that the Enlightenme fashioned.after classical ment of a stereotype of human beau ty worth. . . Racism was models as the measure of all human es, . . . eauty and ugH. a visual ideology based upon stereOtyp human cl assification as ness hecame as much principles of climate" and the environ material factors of measurement, es the white body the so men t."H The Ril cial Contract mak t theories one finds not only matic notm, so that in early mcis b eau tiful and fair faces moral hut aesthetic judgmenrs, with e nonwhites were close pitted against ugly and dark raccs. Som e that they were sometimes enough to Caucasians in appearane exotic way [Native Ameri seen as bcautifui, attractive in an e Asians), But t hose motc cans on occasion; Tahitians; &om atotype-paradjgmaticaHy distant from the Caucas.oid som n Aborjgines)-were stig� hlacks (Africans and also Anstraii.a deviant, Winthrop Jor matizcd as acstllcticaHy repulsive and fascination with whie.h dnn has documcnted thc repel lcd arance of the Afri.cans thcy Englishmen discussed the appe ditions, and Americans. such encountered in early trading expe _
The impl ication s 01 th is denial of equal intellectual and
ment
ations involve a shift epistemic agent, etc.j, iFurthcr complic m to a morc at tenuated itom stmighrforw\ltd biological racis
for b eing a responsible mora! and poli ti cal
a gen r, it predu des full membership in the polity. Since i r
�reclude$ veridical perception 01 th e world, it even precludes
In som e cases COUrt testimony : slaves in the United States were not allowed to give evidenee against their n:asters, nor could Australian Aboligmes te stify against the white settlers,
�
In .ge etal, over a period of centuries, tne governmg epistemic pnncl:ple could be stated as the requiremcnt that··-at least Oil controversial issues·-nonwhite cognition has to he verified by white cognition to be accepted as valid, And ir is pcrmitte(1 to overrid e whire cognition only in extreme and unusupj cir cum Stances Ilorge numbers of consisten t nonwhite wimesses, some kmd of disorder 1n the cognizing cppacitles of the white
B
51 60
DETAILS as Thomas Jefferson expressed their antipathy to Negroid fea
Whereas relations between the sexes necessarily go back to
tures:� (Benjamin Franklin, interestingly, opposed the slave
the origin of the species, an intimate and central reiatlonship
trade on grounds that were a, least partially aesthetic, as a
between EurOpe a.<; .a colleetive entity and non"Europe, "white"
kind of bellutifieation program for America. Voicing his con
and "nonwhire" raees, is a phenomenon of the modem epoch.
ce�n thac impona;:ion of Slaves had "blaeken'd half America,"
There is ongoing sch olarly controversy over tht! existence and
he tlsked: " Why increase the Sons of Afnca, hy Planting rhem
extent of racism in anttquity Ii/racism" ilS a complex ofidcas,
in Ameriea, Whete wc have so fair an Opportunity, by exciud
that is, as against a dt!veloped politicoeeonomic system), with
ing ;tIl BlacKs and Tawneys, of inereasing the lovely White
some writC!s, such as Frank Snowden, finding a period "before
and Red?"l'f
color prejudice," in which blacks are obviously seen. as equals,
To the extent tbat these norms are accepted, blacks will be
and others claiming that Greek and Roman bigotry against
the race most alkntlted from thcir own ood ies -a fate particu
blacks was there from the beginning:9 Burohviously, w�tever
laxly painful for blaek women, \'fho, like aU women, will (hy
the disagreement on thiS point, it would have to be agreed
lhe terms, here, of the Sexual COlUmet) be valued ehiefly by
eh:tt the ideology of modem wcism is far more theoretically
their physical appearance, whieh will generally be deemed to
developed than ancient or medieval preludices and is linked
fall shon of the Caucasoid or light-skinned ideaL4� Moreover,
iw])atcver one's vieW, idealist or materialist, of C<'Iusal priority)
apart from their obvious consequences for intra- and interra
to a system of European domination.
cial seXUtll relationships, these norms wil] affeet opportuniti.es
Nevertheless, this divergence does imply that different ac
employment prospects also, for studies have confirmed
counts of the Racial Contract are possible_ The account I favor
that a "pleasing" physical appearanee gives one an edge in job
conceives the Metal Contract :as creating not merely racial
competition. It is no aecident that bla[;ks of mixed race are
exploitation, but race itself as a group identity. In a contempo·
and
those who are differentially represented in employment in the "white" world. They wiH, beeause 01 their background. often
Tlll'y vocabulary, the Racjal Contract "constructs" raee, (For
"
, . other accounts, for eXtlmple, more essentialist ones, meial
(end to he better educated also, but an addi:ional fa etor is that
self-identmcation would precede the drnwing up of the Racial
whites are less physically uncomfortable with them. " If we
Contraet.) "White" people do not preexist but are brought
have to hire any of them," it may be thought, "at least this
into existcnee as "whit es " by the Raci ..ll Contract-hence the
one laoks a bit like us,"
peculiar transformation of the human population that accom panies this contract. The whltc race is invented, and one becomes I'white 0y law, 11M!
The Ratial Coniract underwrites the modern social conlract and Is conlinually being rewrltten_
In this framework, then, the golden.
{1050 to
age of contract theory
18001 overlapped with the growth of a European capi
talism whose development was stimulated by the voyages of Rildieal femi.nists argue that tbe oppression of women :is tbe
explor.'llcion thatinereasingly gave theconrraetaracial subtcxt.
oldest oppression. Racial oppression is much more recenr.
The evolution of the modem version of the conrract, charac-
62
63
------ ---' ---�--- � -
THE ItAClAl COf1TRt\CT
terized by a n antipatdarchalist Enlightenment liberalism,
was never generally so, over nU the world: bUl there are mony
with its proclamations of the equnl rights, autOnomy, and
places, where they live so 001.'01,11 hi" example being "the savage
freedom of .. II meo, thus rook place simultaneousl)' with the
people in rntmy places of America. "S< So a nonwhite people,
massacre, expropriation, and subjection to hercdito.ty slavery
indeed the very nonwhite people upon whose land his. fellow
of men a t least apparenrly hUman. This contradiction needs
£uropcnns were then encroaching, 1..'1: his only real-life example
to be reconciled; it is reconciled through the Racial Contract,
of people jn 3 srate of nature. lAnd in fact, it has been pointed
which essentially denies their personhood and restricts the
out thar the phr$lsing and terminology of Hobbes's character
terms of the social COntract to whites. " To invade ilnd dispos
iZlltion may well have beeo derived directly from the writings
sess the people of an unoffcnding civilized country would
ofcontemportl!ies abont settlement in the Americas. The "ex
violate morality and trnnsgress the principles of international
plorer" Walter Raleigh described a civil war as Ua state of War,
law/, writes Jennings, "but savages were exceptional. Being uncivilized by definition, they were ourside rhe sanctiOns of
which is- (he meer state of Natute of Men out of communitYI wbere all have an equal right to all things.t' And two other
both morality and lav.'."Sl Thc Racial Comract is thus the
authors of the time characterized the inhabltants of the Ameri·
truth of the social contraet_
eas as "people [who] lived like wild bcosts, without religion,
There is some direct evidence that it is in the writings of
nor govcrnment, nor town, nor houses, without cultivating
the clilssic contract theorists themselves. That is, it is 110t
the land, not clothing their bodieslt ond "people hving yet as
merely a matter Ot hypothetical intellectu ul reconstruction
tbe first men, without lettcts/ without lawes,·without Kings,
on my :pan, arguing from silence :hat "men" mllst really
, Without common wealrhes, without arts . , . not civil by
have meant "white men!' Already Hugo Grotit:st whose early
nature. " I'';
sevc:nteenu)·century work on natural law provi.ded the crucial
In rhe next paragraph! Hobbes gOes on to argue that "though
thcoT
there had never been any time, wherein par ticular men were
ert Williams has pointed Out, the ominous judgment th;.t for
in
a condition of Warre one against anomer," there is "in all
"harbarians," "wild beasts rather than men, one may rightly
timesll a st;J:e of "conrinuall jealousies" between kings and
say . . . that the most just war is against savage beasts, the nexr against men who are like beasts. ,, ;l But let us lust foells
persons of sovereign authority. He presumably emphasizes
on the fou .most important contract theorists: Hobbes, Leeke,
happen in the absence of a "common Power to teare."'" But
Rousseau, and Kant
the text is confuslng.How could It simultaneously be the case
. . i1
this contention in order for the reader to imagine what would
Consider, {O begin with, Hobbes's notoriously bes.tial state
that ,jthere had never been" any such literal SC3te-of·notul'c
of nature, .. state ot war where life is "nasty, brutish, and
war, when in the previous paragraphhe had just said that some
shorL" Ot'\.a superRcial rCi:lding, it might seem that it 1S nonr:1-
were living like that oow! Aki a result of tbis ambiguity, Hobbes
cial, equaliy applicable to everybody, but notc wh
has been charaeterized as a hreral conrraetarian hy SOme com
when considering the objectiOn that �there WilS never stIch 11
mentators and as a hypothetical eomractarian by others. But
time, nor condition of warre as this." He replies, "1 believe it
1 think this minor mystery ean be clc1.lIed up once we recognize
6.
.5
"':HE P.ACIAL Co", TRACT
rn:TAI�
that there 1S a tacit racial logic in the text: the literal11tatc of
ans would enjoy the benefits of liberal p
nature is reserved for nomvhl.tes; fOI whites the state of nature
The Racial Contract began to fiwtrite the social contract.
is hypothetical. The conflict between whites is the conflict
Oue can see this transition more clearly by the time ofLoeke,
between those with sovereigns, that is, those who are already
whose state 01 nature is normatively regulated by traditional
land have always been) in soejety, From this confliee, one can
laltruistic, nonprudential! natural law, It is a moralized state
extrapolate 1gesturing at the raei.]l abyss, SO to speak! to what
6f nature in which private property and money exist, indeed
might happen in the absence of a ruling sovereign. aut really
a stntc 01 nature that is virtually ciyil. Whites' ean thus be
we know that whites are tOO rational to allow thls to happen
literally in this state of nature :for a brief period, anyway!
to rhem. So the most notorious state of nature in the eon
without its calling into question their innate qualities. Locke
traetarian literatUre-the bestial war of all against ,all-is
famously argues that God gave the world lIto. th� u se of the
rcaBy a nonwhite figure, a raeial object lesson for the more
Indusawus and Rational," whieh qualitles were Indicated by
ratioO:ll whites, whose superior grasp of natural law !here in
laboL So while industrious and rational Englishmen were toil.
its prudential rather dum ..Jtruistic versioni will enable them
ing away at home, in America, by contrast, one found I'wild
to take the neeessary Steps
woods and uncultivated wastlcJ . . . left to Nature" b y the idle
Us,wages.
to
avoid it and not to behave as
"
Hobbes has standard!y been seen as an awkwardly transi
Indians,5¥ Though they share tIle state of nature for a time with nonwhites, then, their residence is necessarily hriefer,
tional writer, caught between feudal absolutism and the rise
since whites, hy appropriating and adding viilue to this natural
of parliamentari:mism, who uses the eontract now elassieaUy
world, exhibit their superior rationality, So the mode of appro·
assoeiated with the emergenee of liberalism to defend absolut
pria tion of Native Americans is no real mode of appropriation
ism. Bur it might be argued that he is tranSitional in another
at all, yielding propeny tighrs that c:m b e re
way, in that in mid-seventeenth eemmy l:kltain the imperial
jif they exist at aU!, and thereby rendering their territories
projeet was not yet so fully developed that the intellectual
normntively open for sejzurc once those who have long since
apparatus 01 :meial subordination had been completely elabo·
left the state of nature (Europeans) encoun ter them. Locke's
rated. Hobbes remainsenolJgh of a taeial egalitarian that, while
thesis was in fact to be the central pillar or the expropriation
singling out Natiqe Americans for his real·Hfe example, he
contract-"""the principal philosophical delineation of the nor
suggests that without a sovereign even Europeans could de
mative arguments supporting white civilization's conquest of
scend to theirstarc, and that the absolutiSt government appro
America," writes Williamss9-and not merely in the: United
priate for nonwhites eould also be appropriate for whites}'
States but later in lhe other white settler states in Africa and
The uproar that greeted his work can be seen as attributable
the PllcLfic. Aboriginal economies did not improve the land
at least in part to this moral/political suggestion. The sprelld
and thns could he regarded as nonexistent.
of colonialism would eonsolidate an inteHectual world 1n
The practiee, and arguably also the theory, of Locke played
whieh this bestial State of nature would. be reserved for non·
a role in the slavery eontraet also. In the Second Treatise.
white Savages, to be despotically governed, while civil Europe-
Locke defends slavery resuhing from
••
jusr war, for examJ;!le, 67
THf RACiAl CONTRACT
a defensive war
DETAILS
most fenile in wh�t." Sut Rousseau was writing more than two hundred years after theEuropcan eneounterwith the great
African slaves, and in any case, in the same chapter Locke explicitly opposes hereditary slavery and the enslavement of
Aztec and Inca empires; wasn't there at least a little metallurgy
wives and children.60 Yet Locke had .investments in the sl.avc trading Royal .A.frica Company and earHer assisted in writing
allurgy and agriculture were unknown
America, who have always therefore remained savages.'''',s So
the slave constitution of Carouna. So one could lltgue that
even what might initially seem to be a more open environmen
and otg.riculture in evidence there? Apparently not: "Both met to
the savages of
the Raci
tal determinism, whieh would open the door to racial egalitari·
.inconsistency, which could be resolved bythesupposidon that
anIsm rathet than racial hicra:rchy, degenerates into .massive
Locke saw blacks as not fully human and thus as subjeet to a
historical amnesia and factual misrepreSCQt.ution;. driven by
different set of nonnative tules< Or perhaps the same Lockcan
the presuppositions of the Racial Contract.
moral logic that covered Native Americans can be extcndL"
Moreover, to make the obvious point, even if some of Rous seau's nonwhite savages are unoble," physically and psycho·
logically healthier than the Europeans of the degraded .und corrupt society produeed by the real·life bogus contract, they
ception. After all, it is with his work that the nOtion of the "nohlc savage" is associated Jthough the phrase is not actually
are still saV.:lges. So thcy are primitive beings who are not
his own). And in the Discourse On Inequality's reconstruetion
Out language. Leaving the state of nature, as Rousseau argues .in The Social Contract, his later account of an ideal polity, is necessary for us to beeome fully human moral agents, beings
of the origins of society, everybody is envisaged as having been in the state of nature land thus to have bcen "savage") at one
time or another. But a careful reading of the text reveals, OllCC again, crucial racial distinctions. The only natural savages citcd arc nonwhite savages, examples of European savages be·
actu.ully part ofcivil society, barely raised above animals, with
capable of justiec.(.i. So the praise for nonwhite savages is a
limited paternalistic praise, tantamount to admiration for healthy animals, in no way to be taken to imply their equality,
ing restricted to reports of feral children raised by wOlves lind
let alone superiority, to the eivilized Europeans of the i:deal
bears, child-rearing practices (we are told! comparable to thosc of Hottemots and Caribs.6': IEuropeans arc so intrinsically civi. lized that it takes upbringing by animals to turn them into
polity. The underlying racial dichotomization and hierarchy
savages.) For Europe, savagery is in the dim distant past, since metaliurgy and agriculture are the .inventions leading to civili·
the best illustrot:ion of the grip of the Racial Contract on Europeans, since by this time the aetual contract and the his·
of civilized and savage remains quhe clear Finally, Kant's version of the social contract is in a sense ,
zation, and it turns Out that "one of the best reasons why
torl�! dimension of contractarlanism had apparently van
Europe, if not the earliest to be civilized, lias been at ICllSt more continuously and better civilized than other partS oi the
ished altogethct. So here if anywhere, one would think-in this world of abstract personsl demarcated as such only by their rationality-race would have become irrelevant. But as
v,.-orld, is perhaps that it is ott once 'the richest in jron and the
69
OEiAILS Enlmanuel Eze has recently demonstrated i n great detail, this
corresponding intdleetual ability and limitation. Itonly seems
orthodox picture is radically misleading, and the nature of
casual, unembcddcd in a lurgcr theory/ because white<1eademic
Kantian "persons" and the Kamian " contract" musr really be
philosophy as an institution has had no interest in reseMching,
rethought,M For it lutnS Out rhnt Kant, widely regarded as the
pursuing the implications of, and making known to the world
most important moral theorist of the modern period, in a sense
this dimension of Kant's work.
the father of modern mOta] theory, and-through the work
In facr,
Kant demarcates and theorizes a color�coded racial
of Tohn Rawls and lurgen Habermas-incre8sing]y cenua! to
hierarchy of Europeans, Asians, Africans, and Native Ameri
weil, is also the father of the
cans, differentiated by their degree of innate talent. Ezc ex
modern conceptoi mee,(,(' His 1775 essay "The Dificrent Races
plains: "'Talent' is that which, by 'nature.' guarantees for the
modern political philosophy
as
of Manklnd" !"Von den Vcrscbieden(.:n Rassen der Menschen")
'white,' in Kam's racial rational and mom] order,- the highest
is a classic pro-hereditarhm, untienvinmmenral isl statement
position above all creatures, fo1l9Wed by the�' yel1ow/ the
of "the immutability and permanence of race." For him, enm
'black,' and then the 'red: Skin eolor for Kant is evidence of
menls George \1.osse, "racial make-up beeomes an unchanging
superior, inferior, or no 'gift' of 'talent,' or the capa city to
substance and the foundation of all physieal appeanmce and
rcalize
human development, including intelligence, 'Ii; The famous
education.
reaSOn 11M
rational-morAl perfcctibility through
. . It cannot, therefore, b e Jlrsued that skin color
theorist of personhood is also the theorist of subpersonhood,
for Kam was merely a physical characteristic. It is, rnther,
though rhis distinetion is, in what the suspicious might almoSt
evidence of an unchanging and unchangeable Q'lorJlI quality.'"
think a conspiracy to conceal embarrassing truths, far less
Europeans, to no onc's surprise I presume, bave all the neces-
weB knO>'t'n,
5JX)' talcl1ls to be morally self-educating; there is some hope
As Ezc points out, Kanr taught anthropology and physical
ior As:.ans, though they laek the abilhy to develop abstract
geography for tony years, and his philosophical work really
concepts; rhe innately idle Africans can at leasr be educated
has to be read in conjunction with uleselectures to understand
as servants and slaves through the instruction of a split.
how rncialized his views on mora.l charaetet were, His notori
bamboo eime IKant gives some useful advice on how to beat
Ous commcnt in Observations on tl1e Feeling of the Beautiful
Negroes effieientlY); and thc wretehed Native Americans are
and Sublime is well known to, and often cired by, black intel·
just hopeless, and cannot be
lectuals� "So fundamcntal is the difference between [the black
opposition to the image of his work that has come down to
and whitel races of man . . . it appears to be as great in regard
us and is. standardly taught in introduetory ethics courses, full
to mental ell.pJ.eities as in color" so that "a clear proof that
pcrsonhood for Kant is aetuaUy dependent upon race. In Eze's
what
Ill.
Negro] s.'lid was stupid" was rhat " tllis fellow was
quite: black from head to foo t .
"
&;
The point of Eze's essay is
(ho.t dtis remark is by no means isolated or a casual throwaway
educated at all. So, in complete
suliimnry, "The Wack person, for example, can accordingly be
denied full humanity sinee full and 'true' humAAity accrueS only to the whlte European:'t�
Hne that, though of course rcgrettable, has no bro",:ler implica
The recent furor about Paul de ManJO and, decades earlier,
tions. Rather, it comes out of a deVeloped theory of race <md
Martin Heidcsger, for their complicity with the Nazis, thus
70
71
TI'iE it'\C;A1. CDNTit4cr needs to be put jmo perspcctive. These arc cssemiaHy bit players, mmor le,1guers. One needs to distinguish theory from actual practice. of course, and I'm not $
yeGIs is also the kmndational theorISt in the modem period of the division between Herrenvolk and Untermenschen, pel
sons and subpusons, upon wltich Nazi theory would later draw Modern moral theory and modern racial rht!ory ha\'c .
the same father, The Racial Contract, therefore, undC1Wntes [hc soeia! COn tract, is a visible or hidden operator that testricts and modiBcs tbe scope of lts prescriptions, But since there is hmh syn chronic and diu chronic variation, there :tre many different verslons
or
local instantiations of the Rndal Contract, and
they evolve over time, so that the effectivc foree of the soeial COntract itself changes, and the kind of cognitive dissonance between the two alters. lThis change [us implications for the moral psycholog)< o( the white signatories and their ch<1rHct(:J' istjc patterns of insight and blindness.) The soc!;,ll COntract is (in its orjgin<11 historical version! a spedfie discrete event (hat founds society, even if {through, e.g., Lockean theories oI tacit const;m) subsequent genetodons continue to ratify it on an ongoing basis. By contrast the Racial COlUtaCt is conti'nually being mvnitten to create different forms of alc racial polity. A global periodization, 01 tirneline ovetview of the cvohltion of rhe Racial C'.ontract, would highlight first of <111 rhc crucial division between the time before and the timeafterthemstitu tionulization of global white supremacy. \Thus Janet Ahu Lughod's book ahout the thirteenth�ccflttl!yffourtecnth-cen. tury medleval world system is titled Before European Hege
mony_in The time after would then he further subdivided imo
!)F"AILS
the period of formal, juri.dical white supremacy jthc epoch of the EUropean eonquest, Airlc:tn slavery, and EuropeAn colo nialism, overt white racial seli·identification, and the largely undisputed hegemony of racist theories) and thepresertt period of de faeto white supremacy, when whites' dominance is, for the most part, no longer eonstitutionally And )uridH!ally en· shrined hut rather a matter of social, political culturaL and economic privilege hased on the legacy of the conquest. In the first period, the period of de jute white'supremaey, the
Raeial
Contmct
was
explicit,
the
ch�actcristie
instantiations-che expropriation eontraet, the slave contract, the coloninl contract-making it clear that whites were the privileged race and thc egalitarian social contract applied only to them. (Cognitively, then, this period had the great virtue of social transparency: white supremaey was openly proclaimed. One didn't have to look for a .mbtext, heeausc it was there in the text itsclf.) In th e seeond period, on the O'ther hand, the Raeial Contract hos written itself out offorma1 existence. Thc scope of the terms in the social contract has been lormally extended to apply to everyone, so that "persons" is no longer coextensive with "whites." What characterizes this pcri.od {whieh is, of coursc, the presenrl ls tension helween continuing de facto white privilege and this formal extension o( rights. The Radal Contract continues to manifest itselI, 01 course, in unofficial loeal agreements of various ktnds Irestrietive covenancs, employment discrimination contracts, political de cisions about resource allocation, etc.), But even apart from these
;
a
crucial manifestation is simply the failure to ask
cerw n q uesr ions, taking (or granted a$ ll status quo and base line the e)(jstIns color-coded configurations oJwealth, povertYI property,and opportunities, the pretence that formal, juridical equality is suffieient to remedy inequities created on II founda· tion of several hundred years of racial privIlege, and that ehal�
73
DETA lS
ThE Rl
reasons of local folly and geographical blight the inspiring
lenging that foundarion is a transgression of the !:erms of the
model of the self«suffieicnt white social contraet eannot be
soci<1l contract. :Though actuallY-in a sense-it is, insofar as
followed.
the Racial Contract is the -real meaning of rhe social contract.)
Nationally, wirhin these racial poUties, the Racial Contuct
Globally, the Racial Contract eftccts a final pllladoxic.al
manifestS itself i n white resistance to anything more than the
norming and racing of space, a writing out at the pollty of
formal extension of the tenus of the abstract.social contract
certain spaces as conccptuaUy and hiscorieally irrelevant to
(and often to that also). Whereas before it was denied that
European and Em:o-world development , so that these laced
nonwhires were equal persons, it is now pretended that non
spaces arc categorized as disjoined from rh.c path of elviUzation
whites am equal abStract persons who ean be fully included in
(i.e., the European project). Fredric Jameson writes: "Colonial·
the politymetely by extending the seope of the n1Qral operator,
ism means that a significant structural segmem of the ecO
without
nomic system as a whole Is now located elsewhere, beyond
bave rt;sulted from the previous system of explicit de jure
the metropolis, ourside of the daily life and existential experi ence of the home country. . . . Sueh spatial disjunction bas
racial privilege. Sometimes the new forms taken hy the Racial
as
Comract arc transparently exploitative, lor example, the "jim
its immediate eomcquenee the inability co grasp the way the
crow" contract, whose claim of "separate but equall1 was pat
system functions as a whole."n By ,he social contract 's deci·
endy ludicrous. But others-the joh discrimination contraetl
sion to remain in the space of the European nntion-state, the
the restrictive eov enilnt�are harder to prove. Employment
connection between the development of this spaee's industry,
agencies use subterfuges of various kinds: "In 1990, for exam
culture, civilization, and the material and eultural contrihu
ple, two fonner employces of one of New York City's largest
tions of Aho-Asia and the Americas is denied, so it seems
employment agencies divulged that discrimination WAS rou
as if this spa()e and its denizens arc peculiady uKiona! and
tinely practiced against black applicantS, though concealed
industriol.ls, differentially endowed with qualities that have
behind a number of code words. Clients who did not want to
enabled them to domirulte the world. One then speaks of the
hue blacks woutd indicate rheir preferenee for nppl.leants who
"European miracle" in a way that conceives thls once margirul.l
were 'All American! For its part the agency would signal that
region as �ui generjs, conceptually severing it from the web
all applicant was black by teversing the initials 01 the place
01 spatial connections that made its. development possible.
ment eounseloLU1l Similarly, a study of how "Ametican apatt�
Tbis space actually comes tohave the character it do()s because
heidi! ismallltaincd points out tllat whetcas in the past realtors
of the pumping e:;:ploirarive C<1usality estahlished between i t
would have simply refused to sell to blacks, now blacks Ilare
and those oLlier eoncepruillly invisible spaces. But by re
met by a realtor with a smiling faee who, through a series of
maining within the boundaries of the Europcan SP';ICC of the abstract contract, i.t is valotized as unique, inimitahle, autono mOUS. Ot her parts of the world then disappear from the whitc contr3Ctman histOry, subsumed under the general caregory of risible non·European space, the " Third World." where for
74
.
ruses, lies, and deeeptions, makes it hard for them to learn about, inspect, rent, or purchase homes in white neighboro llooos . . . . Because the discrimimtion is latent, howcv� ir is usuaUy unobservable, even to the person experiencing it. One
75
CHALS [leVer knows for sure."''; Nonwhites then find th�t raee is, paradoxieally, both everywhere and rlOwhcrc, s.trucruriug their Bves but not formaHy recognized in poHtical}moral theory. But In a raciaHy structtllcd polity, the only people who can nnd it psychologically possibie to deny the centrality of nlee
are those who aTe racially privileged, for whom (ll ce is invisible precisely beellus.e the world :is structured around them, whitt: ness as the ground against which the figures of other races- those who, unlike us, are raced�appcar. The fish does. nOt sec the water, and whites do not sce thc racial nature of a white polity because it 15 natural to them, the clement in which they move, As Toni Morrison points out, thc:re are contexts in which claiming raeelessness is itself a racial aet.�� Contemporary debates between nonwhites and ..",hitcs abou t the centrality OT periphera!ity of race c�n thus be sc..:n as
attempts rcspectively to point om, and deny, the existence of the Racial Contract that underpins the social contract, The frustrating problem nonwhi�cs ha'\'c always had, and continue to have, with m.ain.strealU political theory is not with abstrac
tion i[5e11 :after aU, tbe "Ra-cial Contract" is itself 1111 nbsuac CianI hut with all idenli:dng abstraction that abstrac ts away from the erucial relllities of the racial polity,7!. The shift to the hypothetical, ideal c:oll�taCt eneour.1gcs and facilitates this ab5traction, since the eminendy nonidea1. features oj thc Leal world are not part of the apparatus. There is then, i n a sense, no eoneeptuill poim-or.emry to start talking about thc hmda memal way in whieh (as aU nonwhitcs knO\\'! race structures one's life and affeets one's life chances. The hlaek law professor Patrieia Williams eomplains about an ostensible neutrality that is Ct::ally "racism in drag/' il sys , tem of ( racism as statUS quo" whiehis " deep, angry, eradicated from view" but continues to make people "avoid the phantom as they did the substance," "deferlringl to the unsccn sbape
76
of things, '-;7 The black philosophy proies.sor Bill Lawson com ments on the deficiencies of the conceptual apparatus of tradi� tional liberalism, which has no room for the peculiar post Emancipation status or blneks, simultaneously citizens nnd noneitizens,1S The black philosopher of law Anitl1 Allen re lllarks on the Hony of standard Amer ican philosophy of law
texts, which describe a univers e in whic h "all humans are paradigm rightsholclers" and sec no need to point out that the aetual u.s. record is somewhat different,19 The retreat of mainstream normative moral and political thftory into an "ideal" theory that ignores race merely reseripts thc Racial ('.antraet as thc invisible wrhing between the lines. So John ' Rawls, an Amcriean working in the late twentieth century, writes a bnok on jnst'i,cc widely credited with reviving postwar polir:'eal philosophy in whieh not a single reference to Anlerl,. can slavery a.nd its legacy can be found, and Robert Noziek erc.ates a theory of iustice in holdings predicated on legitimate acquisition and tram,ter without more than two or three sen tcneesncknowicdglus:the utter divergeneeot u.s. history from this ideal. >(� Thc silence of mainstream moral and politica.l philosophy on issues of race is a sign of the continuing, power of the Colttract over its s.ignamries, an illusory color blindness that actually entrenches white privilege. A genuine wlfl.seendenee
of its terms would require, as a preliminary, [hc acknowledg ment of its past .md present existenee and the soeial, political, eeonomic, p!'lyehologieal, and mornl implications it has had both for its eomr:lctors and its v�ctlms, By treating tbe present as II somehow neutrnl baseline, with its givet\ configuration
of wealth, property, social standing, and psychological willing ness to sacrifice, the idealized social eonttact renders pcrma - nent the legacy of the Racial Contract. The ever-deepening
abyss between the First World and the Thud World, where 77
OET.G!LS mHlions-latgcly nonwhite-die of starvation each year and
course, Jews, In the colonial wars with Ireland, the English
many more hundreds 0; mtllions-al.so largely nonwhite
routinely used derogatory imagery-tlsavugcs," "cannibals!'
live in wretched pover ty IS seen as unfortunate (calling, cer
"bestial appearancc"-tnat it would now seem incredible to
.
tainly, for the occasional charitab:e contribmionJ bm ume
apply to whites,#lThc waye of mld�nineteenth*ccntury Irlsh
lared to the history of transcontinental and intraeonrinental
immigration into the United States stimulated one wit to
racial exploitation.
observe thut "it would be a good rhing if every Irishman were
Finally, the Racial Contract evolves nm merely by altering
to kHl a nigger and then be hung for it/' and, c.aricatures in
the relalions berween whites and nonwhites but by shHti!1g
the newspapers often represented the Irish as simian, European
the criteria for who (;ounts as white and nonwhite, ;So it is
racism ilgainsr nonwhites has been my focus, but there were
not merely that relations berween rhe respective populations
also intra-European varieries at tfrllcisml!-Teutonism, A..,glo
change but that rhe population bonndades themseh,es change
Saxonism, Nordicism-whieh ale roday of largely antiquarian
also.! Thus-at least in my preferred account of the Racial
interest lmt which were sufficiently influential in the 1920S
Contract !rtgain, orher accounts are possiblej-raee IS debm·
that U,S, immigration law favored "Nordics" over "Mediterra
logizcd. making explidt its political. founda:lon. In
(I sense,
nenn5." jThere lS some recognition of this distinction in popular
rIle Racial Contract construct!; its sjgnatorje,� as much as the)'
culture, Clleers fans will rememb er that the l'ItalianlJ waitress
construct:iL Th e overan trend is toward a limited cxpnnsioll
Cnr!'l IRhea Perlman], curly haired and swarthy, sometimes
of thc privileged human population through the "whitening"
ea.lIs the biond, "alab;lster-skinned" WASP Diane [Shelley
of the previously excluded group in question, though there
Long) "Whitey," and in the 1992 movie Zebrahead, two black
may be local reversnls.
teenagers discuss the question of wherher Italians are really
The �azi project ean thell be scen in part as rbe Hnempt to
white.: Fmally, 1ews, of COUIse, have been the victims of Chris
turn the dock back by rewriting a more exclusivist version
tian tUIOpe's anti·Semitic diserilninntion and pogroms since
of the Racia1 Contract than was globally acceptable at the time.
medieval times, this rccord of persecution rcachjng its horrific
lOne writer suggests ironically thar this was "rhe attempt of
climax under the Third Reich
,
the Germans to make themselves masters of the master
How, then, should these Europeans be categorized, given
Tace_"I�l A."'.Id this backtracking le,1ds ro a prohlem. My catego
tnc whi te/n onwhite dichotomization? One solution would be
rization iwhhe/nonwhire, person/subperson) has the virtues
to rejeet it for a three- or four-way division. But I am reluctant
of elegance and simplici t y and seemsro me w map the essential
to do so, since t think the dyadic partition reatly does capture
features of the tacinl polity accurately, to Carve the soelul
the essential snucmrc of the global racial polity. My solution
reality at its onwlogicnl joints. But sinee, as a pair of eonrrndie
therefore is to retain but "fuzzify" the categories, introducing
cories, this. categorization is ioindy exhaustive of the possibili
interna.l distinctions within them 1 have already pointed OUt
ties, it raises the question of where to locate what could be
rhat some nonwhites V'barbarians" as against "savagesU)
,
celled "borderline" Europeans, white people with a question
ranked higher than others; forexampJc, the Chinese .and fAsian)
mark-the Irish. Slavs, Mcd ltemmeans, and above all, of
Indians would have been placed above Afticans and Australian
78
79
DETA!LS
iMc RACIAL COUTPACT
Aborigines. So it wonld seem that onc could also rank whitest and in raCt Winthrop Jordan notes that "if Europeans were white, some were whucr than orhers. "iU AJl whites are equal, then, but some are whiter, and so mme equal, than Others, and all nonwhites are unequilL but some arc blackcr, and so more unequal, than others. The fundamen:al coneeptual CUt, the primary division, then remains that between whites and
they were in South Africa under apartheidJ, while being classi. fled as verminous nonwhites with respect to the Western AJ lies, inhcritors of the global Racial Contraet.% A eentury ago, at the time of the European domination of China and the Boxe!
rebellion, the Chinese were a degradetl race, signs were POSted saying "No dogs or Chinese allowed/, and they faced heavy
nonwhites, and the fuzzy statuso£ lnfcnor whites is,lceommo
imm.igration !es.t1ietions and diserjmination in the United States. " Yellow Peril" depictions of Chinese in the American
dined by the category of "off-white" rather than nonwhite. Comm.enthlg on the failure of the "valiant efto! tS of thc E.nglish to turn their ethnocentric feelings of supcriority over the
popu:ar media in the early twentieth century included the sinister Orientals of Sa.x Rohmer's Fu M,!nehu novels and the Ming the Meleiles� nemesis of Flash Gordon. But today in the
'bJack' Irish into racism," Richard Drinnon concludes that "the Celts remained at most 'wllice niggers' in their eyes."·';�
United States, Asians are seen as a " model minority," even laecording to Andrew Haeker) "probationary whites," who
And whh the exeeption of Nnzi Germany, to he discussed later, this seems to me " judgmenr that could be generalized fo!' aU these cases of borderline EuropellnS-that they were not subpersons in the [utI technical sense and would all have
might make it if they hang in there long enough. "Is Yellow Black or Whitc!" asks one Asian Ameriean historian; the an_ swer varies.SI The poim, then, is that the membership require ments for Whiteness are rewritten over time; with shifting
been ranked olltologically above genuine nonwhites. The c,lse
criteria prescribed by rhe evolVing Racial Contract .
with which they have now been assimila red into postwar Eu rope and aeeepted as full whites in the united States is somc evidence for rhe correctness of this way of drawing the distinction, Nt:vertheless,
these
The Racial C{mtracl has to be enforced ItJrough violenca and Ideological conditioning.
problem
caseS afC useful in illustrating�agniJtst essentialists-thc social rather tban bio logical basis of the Rae;al Contract. Phenotypical whiteness and European origin were not .uways sufficient for !ullWhitc ness, acceptance into rhe inner sanctum of the racial elub,
The .sociAl COntract is, by definition, claSSically volunturjs tie, modeling the polity on a basis of individuillized consent. What justifics the Iluthority of the state over us is that "we to give it that authority. IOn the older,
the people" agreed
and the rules had to be rewritten to permit inclusion. lOne reeent book, for example, bc.ars the tide How rhe Irish Became
"feudal" patriarchal model, by contrast-the moder of Sir Roh.
WIli!e.l£! On the other hand, thcre are groups "c1ear�y" nOt white who have conjunctUTilUy come ro be seen as such. The Japanese were classified as Nhonoraty whites" for the purpose
. represented as being born into subordil1
of the Axis alliance, the restrictive, local Racial Contract {as
in the mainstream moralized/constitutionalist version of the
so
ert Filmer, Locke's tat:get in the Second Treatise-people were
signatories to transfer or del.cgat:e their rights to itl and its role
B1
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
DETAilS
comract :Locke2.n/K'lI\ti,m) is, correspondingly, to protect [hose rights 2.00 safeguard the weUare of lis citizens. The liberal-democratic state is then an ethical state, whcthc: in the minimalist, night-v,-a.tchman LoekMn version ofenfordng noninterference with citizens' rights or in thc more expansive rcdistl'ihutivistversionof actively promoting ci tizens' wel rate. ]n both cases the liheril! stute is neuual ln thc sense of not pnvileging some eitizens ovet others. Correspondingly, the laws thatare passed have as then rationale this Juridical rcgul
course, been challenged from various politieai directions ovcr the Pilst century or so; the recently revivcd Hegelian moral
critique ftom the perspcetlve ofa comp et'mg, allegedly super�or ideal, a comrmmiwrinll state seeking actively to promote a common conceptJon of the good; the degradcd version of (his in the fascist corporatist state; the anarchist challenge to all stilteS as usurping bodies of legitimized violcncc; fmd what hilS been the most influential radical entique up till recently, the Marxist i1nfliysis of the state as an instru::ncnt of elass power, so that the liberal-dcmoerutic state is supposediy un·
masked as the bourgeois state, the state of the ruii.ng class.
My claim 1s that the model ot the Radal ContraCt shows us
mat we need .ll1other alternative, another way of theorizing
about
and
critiqning tile
state:
the
racial,
or white
supremacist, state, whose functton inter alia is to safeguard the polity as a whitc or whlte..oominated poUty, enforcing the terms of the Racial ContraCt by the approprJine means and, when necessary, facilitating its rewriting from one form
to
another. The liberal-democratic state of classic contractadanism abides by the terms of the social contract by using forcc only to prOtect its citizens, who delegated dllS morahzcd force to
B2
it 50 that it couid guarantee the 5af<:ty not 10 be found in the 5tate of nature. /This was, aiter ali, part of the whole point of
leaving the state of nature in the first plaee.) By contrast, the state established by the Racial Contract 1s by definition not ncutral, since its purpo.'le is to bring ahout conformity to the terms of thc Racial Contract among the subpcrson population, which will obviously have no reason to accept these terms voluntarily, since thccontraet is
is neutral for its full citizens, who arc white, bu� as a corollary, it is nonllcutraI toward the nonwhites, whose intrfnsie sav agery constantly tbreatens reversion to the statC of nature, bubbles of wHderness within the polity, as I suggcsled.l
OJ nr:cessity, then, this state treats white.s and nonwhitcs, persons and suhpcrsons, differently, though in later variants
of the Raeial Con tract it is neeessary to conceal this dillerenee. In seeking flrst to establish and later to reproduce itself, the racial state employs thc tWO traditional weapons of coercion: physical vjolenee and ideological couditioning.
1\1 the carly phase of establishing global white supremacy, overt physical violence was, of course, the dominant face of this political project: the genocide of Native Americans in thc conquest of the tWO continents and of Aborigines in Australia; the punitive colonwl wars ::n Africa, Asia, and the PaciRe; the incredible body counts of slaving expooitionsl the Middle Passage, "seasoning,"
83
DETA1LS
�HE Me!!.! CQ'JTRACT
resistance to me terms of the Raeial Contracr is required, If
enterprise. There is a well-known pereeption 10 the bJack
rhe social contrncr is predicated on voluntarized compliance,
counmmit y that the police-partieulal1y in the jim crow days
rhe Racia! ContraCt dearly requires compul!l.ion for rhe repro
of segregation and largely white police fon:es-were basically
duction of :he political system, In the slavery Contracr, in
an "army of oeeupation,"
llll
Correspondingly, in aU these white and white ruled politics,
ongoing seU-oegadon of personhood, an aecepranee of ehnted
<1ttacking or kHling whires has always been morally and juridi.
potemiillly
caDy singled om as the crime of crimes, a horrWe break with
more explosive than me varieties .of subpersonhood imposed
the natural otder/ not merely because of the greater vatue Ot
either by the expropriation contract {where one wiU ei,her be
white (I.e" a person'sj lile but because of its larget symbolic
sequestered in a SPIU!C tClr away itom white persons�
significance as a chnllenge to rhe raeial poli ty The death pcn
particulaf, the terms of the contract requite of the slave status, psychologically harder
dCtld
ar
to
achieve and
SO
the colonial contr,let (where the Status oj " minor" leaves
or
-
.
Hity is dlfferen:ially applied to nonwhites both in the seope CO'... ered ii-c.,
racially differentiated penalties for the
some hope eha, onc may be permitted to ilchiev\! adulthood
of crimes
some day!. Thus, in �he C.lribbean and on the mainland of the
same cr.imcsJ;� aod in its actual carrying out. (In the history
Amerieas, there Were sites where newly arrived Africans were
of U.S. el1pital punishment, for example, over one thousand
sometimes taken to be "seasoned" before being nanspotted
people have been executed, but only vcry rarely has a white
to
the plantations, And this was basically the metl1physic;,ll
opera tion, carried out through the physical, of breaking them,
been executed for killing a blaek.}W Individual acts of subper� SOIl violence against whites and,
even moresctrous, slaverebcl·
transforming them from pctsons into subpersons of the chattel
nons and (;olOnial uprisings are standardly punished in an
va�iety. Bnt sinee people could always fake acceprance of sub·
exemplary way pour encouroger les outres. with torture and ,
personhood, it was, of course, necessary to keep an eternally
reta liatOry mass killings far exceeding the nllmber .of white
vigilant eye on them for possible signs of dissemhHn& in keep
vietims. Sueh acts htlVe to be seen nm as arbitrary, not as
ing with the sentiment that eternal vigilance is the price of
the product of individual sadism Ithough they encourage and
freedom,
provide an outlet for it), but
as.
the appropriate moral and
The coercive afms of the stare, then�the pollee, the perull
political reslXiose-prescribcd by the Raeial Contract-to a
system, the army-need to be seen as in part the enforcers of
threat to Jl system predicared on nonwhite subpcrsonllood.
the Raeial Contract, working both to keep the peaee and pre.
There is an outrage that is practieally metaphysical because
vent crime among the white citizens, ond to maintain the
one's self·eonceptkm, one's white identity as a superior being
rllcia] ordet and detect and destroy challenges ro ir, so thnr
entitled to rule, is under attaek.
across the white settlcr. states nonwhites are incarcerated a t
Thus in the North and South American reactions to Native
differential rates and for longer rerms. To understand thc longl
American resistance and slave uprisingsl in the European te
bloody history of police brutality against blacks in the United
sponses to the Saint Domingue (Haitianl revolution, the Sepoy
States, for example, one llas to recognize it not as exceSSeS
uprising {"Indian Mutiny"I, the Jamaican MorantBay insurree
by individual racists but as an organie pan of this politiea.l
tion, the Boxer tebelbon in China, the struggle of the HereTO:;
84
85
THE RAClAt CONTRACT
DETAILS
In German Alriea, in the twentieth century eolonial and neo
whom Men can have no SOCiety nor Secur i.ty; " mily licitiy
colonial wars !Ethiopi
ne destroyed.t:l Bur if in the rOleiOll polity nonwhires may be
laya, Kenya, Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, Nnmibial/
reg
in the white settlers' batrles to maintain a white Rhodesia
01 what they happen to be doing a t any particular momentL
.and an apartheid South Africa, one repearedly sees the same
then by extension they CJin be conceptualized in parr as ",
pattern of system
carryin.g :.he s late of nature around with them, incarnati ng :
that an ontological shudder has been sent through [he sysrem
wildness ,md wilderness in their person. In effect, they ean be
of the whiTe polity, calling forth wh:
reg;1Tded even in eivilsociety as being potentially at the center !
\.....
lli�e tcItor to make sure rhat the foundations of the mora)
of a mobile free-nre zone in whieh citizen·to-citizen/white·
and political universe s tay in place. Describing tbe "shod:: to
o n-whit e moral. and juridical constraints do not ohtain. Par
\"hite America" of rhc Sioux defeat of Custer's Seven:h OIV
ticularly in frontier situations, wbere official White authority
aIry, one author writes: "It was rhe kjnd of hu miliming defeat
is distant or unreliable, indiVidual whites may be regarded as
that simply could not be handed to a modern nation of 40
endowed with rhe aurhority to enforce the Racial Contraet
million people by a few scarecrow savages. "�l V. C. Kiernan
themselves. Thus in the Unitcd StilteS paradigmaticaUy ibut
commems on Haiti : " No savagery that has been recorded of
also in the European settlement in Aus t rali", in the colonial
Africans anywhere could outdo some of the acts of the French
ourpost in the "bush" or "jungle" of Asia and Africa! there is
in their effons ro regain eontrol of the island." Of the In dian
a long hiStOry of vigilantism and lynching 'at whieh white
Mutiny, he writes, "Al ter victOry there were savage reprisals.
officialdom baSically connived, inasmuch as hardly anybody
For rhe firsr time on such
scale, but not rhe last, the West
WilS ever punished, though rhe perpetrators were well known
was trying ro quell the East by frightfulness . . . . Some of the
Dnd on occasion photographs were even av;tilDble, (Some
f
lynchings Were ildvertised days in ildvanee, and hundreds or
after the horrors of Europe's own twentieth-century history. "'#2
thousands of people gilthered from su!tounding distriets.)�· In
In generat, then, watehfulness for nonwhite resistance aod
�l
the Northern Territory of A ustralia, one government medical
corresponding readiness :o employ massively disproponiolliltc
officer wrote in 1901, "It was notorious that rhe blaekfcllows
reta!i
were shot down like crows and that no notice was t"ken/'on
polity in
::J.
way different from rhe response to the typical
climes of white citizens.
The other dimension of this coercion is ideological. If the Raci.al Contract erco tes its signatories, those parry to the Con·
But offiei
t ract, by constructing them as "white pcrsons," it also tries
Racial Conrract. In the Loekean state of nature, in the absence
to make its victims, the objects of the Contract, into the
of a consrituted iuridical and penal authority, natural lilW per
"nonwhite subpersons" it sp ecifics. This project requires labor
m its individuals rhemselves co punish wrongdoers. Those who
at botli ends, involVing the development of a depcrsonizing
show by rheir actions that they lack or have "renounced" the
conceptual apparatus through which whites must learn to see
reason of natural law and are like "wild Savage Beasts, wirh
nonwhires ood U]SO, etucially, through which nonwhites must
81
r
Ofi;.llS
THE RAC!f,:' CONTRACT
lear:; to see themselves. For the nonwhites, then, this if; somc�
being ":o..1ake hinl a non�person, Human tights ale for pcople..
thing like the intellectual equivalent of the physi cal process
Con....inee Indians their nncestors were savages, that they were
of "seasotting/' "slave breaking.." the tlim being to produce >Ln
pagan."hU Likewise, in the coloni.al enterptise, ehHdren in the
emity who aceepts subpersonhood . Fredcrick Dougl.1ss, in bis
Caribbetln, Afriea, and Asia wew taught OUt of Britlsh or
ramous first autObiography, describes the need to "darken (the]
French Or Dutch schoolbooks to see themselvcs us usphant
moral and mental vision, and, as tar as possible, to annih i l:tt e
IDut, of course, never full) colored Europeans, saved from thc
the power of reason" of the slave: "He mUst he uble to detect
barbarities of thdr OWn cultures by colonial intervention, duty
no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that
wetting "OUt ancestors, the Gaulsl" and growing up into adults
slavery is right; und he Ca n be brought to that only when he
with "black skln, "White masks!'IOl Australian Aborigine stu
ceases to be a man, "9t Originally denied education , bbeks were
dents write: "Black is, wron�d at white schools but righted
later, in the postbcllum period, given an education appropriale
by expetience. . . . nIaek is, going to white school and earning
to poste!l;;,t'tel status-the den!tll of a pnst, of history, of
home again no wiser:'I!\1\ NgIlg'i wa Thiong'o deserlbes, from
aeh ie vement-so that as far �s possible they wouid llcccpt
his experience in his native Kenyu, the "cultural bomb" of
theJr prescribed roles of servant :lnd menial laborer, comic
British imperialism, whieh prohihitcd learning in the ora l tra
coons �nd Snmbos, grateful Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas.
dition of Gikuyu and trained him a nd his schoolfellows to see
Thus in one of tbe most famous hooks from the black Ameri"
themselves .tnd their country through the alien eyes of
Call expcrienee, Carter Woodson indicts "the mis-edueatiOll
H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan: "The effect of a cultural
of the Negro."�� And as hne as the 1950S, James BaldWin could
bom b is to annihilate a people's belief in their IUlmes, in their
declare tha.t the "separate but equal" system of segregiltion
languages, in their environment, in their hcritage of struggle,
"has worked brilliantly, " for "it has allowed white people,
in their unity, in theireapacitics and ultimate ly in themselves.
\"/ith searedy any pangs of conscienee wh<.ltcvcr, to creme, in
It makes them see their past as OtIC wasteland of noo
every generation, only the Kcgro they wished to see. ,N"
achi evement and it makes them want to distanee themselves
ln the cnse of Native America ns, whose resistance was
hom that was teLand. 'Il� Racism as an ideology needs to be
largely over by the 1870S, 1I policy of cultw;;tl i.lSsimilation was
understood as aiming at the minds of nonwhites as well 3S
introduced under the slogan "Kill the Indian, bUt save the
whites, inculc.tring sub juga.tion. If the social contr:l.ct Iequires
man," aimed at the suppression and eradication of native reli·
that all citizens and persons learn to tespeet themselves and
gious beliefs and ceremonies, such as the Sioux Sun Dance.A>
each other, the Racial Contraet preserlbes nonwhite self·
Similarly, a hundred yca.rs later, Daniel Cablxi, a BJtlzillan
loathing and racial deference tn white ci.tizens. The u ltimate
Pared Indian, eomplains that " the missions kill us from
triumph of this education is that it eventually becomes possi.
within. , . . They impose upon us ,;tnother teligion, belittling
ble to characterize the Racial Contract 3S " consensual " and
the ynlues we hold. This decharll.cteriscs us to tbe poin t where
"voluntaristic" even fot nonwhites.
we lire
••
89
I\
I
\'
NATURALIZED " MERITS
inally, I want to point .out the merits of this model as a "naturalized" accouht of the actual historical record, one which has explanatory as well as norma tive aspirations. Arguably, we are in a better position to bring
F
about the (supposedly) desired political ideals if we can identify and e;xplain the obstacles to their realization. In tracking the actual moral con�ciousness of most white agents, in depicting the actual political realities nonwhites have always recog nized, the theory of the "Racial Contract" shows its superior ity to the ostensibly abstract and general, but actually "white," social contract.
The Racial "Gontract historically tracks the actual moral/political consciousness of (most) white moral agents.
Moral theory, being a branch of value theory, traditionally deals with the realm of the ideal, norms to which we must try to live up as moral agents. And political philosophy is nowadays conceived of as basically an application of ethics to the social and political realm. So it is supposed to be dealing 91
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
with ideals also. But in the first two chapters of this book, I have spent a great deal of time talking about the actual histori 'cal record and the actual norms and ideals that have prevailed in recent global history. I have been giving what, in the current jargon of philosophers, would be called a "naturalized" ,ac count, rather than an idealized account. And that is why I said from the beginning that I preferred the classic use of contract, which is seeking to describe and explain as well as to prescribe. "
But if ethics and political philosophy are focused on norms we want to endorse (ideal ideals, so to speak), what really was the point of this exercise? W hat would be the point of "naturalizing" ethics, which is explicitly the realm of the ideal? My suggestion is that by looking at the actual historically dominant moral/political consciousness and the actual his torically dominant moral/political ideals, we are better en
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
lactic Central, say-to think that deviations from the ideal have been contingent, random, theoretically opaque, or not worth the trouble to theorize. Such a visitor might conclude that all people have generally tried to live up to the norm but, given in�vitable human frailty, have sometimes fallen short. But this conclusion is, in fact, simply false. Racism and racially structured discrimination have not been deviations from the normj they have been the norm, not merely in the sense of de facto statistical distribution patterns but, as 1 emphasized at the start, in the sense of being formally codified, 'written down and proclaimed as such. From this perspective, the Ra cial Contract has underwritten the social contract, so that duties, rights, and liberties have routinely been assigned on a racially 'differentiated basis.. �o understand the actual moral practice of past and present, one needs not merely the standard abstract discussions of, say, the conflicts in people's con
abled to prescribe for society than by starting from ahistorical abstractions. In other words, the point is not to endorse this
sciences between self-interest and empathy with others but a frank appreciation of how the Racial Contract creates a
deficient consciousness and these repugnant ideals but, by recognizing their past and current influence and power and identifying their sources, to correct for them. Realizing a better future requires n?t merely admitting the ugly truth of the past-and present-but understanding the ways.. in which these realities were made invisible, acceptable to the white population. We want to know-both to describe and to
racialized moral psychology. W hites will then act in racist ways while thinkJng of themselves as acting morally. In other words, they will experience genuine cognitive difficulties in recognizing certain behavior patterns as racist, so that quite apart from questions of motivation and bad faith they will be morally handicapped simply from the conceptual point of view in seeing and doing the right thing. As I emphasized at the start, the Racial Contract prescribes, as a condition for mem bership in the polity, an epistemology of ignorance. Feminist political philosophers have documented the strik ing uniformity of opinion among the classic male theorists on the subordination of women, so that as polar as their posi tions may be on other political or theoretical questions, there is common agreement on this. Plato the idealist and Aristotle the materialist agree that women should be subordinate, as .
explain-the Circumstances that actually blocked achieve ment of the ideal raceless ideals and promoted instead the naturalized nonideal racial ideals. We want to know what went wrong in the past, is going wrong now, and is likely to continue to go wrong in the future if we do not guard against it. Now by its relative silence on the question of race, conven tional moral theory would lead the unwary student with no experience of the world-the visiting anthropologist from Ga92
93
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
do Hobbes the absolutist and Rousseau the radical democrat.! With the Racial Contract, as we have seen, there is a similar
and of white moral cognitive dysfunction. As such, it can
pattern, among the contractarians Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and their theoretical adversaries-the anticontractarian
science. For example, a useful recent survey article on "natu
potentially be studied by the new research program of cognitive ralizing" ethics by Alvin Goldman suggests three areas in
Hume, who denies that any race other than the white one h'as produced a civilization; the utilitarian Mill, who denies the applicability of his antipaternalist "harm principle" to "bar
which cognitive science may have implications for moral the
barians" and maintains that they need European colonial des potism; the historicist G. W. F. Hegel, wlw denies that Africa has any history and suggests that blacks were morally im
nation by the cultural environment of the agent; (b) judgments
proved through being enslaved.2 So the Racial Contract is "or thogonal" to the varying directions of their thought, the common assumption they can all take for granted, no matter what their theoretical divergences on other questions. There is also the evidence of silence. W here is Grotius's magisterial
On Natural Law and the Wrongness of the Conquest of the Indies, Locke's stirring Letter concerning the Treatment of the Indians, Kant's moving On the Personhood of Negroes, Mill's famous condemnatory Implications of Utilitarianism for English Colonialism, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels's outraged political Economy of Slavery?3 Intellectuals write about what interests them, what they find important, and especially if the writer is prolific-silence constitutes good prima facie evidence that the subject was not of particular interest. By their failure to denounce the great crimes insepa rable from the European conquest, or by the halfheartedness of their condemnation, or by their actual endorsement of it in some cases, most of the leading European ethical theorists reveal their complicity in the Racial Contract. W hat we need to do, then, is to identify and learn to under stand the workings of a racialized ethic. How were people able consistently to do the wrong thing while thinking that they were doing the right thing? In part, it is a problem of cognition 94
ory: (a) the "cognitive materials" used in moral thinking, such as the logic of concept application, and their possible determi about subjective welfare and how they may be affected by comparing oneself with others; and (c) the role of empathy in influencing moral feeling.4 Now it should be obvious that if racism is as central to the polity as I have argued, then it will have a major shaping effect on white cognizer:s .in all these areas. (a) Because of the intellectual atmosphere produced by the Racial Contract, whites will (in phase one) take for granted the appropriateness of concepts legitimizing the racial order, privileging them as the master race and relegating nonwhites to subpersonhood, and later (in phase two) the appropriateness of concepts that
derace the polity, denying its actual racial structuring.s (b) Because of the reciprocally dependent definitions of superior whiteness and inferior nonwhiteness, whites may consciously or unconsciously assess how they're doing by a scale that depends in part on how nonwhites are doing, since the essence of whiteness is entitlement to differential privilege vis-a.-vis nonwhites as a whole.6 (c) Because the Racial Contract requires the exploitation of nonwhites, it requires in whites the cultiva tion of patterns of affect and empathy that are only weakly, if at all, influenced by nonwhite suffering. In all three cases, then, there are interesting structures of moral cognitive distor tion that could be linked to race, and one p.opes that this new research program will be exploring some of them (though the 95
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
past record of neglect does not give any great reason for optimism). This partitioned moral concern can usefully be thought of as a kind of "Herrenvolk ethics," with the principles applicable to the white subset (the humans) mutating suitably as they ,
cross the color line to the nonwhite subset (the less-than humans). (Susan Opotow has done a detailed study of morali ties of exclusion, in which certain "individuals or groups are perceived as outside the boundary in which morql values, rules, and considerations of fairness apply"; so this '\vould be a racial version of such a morality')? One could then generate, variously, a Herrenvolk Lockeanism, where whiteness itself becomes property, nonwhites do not fully, or at all, own 'them' selves, and nonwhite labor does not appropriate nature;8 a Herrenvolk Kantianism, where nonwhites count as subper sons of considerably less than infinite value, required to give racial deference rather than equal respect to white persons, and white self-respect, correspondingly, is conceptually tied to this nonwhite deference/ and a Herrenvolk utilitarianism, where nonwhites count distributively for less than one and are deemed to suffer less acutely than whites.1O The actual details of the basic values of the particular normative theory (property rights, personhood and respect, welfare) are not im portant, since all theories can be appropriately adjusted inter nally to bring about the desired outcome: what is crucial is the theorist's adherence to the Racial Contract. Being its primary victims, nonwhites have, of course, always been aware of this peculiar schism running through the white psyche. Many years ago, in his classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison had his nameless black narrator point out that whites must have a peculiar reciprocal "construction of [their] inner eyes" which renders black Americans invisible, since they "refuse to see me." The Racial Contract includes an 96
epistemological contract, an epistemology of ignorance. "Rec ognition is a form of agreement," and by the terms of the Racial Gontract, whites have agreed not . to recognize blacks as equal, persons. Thus the white pedestrian who bumps into the black narrator at the start is a representative figure, some body "lost in a dream world." "But didn't he control that dream world-which, alas, is only too real !-and didn't he rule me out of it? .-t\nd if he had yelled for a policeman, wouldn't I have been taken for the offending one? Yes, yes, yes! "11 Simi larly, James Baldwin argues that white supremacy "forced [white] Americans into rationalizations so fantastic that they approached the pathological," generating a tortured ignorance so structured that one cannot .raise certain issues with whites "because even if I should -speak, no one would-believe me," and paradoxically, "they wOHld "not believe me precisely be cause they would know that what I said was true."12 Evasion and self-deception thus become the epistemic norm. Describing America's "national web of self-deceptions" on race, Richard Drinnon cites as an explanation Montesquieu's wry observation about African enslav :ment: ''It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians." The founding ideology of the white settler state required the conceptual erasure of those societies that had been there before: "For [a writer of the time] to have consistently regarded Indians as persons with a psychology of their own would have upended his world. lt would have meant recognizing that 'the state of nature' really had full�fledged people in it and that both it and the cherished 'civil society' had started out as lethal figments of the European imagina tion."13 An Australian historian comments likewise on the existence of "something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale" with respect to Aborigines. 14 Lewis Gor97
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
don, working in the existential phenomenological tradition, draws on Sartrean notions to .argue that in a world structured around race, bad faith necessarily becomes pervasive: "In bad faith, I flee a displeasing truth for a pleasing falsehood. I must convince myself that a falsehood is in fact true. . . . Under the model of bad faith, the stubborn racist has made a choice not to admit certain uncomfortable truths about his group and chooses not to challenge certain comfortable falsehoods about other people. . . . Since he has made this choice he w.ill resist ' whatever threatens it. . . . The more the racist lays he game of evasion, the more estranged he will make himself from his 'inferiors' and the more he will sink into the world that is required to maintain this evasion."ls In the ideal polity one seeks to know oneself and to know the world; here such knowl edge may be dangerous.
�
�
Correspondingly, the Racial Contract also explains the ac tual astonishing historical record of European atrocity against nonwhites, which quantitatively and qualitatively, in numbers and horrific detail, cumulatively dwarfs all other kinds of ethnically/racially motivated massacres put together: la ley enda negra-the black legend-of Spanish colonialism, de famatory only in its invidious singling out of the Spanish, since it would later be emulated by Spain's envious competitors, the Dutch, French, and English, seeking to create legends of their own; the killing through mass murder and disease of 9 5 percent of the indigenous population of the Americas, with recent revisionist scholarship, as mentioned, having dramatically in creased the estimates of the preconquest population, so that at roughly 100 million victims-this would easily rank as the single greatest act of genocide in human history/6 the infamous slogans, now somewhat embarrassing to a generation living under a different phase of the Contract-"Kill the nits and you'll have no lice!" as American cavalryman John Hous
�
98
advised when he shot a Sauk infant at the Wisconsin Bad Axe massacre,17 and "The only good injun is a dead injun"; the slow-motion Holocaust of African slavery, which is now esti mated by some to have claimed thirty to sixty million lives in Africa, the Middle Passage, and the "seasoning" process, even before the degradation and destruction of slave life in
the Americas; 18 t�e casual acceptance as no crime, just the necessary clearing of the territory of pestilential "varmints" and "critters," of the random killing of stray Indians in America or Aborigines �n Australia or Bushmen in South Af rica; the massively punitive European colonial retaliations
after native uprisings; the death toll from the direct and indi- . rect consequences of the forced lahor of the colonial econo mies, such as the millions '(priginal estimates as high as ten million) who died in the Belgian Congo as a r.e sult of Leopold II's quest for ;rubber, though trangely it is to Congolese rather
�
than European savagery that a "heart of darkness" is attrib uted;19 the appropriation of the nonwhite body, not merely , metaphorically (as the black body can be said to have been consumed on the slave plantations to produce European capi tal), but literally, whether as utilitarian tool or as war trophy. As utilitarian tools, Native Americans were occasionally skinned and made into bridle reins (for example by U.S. Presi dent Andrew Jackson),2° Tasmanians were killed and used as ' dog meat,21 and in World War II Jewish hair was made into cushions, and (not as well known) Japanese bones were made by some Americans into letter openers. As war trophies, Indian scalps; Vietnamese ears, and Japanese ears, gold teeth, and skulls were all collected (Life magazine carried a photograph
of a Japanese skull being used as a hood ornament on a U.S. military vehicle, and some soldiers sent skulls home as pre sents for their girlfriend s).22 To these we can add the fact that because of the penal reforms advocated by Cesare Beccaria 99
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
and others, torture was more or less eliminated in Europ e by the end of the eighteenth century, while it continued to be routinely practiced in the colonies, and on the slave plantations-whippings, castrations, disme�berments, roast ings over slow fires, being smeared with sugar, buried up to the neck, and then left for the insects to devour, being filled with gunpowder and then blown up, and so onj23 the fact that in America the medieval tradition of the auto-da-fe, the public burning, survived well into the twentieth century, with thou sands of spectators sometimes gathering for the festive occaI sion of the southern barbecue, bringing children, 'p icnic baskets, etc., and subsequently fighting over the remaih s to see who could get the toes or the knucklebones before ad journing to a celebratory dance in the eveningj24 the fact that the rules of war at least theoretically regulating intra-Europea n combat were abandoned or suspended for non-European s, so that by papal edict the use of the crossbow was initially forbid den against Christians but permitted against Islam, the dum dum (hollow-point) bullet was originally prohibited within Europe but used in the colonial wars,25 the machine gun was brought to perfection in the late nineteenth century in subju gating Africans armed usually only with spears or a few obso lete firearms, so that in the glorious 1898 British victory over the Sudan�se at Omdurman, for example, eleven thousand black warriors were killed at the cost of forty-eight British soldier s, a long-distance massacre in which no Sudanese "got closer than three hundred yards from the British positions,"26 the atomic bomb was used not once but twice against the civilia n population of a yellow people at a time when military necess ity could only questionably be cited (causing Justice Radha binod Pal, in his dissenting opinion in the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, to argue that Allied leaders should have been put on trial with the Japanese),27 We can mention the six million Jews killed in 1 00
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
the camps and ghettos of Europe and the millions of members of other "inferior" races (Romani, Slavs) killed there and by the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front by the Nazi rewriting · 28 the of the Racial Contract to make them too nonwh IteSj the in massacre and torture, rape, pattern of unpunished
twentieth -century colonial/neocolonial and in part racial wars of Algeria (during the course of which about one million Algeri ans, or one-tenth 'of the country's population, perished) and
Vietnam, illustrated by the fact that Lieutenant William Calley was the only American convicted of war crimes in Vietnam and, for his rol� in directing the mass murder of five
hundred women, children, and old men (or, more cautiously and qualifiedly, "Oriental human beings," as the deposition put it), was sentenced to likat hard labor but had his sentence quickly commuted by presidential intervention to "house ar rest" at his Fort Benning bachelor apartment, where he re ' mained for three years before "being freed on parole, then and nOW doubtless a bit puzzle � by the fuss, since, as he told the ' military psychiatrists eXlj.mining him, "he did not fe�l as if
he were killing humans but rather that they were animals with whom one could not speak or reason.";l.9 For these and many other horrors too numerous to list, the ideal Kantian (social contract) norm of the infinite value of all human life thus has to be rewritten to reflect the actual (Racial Contract) norm ofthe f �r greater value of white life, , and the corresponding crystallization of feelings of vastly dif
ferential outrage over white and nonwhite death, white and nonwhite suffering. If looking back (or sometimes just looking across), one wants to ask "But how could they ?" the answer is that it is easy once a ce,rtain social ontology has been created. Bewilderment and puzzlement show that one is taking for granted the morality of the literal social contract as a normj once one begins from the Racial Contract, the mystery evapo1 01
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
rates. The Racial Contract thus makes White moral psychol ogy transparent; one is not continually being "surprised" when one examines the historical record, because t�is is the psychol ogy the contract prescribes. (The theory of th � Racial Contract
is not cynical, because cynicism really implies theoretical breakdown, a despairing throwing up of the hands and a renun ciation of the project of understanding the world and human
evil for a mystified yearning for a prelapsarian man. The "Ra cial Contract" is simply realist-willing to look at the facts without flinching, to explain that if you start with this, then you will end up with tha t. ) Similarly, the "Racial Contract" makes the Jewlsh I
Holocaust-misleadingly designated as the Holocaust----c- om prehensible, distancing itself theoretically both from positions that would render it cognitively opaque, inexplicably sui gene ris, and from positions that would downplay the racial dimen sion and assimilate it to the undifferentiated terrorism of German fascism. From the clouded perspective of the Third World, the question in Arno Mayer's title Why Did the Heav ens Not Darken! betrays a climatic Eurocentrism, which fails to recognize that the blue skies were only smiling on Europe. The influential view he cites (not his own) is typical: "Prima facie the catastrophe which befell the Jews during the Second World War was unique in its own time and unprecedented in history. There are strong reasons to believe that the victimiza tion of the Jews was so enormous and atrocious as to be com pletely outside the bounds of all other human experience. If that is the case, what the Jews were subjected to will forever defy historical reconstruction and interpretation, let alone comprehension."30 But this represents an astonishing white amnesia about the actual historical record. Likewise, the de spairing question of how there can be poetry after Auschwitz evokes the puzzled nonwhite reply of how there could have 1 02
been poetry before Auschwitz, and after the killing fields in America, Africa, Asia. The standpoint of Native America, black Africa, colonial Asia, has always been aware that Euro pean civilization rests on extra-European barbarism, so that the Jewish Holocaust, the "Judeocide" (Mayer), is by no means a bolt from the blue, an unfathomable anomaly in the develop
ment of the West, but unique only in that it represents use of the Racial Contract against Europeans. I say this in no way to diminish its horror, of course, but rather to deny its singular ity, to establish its conceptual identity with other policies carried out by Europe in non-Europe for hundreds of years, but using methods less efficient than those made possible by
c
advanced mid-twentieth-century industrial society. . In the twilight world of the Cold War, the term "blowback" � was used in American spy jargon to refer to "u expected�and negative-effects at home that result from covert operations overseas," particularly from (what were called) "black" opera tions of assassination and government. 6verthrow.31 A case can
be made for seeing the "blowback" ho.m ,the overseas ("white") operations of European conquest, settlement, slave�y, and co lonialism as consolidating in the modern European mind a racialized ethic; that, in combination with traditional anti Semitism, eventually boomeranged, returning to E�rope itself to facilitate the Jewish Holo�aust. Forty years ago, in his clas
sic polemic Discourse on Colonialism; Aime Cesaire pointed out the implicit double standard in European "outrage" at Nazism: "It is Nazism, yes, but . . . before [Europeans] were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they .tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it,
shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples . . . . [Hitler's crime is] the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs 1 03
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THE RACIAL CONTRACT
of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa. 11 32 The Racial Contract continues, with a truly grisly irony, to manifest itself even in the condemnation of the consequences of the Racial Contract, since the racial mass murdd of Europe ans is placed on a different moral plane than the racial mass murder of non-Europeans. Similarly, Kiernan argues that King Leopold's Congo "cast before it the shadow that was to turn into Hitler's empire inside Europe. . . . Attitudes acquired dur ing the subjugation of the other continents now reproduced themselves at home."33 So in this explanatory framework,
unlike the subsumption of the death camps under a der�ced fascism, the racial dimension and the establishment of Jewi�h nonwhite subpersonhood are explanatorily crucial. If, as ear lier argued, the Jews were by this time basically "off-white". rather than "nonwhite," assimilated into the population of persons, the Nazis could be said to be in local violation of the global Racial Contract by excluding from the club of White
ness groups already grudgingly admitted, by doing to Europe ans (even borderline ones) what (by then) was only supposed to be done to non-Europeans. Postwar writings on this subject by Europeans, both in Eu rope and in North America, have generally sought to block these conceptual connections, representing Nazi policy as more deviant than it actually was/ for example, in the Historik erstreit, the German debate over the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust. The dark historical record of European imperialism has been forgotten. Robert Harris's chilling 1992 novel Father land, a classic in the alternative-worlds science fiction genre, depicts a future in which the Nazis have won World WaI II and have eradicated from the record their killing of the Jews, so that only scattered evidence survives.34 But in certain re spects we live in an actual, nonalternative world where the victors of racial killing really did win and have reconstructed 1 04
and falsified the record accordingly. Holocaust denial and Ho locaust apologia thus long precede the post- I 945 period, going back all the way to the original response to the revelations
of Las Casas's Devastation of the Indies in 1 5 42.35 Yet, with few exceptions, only recently has revisionist white historiogra phy belatedly begun to catch up with this nonwhite conceptualization-hence the title of David StannaId's book on the Columbian conquest, American Holocaust; the related
title of an anthology (cited by Noam Chomsky in his Year 501) put out i n Germany i n anticipation o f the quincentenaIY, Das Fiinfhundert-jiihrige Reich (Five-hundred year reich); and the
Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist's recently translateti "Extermi nate All the Brutes, which explicitly links the famous injunc tion of Conrad's Kurtz to Nazi pr�ctice: "Auschwitz was the "
modern industrial application of a policy of extermination on which European world domination had long since rested. . / . And when what had been done in the heart of darkness was repeated in the heart of Europe, no one recognized it. No one
wished to admit what everyone kn�w. . . . · It is not knowledge ' t we lack. What is missing is the ' c�urage o understand what " we know and draw conclusions."36 The debate will doubtless continue for many decades to come. But on a closing note, it does not seem inappropriate to get the opinion
�f
that well-known moral and political theorist Adolf Hitler (surely a man with so �ething worthwhile to say on the subject), who, looking ahead in a 1 9 3 2 speech, "explicitly located his Lebensraum project within the long trajectory of European racial conquest."37 As he explained to his presumably attentive audience, you cannot understand "the economically privileged supremacy of the white race over the rest of the world" except by relating it to
II
a political
concept of supremacy which has been peculiar to the white 1 05
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
race as a natural phenomenon for many centuries and which it has upheld as such to the outer world": Take for example India: England did not acquire India i� a lawful and legitimate manner, but rather without regar d to the natives' wishes, views, or declarations of rights. . . . Just as Cortes or Pizarro demanded for themselves Central America and the northern states of South America not on the basis of any legal claim, but from the absolute, inborn feeling of superiority of the white race. The settlement of , the North American continent was similarly a consequence not of any higher claim in a democratic or international sense, but rather of a consciousness of what is right which had its sole roots in the conviction of the superiority 'and thus the right of the white race. So his plan was just to uphold this inspiring Western tradition, this racial "right to dominate (Herrenrecht)," this "frame of mind . . . which has conquered the world" for the white race, since "from this political view there evolved the basis for the economic takeover of the rest of the world. "38 In other words, he saw himself as simply doing at home what his fellow Euro peans had long been doing abroad. Finally, the theory of the Racial Contract; by separating whiteness as phenotype/racial classification from W hiteness as a politicoeconomic system committed to white supremacy, opens a theoretical space for white repudiation of the Con tract. (One could then distinguish "being white" from "be ing W hite.") There is an interesting point of contrast here with the social contract. One obvious early objection to the notion of society's being based on a "contract" was that even if an original found ing contract had existed, it wouldn't bind later generations, 1 06
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
who hadn't signed it. There have been various attempts by contractarians to get around this problem, the best-known being Locke's notion of "tacit consent."39 The idea is that if you choose as an adult to stay in your country of birth and make use of its benefits, then you have "tacitly" consented to obey the government and thus to be bound by the contract. But David Hume is famously scathing about this claim, saying that the notion of tacit consent is vacuous where there is no real possibility of opting out by moving to a no-longer-existent state of nature or of being able to emigrate when you have no particular skills and no other language but your mother tongue.40 You stay because you have no real choice. But for the Racial Contract, it is different. There is a real choice for whites, though admittedly a difficult one. The rejec tion of the Racial Contract and the normed inequities of the white polity does not require one to leave the country but to speak out and struggle against the terms of the Contract. So in this case, moral/political judgments about one's "consent" to the legitimacy of the politicaL system and conclusions about one's effectively hav in� become a.signatory to the "contract," are apropos�and so are judgments . of one's culpability. By
unquestioningly "going along with things," by accepting all the privileges of whiteness with concomitant complicity in the system of white supremacy, one can be said to have con sented to W hiteness. And in fact there have always been praiseworthy whites anticolonialists, abolitionists, opponents of imperialism, civil rights activists, resisters of apartheid-who have recognized the existence and immorality of W hiteness as a political sys tem, challenged its legitimacy, and insofar as possible, refused the Contract. (Inasmuch as mere skin color will automatically continue to privilege them, of course, this identification with the oppressed can usually be only partial.) Thus the interesting 1 07
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
moral/political phenomenon of the white renegade, the race traitor in the language of the Klan (accurate enough insofar as "race" here denotes W hiteness),4l the colonial explorer who "goes native," the soldier in French Indochina who contracts ' .'
Ie mal iaune, the yellow disorder (the perilous illness of "attachment , , . to Indochina's landscape, people , , . and cul ture"),42 the nigger-, Injun-, or Jew-lover. These individuals betray the white polity in the name of a broader definition of the polis-"Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity"43thus becoming "renegades from the States, traitors to ,their . country and to civilization," "a white Injun, and there's noth ing more despicable."44 For as the term signifies, where moral ity has been racialized, the practice of a genuinely color-blind , ethic requires the repudiation of one's Herrenvolk standing and its accompanying moral epistemology, thus eliciting the appropriate moral condemnation from the race loyalists and white signatories who have not repudiated either. The level of commitment and sacrifice will, of course, vary. Some have written exposes of the hidden truth of the Racial Contract-Las Casas's Devastation of the Indies; abolitionist literature; the French writer Abbe Raynal's call for black slave revolution; Mark Twain's writings for the Anti-Imperialist League (usually suppressed as an embarrassment by his biogra phers, as Chomsky notes);45 Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's principled oppositional journalism against their countryis co lonial war. Some have tried to save some of its victims-the Underground Railroad; Aborigines Protection Societies; Oskar Schindler's Jewish charges; Don Macleod, the Australian white man "accepted as an honorary Aborigine, who helped organize the first Aboriginal strike in the Pilbara in 1 946";46 Hugh Thompson, the American helicopter pilot who threatened to fire on his fellow soldiers unless they stopped massacring Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. 47 Some have actually given 1 08
their lives for the struggle-the white American antislavery revolutionary John Brown; the white members of the African National Congress who died trying to abolish apartheid. But the mere fact of their existence shows what was possible, throwing into contrast and rendering open for moral judgment the behavior of their fellow whites, who chose to accept W hite ness instead.
The Racial Contract has always been recognized by nonwhites as the real determinant of (most) white moral/politi�al practice and thus as the real moral/political agreement to be challenged.
If the epistemology of the signatorie;l, the agents, of the Racial Contract requires evasion and denial of the realities of race, the epistemology of the victims, the objects, of the Racial Contract is, unsurprisingly, focused on these realities them selves. (So there is a reciprocal relationship, the Racial Con tract tracking white moral/political consciousness, the reaction to the Racial Contract tracking nonwhite moral/po litical consciousness and stimuiating a puzzled investigation of that white moral/political consciousness.) The term " stand point theory" is now routinely used to signify the notion that in understanding the workings of a system of oppression, a perspective from the bottom up is more likely to be accurate than one from the top down. W hatis involved here, then, is a "racial" version of standpoint theory, a perspectival cognitive advantage that is grounded in the phenomenological experi ence of the disjuncture between official (white) reality and actual (nonwhite) experience, the "double-consciousness" of which W. E. B. Du Bois spoke.48 This differential racial experi ence generates an alternative moral and political perception of social reality which is encapsulated in the insight from the 1 09
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
black American folk tradition I have used as the epigraph of this book: the central realization, summing up the Racial Contract, that "when white people say 'Justice,' they mean
'Just Us.' " Nonwhites have always (at least in first encounter �') 'been bemused or astonished by the invisibility of the Racial Con tract to whites, the fact that whites have routinely talked in
universalist terms even when it has been quite clear that the scope has really been limited to themselves. Correspondingly, nonwhites, with no vested material or psychic interest in the ' Racial Contract-objects rather than subjects of it, vie�ing it from outside rather than inside, subpersons rather than
persons-are (at least before ideological conditioning) able to see its terms quite clearly. Thus the hypocrisy of the racial polity is most transparent to its victims. The corollary is that nonwhite interest in white moral and political theory has
necessarily been focused less on the details of the particular competing moral and political candidates (utilitarianism ver
sus deontology versus natural rights theory; liberalism versus conservatism versus socialism) than in the unacknowledged Racial Contract that has usually framed their functioning. The variable that makes the most difference to the fate of nonwhites is not the fine- or even coarse-grained conceptual divergences of the different theories themselves (all have their Herrenvolk variants), but whether or not the subclause invok ing the Racial Contract, thus putting the theory into Herren volk mode, has been activated. The details of the moral theories thus become less important than the metatheory, the Racial Contract, in which they are. embedded. The crucial question is whether nonwhites are counted as full persons, part of the population covered by the moral operator, or not. The preoccupation of nonwhite moral and political thought
with issues of race, puzzling alike to a white liberalism predi110
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
cated on colorless atomic individuals and a white Marxism predicated on colorless classes in struggle, thus becomes read ily explicable once the reality of the Racial Contract has been conceded. What is involved is neither a simple variant of tradi tional European nationalism (to which it is sometimes assimi lated) nor a mysterious political project unfolding in some alien theoretical space (as in the mutually opaque language games postulated by postmodernism). The unifying concep tual space within which both orthodox white moral/political philosophy and unorthodox nonwhite moral/political philoso phy are developing is the space that locates the (mythical) social contract on the same plane as the (real) Racial Contract, being predicated on the translation of "race" into the mutually commensurable and mutually intelligible language of per sonhood, and thereby demonstrating that these are contiguous, indeed identical, spaces-not so much a different conceptual universe as a recognition of the dark matter of the existing one. Personhood can be taken for �ranted by some, while it (and all that accompanies it) has to be fought for by. others, so that the general human p'aliti�l project of struggling for a better society involves a diffe ient trajectory for nonwhites. It is no accident, then, that l:�e moral an'd political theory
and practical struggles of nonwhites have so often centered on race, the marker of personhood and subpersonhood, inclusion within or exclusion from the racial polity. The formal con tractarian apparatus I have tried to develop will not be articu lated as such. But the crucial notions of the person/subperson differentiation, the correspondIngly racially structured moral code (Herrenvolk ethics), and the white-supremacist character of the polity can be found in one form or another everywhere in Native American, black American, and Third and Fourth World anticolonial thought. Sitting Bull asks: " What treaty that the whites have kept 111
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
has the red man broken ? Not one. W hat treaty that the white man ever made with us have they kept ? Not one. W hen I was a boy the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land. . . . W here are our lands? W ho owns them? W hat .white man can say I ever stole his land or a penny of his m�n'!.ey ? Yet, they say I am a thief. . . . W hat law have I broken ?' Is it
wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red? " Ward Churchill, another Native American, characterizes European settlers as a self-conceived "master race." David Walker complains that whites consider blacks "not of the human family," forcing blacks "to prove to ·them ourselves, that we are MEN. " W. E. B. Du Bois represents blacks
as a "tertium quid, " "somewhere between men and cattle," comments that "Liberty, Justice, and Right" are marked '''For W hite People Only,' " and suggests that "the statement 'I am white'" is becoming "the one fundamental tenet of our practi cal morality." Richard Wright analyzes "the ethics of living Jim Crow." Marcus Garvey concludes that blacks are "a race
without respect." Jawaharlal Nehru claims that British policy in India is "that of the herrenvolk and the master race." Martin Luther King Jr. describes the feeling of "forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness.' " Malcolm X asserts that
America "has not only deprived us of the right to be a citizen, she has deprived us of the right to be human beings, the right to be recognized and respected as men and women. . . . We are fighting for recognition as human beings." Frantz Fanon maps a colonial world divided between "two different species," a "governing race" and "zoological" natives. Aime Cesaire ar
gues that "the colonizer . . . in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal. . . . colonization 'thingification.' " Australian Aborigines in a =
I 9 82 protest statement at the Commonwealth Games in Bris bane point out that "since the W hite invasion . . . [o]ur human112
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
ity is being degraded and our history distorted by strangers. . . . Before the World, we accuse W hite Australia (and her Mother, England) of crimes against humanity and the planet. The past two centuries of colonisation is proof of our accusation. We ' hereby demand yet again recognition of our humanity and our land rights."49 The central moral commonality uniting all their experiences is the reality of racial subordination, necessarily generating a different moral topography from the one standardly examined in white ethical discourse. Correspondingly, the polity was usually thought of in racial terms, as white ruled, and this perspective would become global in the period of formal colonial administration. Political theory is in part about who the main actors are, and for this unacknowledged polity they are neither the atomic individuals of classic liberal thought nor the classes of Marxist theory but races. The various native and colonial peoples' attempts (usually unsuccessful, too little and too late ) to forge a racial unity-Pan-Indianism, Pan-Africanism, Pan·Arabism, Pan Asianism, Pan-Islamism-arose in response to an already achieved white unity, a Pan-Europeanism formalized andcin corporated by the terms of the Racial Contract. In the period of de jure global white supremacy, of colonial ism and slavery, this solidarity w:as clearly perceived by whites also. "That race is everything, is-sitp.ply a fact�" writes Scots man Robert Knox in The Races of Men ( I 8 5 0),50 and theories of the necessity of racial struggle, race war, against the subordi nate races are put forward as obvious. Darwin's work raised hopes in some quarters that natural selection (perhaps with a little help from its friends) would sweep away the remaining inferior races, as it had already clone so providentially in the Americas and Tasmania, so that .the planet as a whole could be cleared for white settlement Y And after that only the sky would be the limit . In fact, even the sky would not be the 113
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
limit, for there was always the solar system. Cecil Rhodes dreamed that perhaps he could "annex the planets" for Britain: ,, "Where there is space, there is hope. 52 But alas, this noble dream was not to be realized. Even with encouragement, nonwhites did not die fast enough. So whites had to settle for colonial rule over stubbornly growing �ative populations, while of course keeping a watchful eye out for both rebellion and subversive notions of self-government. Wit ness the various colored perils-red (Native American, that is), black, and yellow-that have haunted the European and Euro-implanted imagination. "Europe, fJ Kiernan comments, "thought of its identity in terms of race or color and plagued itself with fears of the Yellow Peril or a Black Peril-boomer ang effects, as they might be called, of a W hite Peril from which the other continents were more tangibly suffering."53 The political framework is quite explicitly predicated on the notion that whites everywhere have a common interest in maintaining global white supremacy against insurrections conceived of in racial terms. At the turn of the century, Europe ans were worried about the . "vast ant-heap" filled with "soldier-ants" of China, while "similar fears were in the air about a huge black army," threatening a race war of revenge led by "dusky Napoleons. "54 Though there were occasional breaches for strategic national advantage, international white racial solidarity was generally demonstrated in the joint actions to suppress and isolate slave rebellions and colonial uprisings: the boycott of Haiti, the only successful slave revolution in history (and, noncoincidentally, today the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere), the common intervention against the 1 899-1 900 Boxer. rebellion in China, the concern raised by the 1 905 Japanese victory over Russia. As late as the early twentieth century, books were still being published with such warning titles as The Passing of 114
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
the Great Race and The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy.55 Intra-European differences and conflicts were real enough but would be quickly put aside in the face of the nonwhite threat: "In the course of their rivalries Europeans exchanged many hard words, and sometimes abused each other in order to please a non-European people. . . . But when it came to any serious colonial upheaval, white men felt their kinship, and Europe drew together . . . . Above all, and very remarkably, despite innumerable crises over rival claims the European countries managed from the War of American Independence onward to avoid a single colonial war among themselves."56 This unity ended in the twentieth century with the outbreak of World War I, which was in part an interimperialist war over competing colonial claims. But despite nonwhite agitation and military participation (largely as cannon fodder) in the armies of their respective mother countries, the postwar settlement led not to decolonization but to a territorial redistribution among the colonial powers themselves. ("OK, I'll take this one, and you can take that one.") In the interwar years Japan's Pan-Asiatic Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was seen by most white Western leaders as a threat to global white supremacy. Indeed, as late as World War II, the popular Ameri can writer Pearl Buck had to wain her readers that colonized peoples would not continue to p�t up with global white domi nation, and that unless there -was change their discontent would lead to "the �ongest of human,wars . . . the war between the white man and his world and the colored man and his world."57 Corresponding to this global white solidarity transcending national boundaries, the virtual white polity, nonwhites' com mon interest in abolishing the Racial Contract manifested itself in patterns of partisan emotional identification which from a modern, more nationalistic perspective now seem quite 115
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
bizarre. In 1879, for example, when the King of Burma learned of the Zulu defeat of a British army at Isandhlwana, he immedi ately announced his intention of marching on Rangoon.58 In 1905 Indians cheered the Japanese victory over the czar's (white) armies in the Russo-Japanese war.59 In the Sp�nish American War, black Americans raised doubts about the point of being "a black man in the army of the white man sent to kill the brown man," and a few blacks actually went over to the side of Emilio Aguinaldo's Filipino forces.6o After Pearl Harbor, the ominous joke circulated in the American press of a black sharecropper who comments to his white boss, "By the way, Captain, I hear the Japs done declared war on you white folks"; black civil rights militants demanded the . li double-VIC t ory," "V'lctory at H ome as We 11 as Abroad"; Japanese intelligence considered the possibility of an alliance with black Americans in a domestic colored front against white supremacy; and white Americans worried about black loy alty.61 The 1954 Vietnamese victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu (like the Japanese capture of Singapore in World War II) was in part seen as a racial triumph, the defeat of a white by a brown people, a blow against the arrogapce of global white supremacy. So on the level of the popular consciousness of nonwhites particularly in the first phase of the Racial Contract, but linger ing on into the second phase-racial self-identification was deeply embedded, with the notion that nonwhites everywhere were engaged in some kind of common political struggle, so that a victory for one was a victory for all. The different battles around the world against slavery, colonialism, jim crow, the "color bar," European imperialism, apartheid were in a sense all part of a common struggle against the Racial Contract . As Gary Okihiro points out, what came into existence was "a global racial formation that complemented and buttressed the 116
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
"trans economic and political world-system," thus generating world this is It 62 national identities of white and nonwhite." Bois was this moral and political reality-that W. E. B. Du ent "To statem ist describing in his famous 1900 Pan-African twentieth the Nations of the World": "The problem of the he would as since, century is the problem of the color line," but clear later point out, too many have accepted "that tacit the alone race white modern philosophy which assigns to the . . . will hegemony of the world and assumes that other races s or die white the of either be content to serve the interests world that out before their all-conquering march."63 It is this rence, a Confe esia) later produced the 1 9 5 5 Bandung (Indon "under meeting of twenty-nine Asian and African nations, the , whose phrase t's dogs of the human race" in Richard Wrigh such decision to discuss "racialism and colonialism" caused even that ng meeti consternation in the West at the time,64 the ment. tually led to the formation of the Non-Aligned Move on of creati the And it is this world that stimulated, in 1975, alian the World Council" of Indigenous Peoples, uniting Austr s.65 Indian ican Aborigines, New Zealand Maoris, and Amer ry If to white readers this intellectual world, only half a centu a is it pts, conce distant, now seems like a universe of alien act in tribute to the success of the r.ewritten Racial Contr domi white that so transforming the terms of public discol,ll�e ov points nation is now conceptually invisible. A.s Leon Poliak ean soil, Europ (on out, the embarrassment of the death camps sanitiza anyway) led the postwar European intelligentsia to a aberrant the e tion of the past record, in which racism becam r Gobi invention of scapegoat figures such as Joseph-Arthu to made thus is ht neau: "A vast chapter of western' thoug corre disappear by sleight of hand, anq this conjuring trick to the level, orical sponds, on the psychological or psycho�hist embarcollective suppression of troubling memories and 117
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
rassing truths."66 That the revival of Anglo-American political philosophy takes place in this period, the present epoch of the de facto Racial Contract, partially explains its otherworldly race insensitivity. The history of imperialism, colonialism, and genocide, the reality of systemic racial exclusion, are ob� fuscated in seemingly abstract and general categories that originally were restricted to white citizens. But the overtly political battles-for emancipation, decolo nization, civil rights, land rights-were only part of this strug gle. The terms of the Racial Contract norm nonwhite persons themselves, establishing morally, epistemically, and aestheti � cally their ontological inferiority. To the extent that nonwhites . accept this, to the extent that they also were signatories to the Contract, there is a corollary personal dimension to this struggle which is accommodated with difficulty, if at all, in the categories of mainstream political philosophy. Operating on the terrain of the social contract and thus taking personhood for granted, failing to recognize the reality of the Racial Con tract, orthodox political theory has difficulty making sense of the multidimensionality of oppositional nonwhite political thought. What does it require for a subperson to assert himself or herself politically? To begin with, it means simply, or not so simply, claiming the moral status of personhood. So it means challenging the white-constructed ontology that has deemed one a "body impolitic," an entity not entitled to assert per sonl:'lOod in the first place. In a sense one has to fight an internal battle before even advancing onto the ground of external com bat. One has to overcome the internalization of subpersonhood prescribed by the Racial Contract and recognize one's own humanity, resisting the official category of despised aboriginal, natural slave, colonial ward. One has to learn the basic self respect that can casually be assumed by Kantian persons, those 118
J
h is denied to subp privileged by the Racial Contract, but whic , the importance of ersons. Particularly for blacks, ex-slaves respect from whites is developing self-respect and demanding "how a man was made crucial. Frederick Douglass recounts how a slave was made a slave " ana promises "you shall see this struggle is still in a man 67 But a hundred years later like men ," wrote James progress. "Negroes want to be treat ed ghtforward statement, Baldwin in the I 9 5 0S, "a perfectly strai have mastered Kant, cont aining only seven words. People who Bible find this state Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the ment utterly impenetrable."6B be an epistemic di Linked with this personal struggle will racially mystificatory mension, cognitive resistance to the reconstruction of past aspects of white theory, the painstaking ial gaps and erase the and present necessary to fill in the cruc pean worldview. One slanders of the globally dominant Euro powers, to develop has to learn to trust one's own cognitive explanation, overarch one's own concepts, insights, modes of hegemony of concep ing theories, and to oppose the epistemic rt and suppress the tual frameworks designed in part to thwa think against the gra n. exploration of such matters; one has to concealed by the RaCIal There are excavations of the histories rican, African and Contract: Native American, black Ame rization of their pasts, Asian and Pacific investigation and valo . . agery" and state-ofg1Vmg the lie to the description. nf "sav ,, istory. 69 The exposure nature existence of "peoples without.h · rism, not-so-innocent of the misrepresentations of Euro cent is thus part of the "white lies" and "white mythologies," od.7° The long hi��ory political project of reclaiming personho oppositional tradltlon, of what has been called, in the black ssary political response "vindicationist" scholarship,71 is a nece , which has no corre to the fabrications of the Racial Contract c. ontract because Eurolate in the political theory of the social
>
�
.
-
119
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
peans were in cultural control of their own past and, so, could be confident it would not be misrepresent ed (or, perhaps better, that the misrepresentations would be their own). Finally, the soma tic aspect of the Racial Contract-the nec essary reference it makes to the body-ex plains the body poli tics that nonwhites have often incorporated into their struggle. Global white supremacy denies subperson s not merely moral and cognitive but also aesthetic parity. Particularly for the black body, phenotypically most distant from the Caucasoid somatic norm, the implications often are the attempt to trans form oneself as far as possible into an imit ation of the whit body.72 Thus the assertion of full black personhood has also sometimes manifested itself in the self-c onscious repudiation of somatic transformation and the proc lamation "Black is beautiful ! " For mainstream political philo sophy this is merely a fashion statement; for a theory informed by the Racial Con tract, it is part of the political project of recla iming personhood. ,
�
The "Racial Contract" as a theory is explanatorily superior to the raceless social contract in accounting for the political and moral
realities of the world and in helping to guide normative theory.
The "Racial Contract" as a naturalized acco unt (henceforth simply the "Racial Contract") is theoretic ally superior to the raceless social contract as a model of the actual world and, correspondingly, of what needs to be done to reform it. I therefore advocate the supplementation of stand ard social contract discussions with an account of the "Racial Contract. " It might be replied that I am making a kind of II category mistake," since even if my claims abou t the centrality of racism to recent global history are true, modern contractarian ism has long since given up real-world expl anatory pretensions, 1 20
being hypothetical, subjunctive exercises in ideal theory. So the fact that actual societies were not based on these norms, even if true, and unfortunate, is simply irrelevant. These are just two different kinds of projects. The discussion at the beginning should have made clear why I think this answer misses the point. Insofar as the moral theory and political philosophy of present-day contractarian ism are trying to prescribe ideals for a just society, which are presumably intended to help transform our present nonideal society, it is obviously important to get clear what the facts are. Moral and political prescription will depend in part on empirical claims and theoretical generalizations, accounts of what happened in the past and what is happening now, as well as more abstract views about how society and the state work and where political power is located. If the facts are radically different from those that are conventionally represented, the prescriptions are also likely to be radically different. Now as I pointed out at the start, and indeed throughout, the absence from most white moral/political philosophy of discussions of race and white supremacy would lead one to think that race and racism have been marginal to the history of the West. And this belief is reinforced by the mainstream conceptualizations of the polity themselves, which portray it as essentially raceless, whether in the dominant view of an individualist liberal democracy, o � in the minority radical Marxist view of a class society. So it is not that mainstream con tractarians have no picture. (Indeed it is impossible to theo rize without some picture.) Rather, they have an actual (tacit) picture, which, in its exclusion or marginalization of race and its typically sanitized, whitewashed, and amnesiac account of European imperialism and settlement, is deeply flawed and misleading. So the powerful image of the idealized contract, in the absence of an explicit counterimage, continues to shape 1 21
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
our descriptive as well as normative theorizations. By provid ing no history, contemporary contractarianism encourages its audience to fill in a mystified history, which turns out to look oddly like the (ostensibly) repudiated history in the original contract itself ! No one actually believes nowadays, of course, that people formally came out of the wilderness and signed a contract. But there is the impression that the modern European
nation-states were not centrally affected by their imperial history and that societies such as the United States were founded on noble moral principles meant to include everyone, , but unfortunately, there were some deviations. 73 The "Racial Contrac t " explodes this picture as mythical, identifying it as
itself an artifact of the Racial Contract in the second, de facto phase of white suprema cy. ThUS-in the standard array of metaphors of perceptual/conceptual revolution-it effects a gestalt shift, reversing figure and ground, switching paradigms, inverting "norm" and "deviation," to emphasize that non white racial exclusion from personhood was the actual norm. Racism, racial self-identification, and race thinking are then not in the least "surprising," "anomalous," "puzzling," incon gruent with Enlightenment European humanism, but required by the Racial Contract as part of the terms for the European appropriation of the world. So in a sense s tandatd contractarian discussions are fundamentally misleading, because they have things backward to begin with: what has usually been taken (when it has been noticed at all) as the radst "exception" has really been the rule; what has been taken as the "rule " the ' ideal norm, has really been the exception. The second, related reason that the "Racial Contract" should be part of the necessary foundation for contemporary political theory is that our theorizing and moralizing a bout the sociopolitical facts are affected in characteristic ways by social structure. There is a reflexiveness to political theory, 1 22
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
in which it theorizes about itself and later theorists critique the blindnesses of earlier ones. The classic texts of the central thinkers of the Western political tradition-for example, Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Burke, Marx-typically provide not merely n�rmative judgments but mappings of social ontologies and politi �al epistemologies which explain why the normative judgments of others have gone astray. These theorists recog nized that to bring about the ideal polity, one needs to under stand how the structure and workings of the actual polity may interfere with our perception of the social truth. Our characteristic patterns of understanding and misunder standing of the world are themselves influenced by the way the world is and by the way we ourselves are; whether naturally or as shaped and molded by that world. So one needs criteria for political knowing, whether through penetrating the illusory appearances of this empirical world
(Plato), through learning to discern natural law (Hobbes, Locke), through rejecting abstraction for the accumulated wis dom of "prejudice" (Burke), or through demystifying oneself of bourgeois and patriarchal ideology (Marxism, feminism). Particularly for alternative, oppositionai theory (as with the
last two), the claim will be that an oppressive polity character ized by group domination distorts our cognizing in ways that themselves need to be theorized about . We are blinded to realities that we should see, taking for granted as natural what are in fact human-created structures. So we need to see differ ently, ridding ourselves of class and ·. gender bias, coming to
recognize as political what we ha'd previously thought of as apolitical or personal, doing conceptual innovation, reconceiv ing the familiar, looking with new . eyes at the old world around us. Now if the "Racial Contract",is right, existing conceptions of the polity are foundationally deficient. There is obviously 1 23
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
all the difference in the world between saying the system is basically sound despite some unfortunate racist deviations, and saying that the polity is racially structured, the state white-supremacist, and races themselves significant existents that an adequate political ontology needs to accommodate. So the dispute would be not merely about the facts but about why these facts have gone so long unapprehended and untheo rized in white moral/political theory. Could it be that member ship in the Herrenvolk, the race privileged by this political system, tends to prevent recognition of it as a political system? ' Indeed, it could. So not only would meeting this political challenge imply a radically different "metanarrative" of the history that has brought us to this point, but it would also require, as I have sketched, a rethinking and reconceptualiza tion of the existing conventional moral/political apparatus and a self-consciously reflexive epistemic. examination of how this
deficient apparatus has affected the moral psychology of whites and directed their attention away from certain realities. By its crucial silence on race and the corresponding opacities of its conventional conceptual array, the raceless social contract and the raceless world of contemporary moral and political theory render mysterious the actual political issues and con cerns that have historically preoccupied a large section of the world's population. Think of the rich colorful tapestry over the last two centu ries of abolitionism, racial vindicationism, aboriginal land claims, antiimperial and anticolonial movements, antiapart heid struggle, searches to reclaim racial and cultural heritages, and ask yourself what thread of it ever appears within the bleached weave of the standard First World political philosophy text . It is undeniable (one would think) that these struggles are political, but dominant categories obscure our understand ing of them. They seem to be taking place in a different concep1 24
.
tual space from the one inhabited by mainstream political theory. One will . search in vain for them in most standard histories and contemporary surveys of Western political thought. The recent advent of discussions of "multicul turaY-sm" is welcome, but what needs to be appreciated is that these are issues of political power, not just mutual misconcep tions resulting from the clash of cultures. To the extent that "race" is assimilated to " ethnicity," white supremacy remains unmentioned, and the historic Racial Contract-prescribed connection between race and personhood is ignored, these discussions, in my opinion, fail to make the necessary drastic theoretical correction. Thus they still take place within a conventional, if expanded, framework. If I am right, what needs to be recognized is that side by side with the existing political structures familiar to all of us, the standard subject matter of political theory-absolutism and constitutionalism, dictatorship and democracy, capitalism and socialism-there has also been an unnamed global political structure-global
white suprem a cy-and these struggles are in part struggles against this system. Until the system is named and seen as such, no serious theoretical appr!!ciation of the significance of these phenomena is possible. Another virtue of the i'Racial Contract" is that it simultane ously recognizes the reality of race (causal power, theoretical centrality) and demystifies race (positing race as con structed),74 Historically, the most influential theories of race have themselves been racist, varieties of more or less sophisti cated biological determiniSm, �rom naive pre-Darwinian speculations to the later more elaborated views of nineteenth century Social Darwinism and twentieth-century Nazi Ras senkunde, race ,science. To speak of "race theory" in the offi cially nonracist climate of t,Oday is thus likely to trigger alarm bells: hasn't it been proven that race is unreal ? But it is a false 1 25
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
dichotomization to assume that the only alternatives are race as nonexistent and race as biological essence. Contemporary "critical race theorY"-of which this book could be seen as an example-adds the adjective specifically to differentiate
white supremacy, thus making conceptual room for "white renegades" and "race traitors." Anfi its aim is not to replace one Racial Contract with another of a different color but ulti mately to eliminate race (not as innocent human variety but
itself from the essentialist views of the past .75 Race is sociopo litical rather than biological, but it is nonetheless real.
as ontological superiority and inferiority, as differential enti tlement and privilege) altogether. l Corresponslingly, the "Racial Contract" demystifies the uniqueness of -white racism (for those who, understandably,
Thus, on the one hand, unlike mainstream white theory, liberal and radical, the "Racial Contract" sees that "race" and "white supremacy" are themselves critical theoretical terms that must be incorporated into the vocabulary of an adequate sociopolitical theory, that society is neither just a collection
see Europeans as intrinsically W hite) by locating it as the contingent outcome of a particular set of circumstances. It is proper, given both the historical record and the denial of it
of atomic individuals nor just a structure of workers and capi talists. On the other hand, the "Racial Contract" demystifies race, distancing itself from the "oppositional" biological deter minisms (melanin theory, "sun people" and "ice people") and
be the polemical focus of critique. But it is important not to lose sight of the fact that other subordinate Racial Contracts exist which do not involve white/nonwhite relations. In a
occasional deplorable anti-Semitism of some recent elements of the black tradition, as the 1 9 60s promise of integration fails and intransigent social structures and growing white recalci trance are increasingly conceptualized in naturalistic terms. The "Racial Contract" thus places itself within the sensible mainstream of moral theory by not holding people responsible for what they cannot help. Even liberal whites of good will are sometimes made uneasy by racial politics,. because an un sophisticatedly undifferentiated denunciatory vocabulary ("white") does not seem to allow for standard political/moral distinctions between a politics of choice-absolutist and democrat, fascist and liberal-for which it is rational that we should be held responsible, and a skin color and phenotype that, after all, we cannot help. By recognizing it as a political system, the "Racial Contract" voluntarizes race in the same way that the social contract voluntarizes the creation of soci ety and the state. It distinguishes between whiteness as pheno type/genealogy and W hiteness as a political commitment to 1 26
until recently, that white racism and white W hiteness should
sense, the "Racial Contract" decolorizes W hiteness by de taching it from whiteness, thereby demonstrating that in a parallel universe it could have been Yellowness, Redness, Brownness, or Blackness. Or, alternatively phrased, we could have had a yellow, red, brown, or black W hiteness: Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations. That it is, is illustrated by the only serious twentieth century challenger to European domination: Japan. As I have mentioned throughout, their unique history has put the Japa nese in the peculiar position of being, at different times, or even simultaneously by different systems, nonwhite by the global W hite Racial Contract, white by the local (Nazi) Racial Contract, and a (W hite) yelJow by their own Yellow Racial Contract. In Asia the Japanese ' have long considered them,
selves the superior race, oppressing the Ainu in their own country and proclaiming during the 1 9 3 0S a Pan-Asiatic mis sion to "unite the yellow races" under their leadership against white Western domination, The ruthlessness displayed on 1 27
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
THE RACIAL CONTRACT both sides during the Pacific War, a "war without mercy, " arose in part because on both sides it was a
race
war, a war
between conflicting systems of racial superiority, competing claims to the real Whiteness, pink or yellow. The headline of one Hearst paper summed it up: "The war in the Pacific is the World War, the War of Oriental Races against Occidental
I
can fall into Whiteness under the appropriate circumstances, as shown by the ( "White") black Hutus' 1 9 94 massacre of half a million to a million inferior black Tutsis in a few bloody weeks in Rwanda. Though it may appear to be such, the "Racial Contract" is not a "deconstruction" of the social contract . I am in some
Races for the Domination of the World.1I76 As written during
sympathy with postmodernism politically-the iconoclastic
the Japanese occupation of China, from the 1 937 Rape of Nan
challenge to orthodox theory, the tipping over of the white
king on, the Yellow Racial Contract produced a death toll
marble busts in the museum of Great Western Thinkers-but
estimated by some to be as high as 1 0-13 million people.77
ultimately, I see it ,as an epistemological and theoretical dead
What Axis triumph might have meant for the world is re
end, itself symptomatic rather than diagnostic of the problems
vealed in a remarkable document that survived the desperate
of the globe as We enter the new millennium/9 The "Racial
burning of files in the last weeks before the arrival in Tokyo
Contract" is really in the spirit of a racially informed
of the occupying U.S. army: An Investigation
logiekritik
of Global Policy
Ideo
and thus pro-Enlightenment (Jiirgen Habermas's
Not exactly an equivalent
radical and to-be-completed Enlightenment, that is-though
to the infamous 1 942 Nazi Wannsee Protocol that put the
Habermas's Eurocentric, deraced, and deimperialized vision
with the Yamato Race as Nucleus.
details of the Final Solution into place, it does nonetheless
of modernity itself stands in need of critique)80 and antipost
describe the "natural hierarchy based on inherent qualities
modernist. It criticizes the social contract from a normative
and capabilities" of the various races of the world, envisages a
base that does not see the ideals of contractarianism them
global order in which the "Yamato race" would be the "leading
selves as necessarily problematic but shows how they have
race" (which would have to avoid intermarriage to maintain
been betrayed by white contractarians. So it assumes inter
its purity), and prescribes a postwar mission of expansion and
translatability, the conceptual commensurability of degraded
colonization based on an ominously revised global cartography
norm and critique, and brings them together in an epistemic
in which, for example, America emerges as "Asia's eastern
union that repudiates the postmodernist picture of isolated,
wing. "78 The Yamatos and the Aryans would, postvictory, have
mutually unintelligible language games. Moreover, it is explic
had to fight it out to decide who the real global master race
itly predicated on the
truth
of a particular metanarrative, the
was. So there is no reason to think that other nonwhites (non
historical account of the European conquest of the world,
yellows? ) would have fared much better under this version of
which has made the world what it is today. Thus it lays claims
the Racial Contract. The point, then, is that while the White
to truth, objectivity, realism, the description of .the world as
Racial Contract has historically been the most devastating
it actually is, the prescription f�>r a transformation of that
and the most important one in shaping the contours of the
world to achieve racial justice-and invites criticism on those
world, it is not unique, and there should be no essentialist
same terms.
illusions about anyone's intrinsic "racial" virtue. All peoples
1 28
In the best tradition of oppositional materialist critique of
1 29
THE RACIAL CONTRACT
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
hegemonic idealist social theory, the "Racial Contract"
recog
citizens but by white, black, brown, yellow, red beings, inter
nizes the actuality of the world we live in, relates the construc
acting with, pretending not to see, categorizing, judging, nego
tion of ideals, and the nonrealization of these ideals, to the
tiating, allying, exploiting, struggling with each other in large
character of this world, to group interests and institutionalized
measure according to race-the world, in short, in which we
structures, and points to what would be necessary for achiev
all actually live.
ing them . Thus it unites description and prescription, fact and norm.
Finally, the "Racial Contract" locates itself proudly in the long, honorable · tradition of oppositional black theory, the
Unlike the social contract, which is necessarily embarrassed
theory of those who were denied the capacity to theorize, the
by the actual histories of the polities in which it is propagated,
cognitions of persons rejecting their official subpersonhood.
the "Racial Contract"
starts from
these uncomfortable reali
The peculiar -terms of the slavery contract meant that, of all
ties. Thus it is not, like the social contract, continually forced
the different varieties of subpersons, blacks were the ones
to retreat into illusory idealizing abstraction, the never-never
most directly confronted over a period of hundreds of years
land of pure theory, but can move readily between the hypc>
with the contradictions of white theory, being both a part
thetical and the actual, the subjunctive and the indicative,
and not a part of the white polity, and as such epistemically
having no need to pretend things happened which did not, to
privileged. The "Racial Contract" pays tribute to the insights
evade and to elide and to skim over. The "Racial Contract"
of generations of anonymous "race men" (and "race women")
is intimate with the world and so is not continually "aston
who, under the most difficult circumstances, often self
ished" by revelations about it; it does not find it remarkable
educated, denied access to formal training and the resources
that racism has been the norm and that people think of them
of the academy, the object of scorn and contempt from hege
selves as raced rather than abstract citizens, which any objec
monic white theory, nevertheless managed to forge the con
tive history will in fact show. The "Racial Contract" is an
cepts necessary to trace the contours of the system oppressing
abstraction that is this-worldly, showing that the problem with
them, defying the massive weight of a white scholarship that
mainstream political philosophy is not abstraction in itself
either morally justified this oppression or denied its existence.
(all theory definitionally requires abstraction), but abstraction
Black activists have always recognized white domination,
that, as Onora O'Neill has pointed out, characteristically ab
white power (what one writer in 1 9 1 9 called the "white
stracts away from the things that matter, the actual causal
ocracy, " rule by whites),82 as a political system of exclusion
determinants and their requisite theoretical correlates, guided
and differential privilege, problematically conceptualized by
by the terms of the Racial Contract which has now written
the categories of either white liberalism or white Marxism.
itself out of existence but continues to affect theory and theo
The "Racial Contract" can thus be regarded as a black vernacu
rizing by its invisible presence.8! The "Racial Contract"
lar (literally: "the language of the slave" ) " Signifyin(g)" on
throws open the doors of orthodox political philosophy's her
the social contract, a "double-voiced, " "two-toned, " "formal
metically sealed, stuffy little universe and lets the world rush
revision" that "critique[s] the nature of (white) meaning it
into its sterile white halls, a world populated not by abstract
self, " by demonstratin.
1 30
g that
"a Simultaneous, but negated,
1 31
"NATURALIZED" MERITS
THE RACIAL CONTRACT parallel discursive (ontological, political) universe exists,
honestly addressed. Those who pretend not to see them, who
within the larger white discursive universe. "83 It is a black
claim not to recognize the picture I have sketched, are only
demystification of the lies of white theory, an uncovering of
continuing the epistemology of ignorance required by the origi
the Klan robes beneath the white politician's three-piece suit.
nal Racial Contract. As long as this studied ignorance persists,
the "Racial Contract"
the Racial Contract will only be rewritten, rather than being
speaks from the perspective of the cognizers whose mere pres
torn up altogether, and justice will continue to be restricted
ence in the halls of white theory is a cognitive threat,
to "just us. "
Ironic, cool, hip, above all
knowing,
because-in the inverted epistemic logic of the racial polity the "ideal speech situation" requires our absence, since we are, literally, the men and women who know too much, who in that wonderful American expr e ssion-know where the bod
ies are buried (after all,
so many of them are our own). It does
what black critique has always had to do to be effective: it situates itself in the same space as its adversary and then shows what follows from "writing 'race' and [seeing] the ·difference it makes. "84 As such, it makes it possible for us to connect the two rather than, as at present, have them isolated in two ghettoized spaces, black political theory'S ghettoization from mainstream discussion, white mainstream theory's ghettoiza tion from reality. The struggle to close the gap between the ideal of the social contract and the reality of the Racial Contract has been the unacknowledged political history of the past few hundred years, the "battle of the color line, " in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, and is likely to continue being so for the near future, as racial division continues to fester, the United States moves demographically from a white-majority to a nonwhite majority society, the chasm between a largely white First World and a largely nonwhite Third World continues to deepen, desperate illegal immigration from the latter to the former escalates, and demands for global justice in a new world order of "global apartheid" grow louder.85 Naming this reality brings it into the necessary theoretical focus for these issues to be
132
1 33
NOTES
INTRODUCTION
I. A 1 994 report on American philosophy, "Status and Future of the Profession, " revealed that "only one department in 20 (28 of the 456 departments reporting) has any [tenure-track] African American faculty, with slightly fewer having either Hispanic American or Asian-American [tenure-track] faculty ( I ? depart ments in both cases). A mere seven departments have any [tenure-track] Native American faculty. " Proceedings and Ad dresses of The American Philosophical Association 70, no. 2 ( 1 99 6 ) : 1 3 7 ·
2. For an overview, see, for example, Ernest Barker, Introduction to Social Contract: Essays by Locke, Hume, and Rousseau, ed. Barker ( 1 947; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1 9 60); Mi chael Lessnoff, Social Contract (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Hu manities Press, 1 9 86); will Kymlicka, "The Social Contract Tradition," in A Companion to Ethics, ed. Peter Singer (Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1 9 9 1 ), pp. 1 8 6-96; Jean Hampton, "Con tract and Consent," in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit · (Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1 9 9 3 ), pp. 379-9 3 . 3 . Indigenous peoples a s a global group are sometimes referred to as the "Fourth World." See Roger Moody, ed., The Indigenous Voice: Visions and Realities, 2d ed., rev. ( 1 988; rpt. Utrecht: International Books, 1 9 9 3) .
1 35
NOTES TO PAGES 7-1 1
NOTES TO PAGES 4-6 4· For a praiseworthy exception, see Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, I 990). Young focuses explicitly on the implications for standard conceptions of justice of group subordination, including racial groups. S · Credit for the revival of social contract theory, and indeed post war political philosophy in general, is usually given to John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, I 97 I ). 6. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, I 9 9 I ); John Locke, Two Treatises of Government, ed. Peter Laslett ( I 960; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I 988); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men, trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin, I 984); Rousseau, The So cial Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin, I 968); Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I 9 9 I ). 7· In "Contract and Consent," p. 3 82, Jean Hampton reminds us that for the classic theorists, contract is intended "simultane ously to describe the nature of political societies, and to prescribe a new and more defensible form for such societies." In this essay, and also in "The Contractarian Explanation of the State, " in The Philosophy of the Human Sciences, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, I S , ed. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling Jr., and Howard K. Wettstein ( Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, I 9 90), pp. 344-7 I, she argues explicitly for a revival of the old-fashioned, seemingly discredited " contractarian expla nation of the state." Hampton points out that the imagery of "contract" captures the essential point that "authoritative po litical societies are human creations" (not divinely ordained or naturally determined) and "conventionally generated." 8. Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, pt. 2 . 9 · Carole Pateman, The Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford Uni versity Press, I 988). One difference between our approaches is that Pateman thinks contractarianism is necessarily oppressive-"Contract always generates political .right in the form of relations of domination and subordination" (p. 8)-
136
whereas I see domination within contract theory as more contin gent. For me, in other words, it is not the case that a Racial Contract had to underpin the social contract. Rather, this con tract is a result of the particular conjunction of circumstances in global history which led to European imperialism. And as a corollary, I believe contract theory can be put to positive use once this hidden history is acknowledged, though I do not follow up such a program in this book. For an example of feminist contractarianism that contrasts with Pateman's negative assess ment, see Susan Moller Okin, Justice, Gender, and the Family (New York: Basic .Books, 1989). ro. See, for example, Paul Thagard, Conceptual Revolutions (Prince ton: Princeton University Press, I 992), p. 22. I I . See Hampton, "Contract and Consent" and "Contractarian Ex planation." Hampton's own focus is the liberal-democratic state, but obviously her strategy of employing "contract" to conceptu alize conventiona�ly generated norms and practices is open to be adapted to the understanding of the non-liberal-democratic racial state, the diffetence being that "the people" now become the white population.
CHAPTER 1 . OVERVIEW
I. Otto Gierke termed these respectively the Gesellschaftsvertrag and the Herrschaftsvertrag. For a discussion, see, for example, Barker, Introduction, Social Contract; and Lessnoff, Social Con tract, chap. 3. 2. Rawls, Theory of Justice, pt. I . 3 . In speaking generally o f "whites," I am not, o f course, denying that there are gender relations of domination and subordination or, for that matter, class relations of domination and subordina tion within the white population. I am not claiming that race is the only axis of social oppression. But race is what I want to focus on; so in the absence of that chimerical entity, a unifying theory of race, class, and gender oppression, it seems to me that one has to make generalizations that it would be stylistically cumbersome to qualify at every point. So these should just be 1 37
NOTES TO PAGES 1 2-1 5 taken as read. Nevertheless, I do want to insist that my overall picture is roughly accurate, i.e., that whites do in general benefit from white supremacy (though gender and class differentiation mean, of course, that they do not benefit equally) and that histori cally white racial solidarity has overridden class and gender solidarity. Women, subordinate classes, and nonwhites may be oppressed in common, but it is not a common oppression: the structuring is so different that it has not led to any common front between them. Neither white women nor white workers have as a group (as against principled individuals) historically made common cause with nonwhites against colonialism, white settlement, slavery, imperialism, jim crow, apartheid. We all have multiple identities, and, to this extent, most of us are both privileged and disadvantaged by different systems of domination. But white racial identity has generally triumphed over all others; it is race that (transgender, transclass) has generally determined the social world and loyalties, the lifeworld, of whites-whether as citizens of the colonizing mother country, settlers, nonslaves, or beneficiaries of the "color bar" and the "color line. " There has been no comparable, spontaneously crystallizing transracial "workers'" world or transracial "female" world: race is the iden tity around which whites have usually closed ranks. Neverthe less, as a concession, a semantic signal of this admitted gender privileging within the white population, by which white wom en's personhood is originally virtual, dependent on their having the appropriate relation (daughter, sister, wife) to the white male, I will sometimes deliberately use the non-gender;neutral "men. " For some recent literature on these problematic intersections of identity, see, for example, Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapo lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 9 9 3 ); Nupur Chaudhuri and Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism: Com plicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1 9 9 1 ) . 4 . Rousseau, Social Contract; Hobbes, ieviathan. 5 . For a discussion of the two versions, see Kymlicka, "The Social Contract Tradition. "
138
NOTES TO PAGES 1 5-1 9 6. Hobbes's judgment that " INJUSTICE, is no other than the not Performance of Covenant," Leviathan, p. 100, has standardly been taken as a statement of moral conventionalism. Hobbes's egalitarian social morality is based not on the moral equality of humans, but on the fact of a rough parity of physical power and mental ability in the state of nature (chap. 1 3 ). Within this framework, the Racial Contract would then be the natural out come of a systematic disparity in power-of weaponry rather than individual strength-between expansionist Europe and the rest of the world. This could be said to be neatly summed up in Hilaire Belloc's famous little ditty: "Whatever happens, we have got / The Maxim Gun,- and they have not." Hilaire Belloc, "The Modern Traveller, " quoted in John Ellis, The Social History of the Machine Gun ( 1 9 7 5 ; rpt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Paperbacks, 1 9 86), p. 94. Or at an earlier stage, in the conquest of the Ameri cas, the musket and the steel sword. 7. See, for example, A. P. d'Entreves, Natural Law: An Introduction · to Legal Philosophy, 2d rev. ed. ( 1 9 5 1 ; rpL London: Hutchin son, 1 970). 8. Locke, Second Treatise of Two Treatises of Government, p. 269. 9. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 230-3 2. 10. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1 948). I I . For the notion of "epistemological communities," see recent work in feminist theory-for example, Linda Alcoff and Eliza beth Potter, eds., Feminist Epistemologies (New York: Routledge, 1 9 9 3 ) . 1 2. Thus Ward Churchill, a Native American, speaks sardonically of "fantasies of the master race." Ward Churchill, Fantasies of the Master Race: Literature, Cinema, and the Colonization of American Indians, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Monroe, Maine: Com
mon Courage Press, 1 992); William Gibson, Neuromancer (New York: Ace Science Fiction Books, 1 984). 1 3 . Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West (London: Routledge, 1 990); Edward W. Said, Orientalism ( 1 978; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1 97 9 ); V. Y. Mutlimbe, The Inven tion of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1 988); Enrique Dussel,
1 39
NOTES TO PAGES 23-28
NOTES TO PAGES 1 9-23
The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of "the Other" and the Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael D. Barber ( 1 992; rpt. New
York: Continuum, 1 9 9 5 ); Robert Berkhofer Jr., The White Man 's Indian: Images of the American Indian from Columbus to the Present (New York: Knopf, 1 978); Gretchen M. Bataille and
Charles 1. P. Silet, eds., The Pretend Indians: Images of Native Americans in the Movies (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1 9 80); George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny,
I817-I914 (1 9 7 1 ; rpt. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University Press, 1 987); Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Caliban and Other Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minne sota Press, 1 9 89); Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (1986; rpt. London: Routledge, 1 992). 14. Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (New York: International, 1 9 72), p. 120. 1 5 . Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington ( 1 9 6 1; rpt. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1 99 1 ). 1 6 . V. G. Kiernan, The Lords of Human Kind: Black Man, Yellow Man, and White Man in an Age of Empire (1969; rpt. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986); Anthony Pagden, Lords of All the World: Ideologies ofEmpire in Spain, Britain, and France, c. ISOO-C. 1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1 9 9 5 ).
17. Pagden, Lords, pp. 1-2. 18. Robert A. Williams Jr., "The Algebra of Federal Indian Law: The Hard Trail of Decolonizing and Americanizing the White Man's Indian Jurisprudence," Wisconsin Law Review 1986 ( 1 9 86): 229. See also Robert A. Williams Jr., The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford University Press, 1 990). 19. Williams, "Algebra," pp. 230-3 1, 2 3 3 . See also Lewis Hanke, Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice in the Modern World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
1 9 5 9), p. 1 9 · 2 0 . Williams, "Algebra"; Hanke, Aristotle. 2 I . Allen Carey-Webb, "Other-Fashioning: The Discourse of Empire
1 40
and Nation in Lope de Vega's El Nuevo mundo descubierto par Cristobal Colon, " in Amerindian Images and the Legacy of Columbus, ed. Rene Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini, Hispanic Is sues, 9 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 992), PP · 43 3-34· 22. Philip D. Curtin, Introduction, to Imperialism, ed. Curti:Q. (New York: Walker, 1 9 7 1 ), p. xiii. 2 3 . Pierre 1. van den Berghe, Race and Racism: A Comparative Perspective, 2d ed. (New York: Wiley, 1 978). 24. Pagden, Lords, chap. I . 2 5 . Williams, "Algebra," p . 2 5 3 · 26.- ustice Joseph Story, quoted i n Williams, "Algebra, " p. 2 5 6 . 2 7 . Dred Scott v. Sanford, 1 857, in Race, Class, and Gender in the United States: An Integrated Study, ed. Paula S. Rothenberg, 3d ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1 9 9 5 ), p. 323· 28. Excerpt from Jules Harmand, Domination et colonisation (19 I 0), in Curtin, Imperialism, pp. 294-98. 29. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf,
r
1 9 9 3 ), pp. xiv, xiii. 30. Harold R. Isaacs, "Color in World Affairs," Foreign Affairs 47 ( 1 969): 2 3 5 , 246. See also Benjamin P. Bowser, ed., Racism and Anti-Racism in World Perspective (Thousand Oaks, Calif: Sage, 1 9 9 5 ) . 3 I . Helen Jackson, A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government's Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes
( 1 8 8 1; rpt. New York: Indian Head Books, 1 9 9 3 )· In her classic expose, Jackson concludes (pp. 3 37-3 8): "It makes little differ ence . . . where one opens the record of the history of the Indians; every page and every year has its dark stain. The story of one tribe is the story of all, varied only by differences of time and place . . . . [T]he United States Government breaks promises now [ 1 880] as deftly as then [ 1 7 9 5 ], and with an added ingenuity from long practice." Jackson herself, it should be noted, saw Native Americans as having a "lesser right," since there was no question about the "fairness of holding that ultimate sovereignty belonged to the civilized discoverer, 'as against the savage barbarian." To think otherwise would merely be "feeble sentimentalism" (pp. IO-I I ) . But she did at least want this le�ser right recognized. 1 41
NOTES TO PAGES 29-33
NOTES TO PAGE 28
American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Under
32. See, for example, David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Co lumbus and the Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1992).
class (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1 99 3 ) · 38. See, for example, Kiernan, Lords; V. G . Kiernan, Imperalism and its Contradictions, ed. Harvey J. Kaye (New York: Routledge,
33. Richard Drinnon, Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian
1 9 9 5 ); D. K. Fieldhouse, The Colonial Empires: A Comparative
Hating and Empire-Building (New York: Meridian, 1 980), p. 332.
Survey from the Eighteenth Century ( 1 9 66; rpt. London: Macmil
34. Ibid., p. 1 02. See also Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins ofAmerican RacialAnglo-Saxonism (Cam bridge: Harvard University Press, 1 9 8 I ); and Ronald Takaki, Iron Cages: Race and Culture in I9th-Century America ( 1 979; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1 990). 3 5 . A. Grenfell Price, White Settlers and Native Peoples: An Histori
lan, 1 982); Pagden, Lords; Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us: White Predators, Black Slavers, and the African Elite (New
York: Vintage Books, 1 9 7 5 ); Henri Brunschwig, French Colonial ism, 1 8 7 1-1914: Myths and Realities, trans. William Granville
Brown ( 1 96 4; rpt. New York: Praeger, 1 9 66); David Healy, U. S. Expansionism: The Imperialist Urge in the I 890S (Madison: Uni
cal Study of Racial Contacts between English-Speaking Whites
versity of Wisconsin Press, 1 970).
and Aboriginal Peoples in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand ( 1 9 5 0; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press,
39. Said, Culture, p. 8.
1 9 7 2); A. Grenfell Price, The Western Invasions of the Pacific
40. Kiernan, Lords, p. 24· 4 1 . Linda Alcoff outlines an attractive, distinctively Latin American ideal of hybrid racial identity in her "Mestizo Identity, " in American Mixed Race: The Culture of Microdiversity, ed. Naomi
and Its Continents (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1 9 6 3 ); van den
Berghe, Race; Louis Hartz, The Founding of New Societies: Stud ies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South Africa, Canada, and Australia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and
Zack (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1 9 9 5 ), pp. 2 5 7-78. Unfortunately, however, this ideal has yet to be realized. For an
World, 1 9 6 4); F. S. Stevens, ed., Racism: The Australian Experi ence, 3 vols. (New York: Taplinger, 1 972); Henry Reynolds, The
exposure of the Latin American myths of "racial democracy" and a race-transcendent mestizaje, and an account of the reality
Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the Euro pean Invasion of Australia (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Pen guin, 1 9 82). Price's books are valuable sources in comparative history, but-though progressive by the standards of the time they need to be treated with caution, since their figures and attitudes are both now somewhat dated. In White Settlers, for example, the Indian population north of the Rio Grande is esti mated at fewer than 8 5 0,000, whereas estimates today are ten to twenty times higher, and Price speculates that the Indians were "less advanced than their white conquerors" because they had smaller brains (pp. 6-7). 3 6. Van den Berghe, Race, p. 18. 3 7 . C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Tim Crow, 3 d ed. ( 1 9 5 5; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1 974); George M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in American and South African History (New York: Oxford Univer sity Press, 1 9 8 1 ); Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton,
1 42
of the ideal of blanqueamiento (whitening) and the continuing subordination of blacks and the darker-skinned throughout the region, see, for example, Minority Rights Group, ed., No Longer Invisible: Afro-Latin Americans Today (London: Minority Rights, 1 9 9 5 ); and Bowser, Racism and Anti-Racism. 42. Locke, Second Treatise, pp. 3 5 0-5 1 . Since Locke also uses "prop erty" to mean rights, this is not quite as one-dimensional a vision of government as it sounds. 43. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 89·
W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1 860-1880 (1 9 3 5 ; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1992). 45. See Eric Jones, The European Miracle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 9 8 1 ) . My discussion here follows J. M. Blaut
44.
et al., 1492: The Debate on Colonialism, Eurocentrism, and History (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1 992); and J. M. Blaut,
1 43
NOTES TO PAGES 39-45
NOTES TO PAGES 34-39 The Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism and EUIocentric History (New York: Guilford Press, 1 9 9 3 ).
46. Blaut, I492; Blaut, Colonizer's Model. 47 · Sandra Harding, Introduction, to Harding, ed., The "Racial" Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1 9 9 3 ), p. 2. 48. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery ( 1 944; rpt. New York: Capricorn Books, 1 966). 49· Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa ( 1 972; rpt. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1 974); Samir Amin, Eurocentrism, trans. Russell Moore ( 1 988: rpt. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1 989); Andre Gunder Frank, World Accu mulation, I492-1 789 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System, 3 vols. (New York: Academic Press, 1 974-1 988). 50. Blaut, I492, p. 3. 5 1 . Kiernan, Imperialism, pp. 98, 1 49. 5 2 . Quoted in Noam Chomsky, Year 50I: The Conquest Continues (Boston: South End Press, 1 99 3 ), p. 6 1 . 5 3 · But see Richard J . Herrnstein and Charles Murray's bestseller The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1 994), as a sign that the older,
straightforwardly racist theories may be making a comeback. 54· See, for example: Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal (New York: Scribner's, 1 992); Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: BasicBooks, 1 992); Massey and Denton, American Apartheid; Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: The Re treat from Racial Justice in American Thought and Policy (Bos ton: Beacon Press, 1 9 9 5 ); Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders, Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (Chi cago: University of Chicago Press, 1 99 6 ); Tom Wicker, Tragic FailUIe: Racial Integration in America (New, York: William Mor row, 1 996). 5 5 · Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge 1995 ), pp. 86, 7. 5 6 . Richard F. America, ed., The Wealth of Races: The Present Value
1 44
of Benefits from Past Injustices (New York: Greenwood Press,
1 990). For another ironic tribute, whose subject is the interna tional distribution of wealth, see Malcolm Caldwell, The Wealth of Some Nations (London: Zed Press, 1977). 5 7 . David H. Swinton, "Racial Inequality and Reparations," in America, Wealth of Races, p. 1 5 6. 58. James Marketti, "Estimated Present Value of Income Diverted during Slavery, " in America, Wealth of Races, p. 1 07. 59. Robert S. Browne, "Achieving Parity through Reparations, " in America, Wealth of Races, p. 204; Swinton, "Racial Inequal ity, " p. 1 5 6.
CHAPTER 2. DETAILS
I will later discuss the taxonomic problems posed by "border line" I"semi-" Europeans. 2. See, for example, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Im ages of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture ( 1 990; rpt. New Haven: Yale Univ�rsity Press, 1 992), pp. 30-3 1; Ronald Sanders, Lost Tribes and Promised Lands: The Origins of Ameri can Racism (Boston: Little, .Brown, 1 978), p. 202. 3. Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak, eds., The Wild Man I.
Within: An Image in Western Thought from the Renaissance to Romanticism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972).
4. Hayden White, "The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an Idea, " in Dudley and Novak, Wild Man, p. 5 . 5. Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the Indian and the American Mind, rev. ed. ( 1 9 5 3; rpt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1 9 6 5 ) (original title: The Savages of America), p. 3 . 6 . Mary Louise Pratt, " Humboldt and the Reinvention of America, " in Jara and Spadaccini, Amerindian Images, p. 5 89. 7. Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, pp. 15, 1 3 . 8. Martin Bernal, The Fabric ation of Ancient Greece, 17 85-I985, vol. I of Black Athena.]he Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civili zation (New Brunswick,' N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1 9 87). This claim has a long history in the international black commu1 45
NOTES TO PAGES 45-50
9. 10. 11.
12. 13. 14. IS.
16.
17. 18. 19. 20.
21.
22.
nity (African, African Americanl. See, for example, Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, trans. Mercer Cook ( 1 9 5 5 , 1967; rpt. Westport, Conn.: .Lawrence Hill, 1 9741· Harding, "Racial" Economy, p. 27. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul O'Prey ( 1 902; rpt. London: Penguin Books, 1 9 8 3 1, p. 3 3 . Scott B . Cook, Colonial Encounters in the Age of High Imperial ism (New York: HarperCollins World History Series, 1 9961, p. I 04· Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, p. 7 1 . Sanders, Lost Tribes, pp. 9-12. Drinnon, Facing West, pp. 122-23, lOS, 66. For an analysis of the film, see, for example, Michael Ryan and Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana Univer sity Press, 1 9 8 8 1. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Poli tics of Meaning (Cambridge, Mass. : Blackwell, 1 9 9 3 1, p. 1 8 5 , and more generally, chap. 8, " 'Polluting the Body Politic': Race and Urban Location," pp. 1 8 5 -205 . Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, pp. 3 8-40. Franke Wilmer, The Indigenous Voice in World Politics: Since Time Immemorial (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1 99 3 1. Locke, Second Treatise, p. 3 0 1 . Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonial ism, and the Cant of Conquest ( 1 97 5 ; rpt. NeW York: Norton, 1 97 6 1, pt. 1 . Ibid, p . 1 6 . See also Stannard, American Holocaust, chaps. I and 2, for an account of the exponential upward revision in recent years of estimates of the pre-Columbian population of the Ameri cas and the politics of its previous undercounting. Half a century ago, standard figures were 8 million total for North and South America and fewer than I million for the region north of Mexico; today some estimates would put these numbers as high as 145 million and 1 8 million, respectively. Stannard, American Holo caust, p. I I . Drinnon, Facing West, pp. 49, 2 1 2, 232.
1 46
NOTES TO PAGES 50-56
2 3 . Quoted from an official document by A. Barrie Pittock, "Aborigi nal Land Rights," in Stevens, Racism 2 : 1 92. 24. Leonard Thompson, The Political Mythology ofApartheid (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1 98 5 1, p. 7 5 . 2 5 . Drinnon, FaCing West, p . 2 1 3 . 2 6 . Russel Ward, "An Australian Legend, " Royal Australian Histori cal Society Journal and Proceedings 47, no. 6 ( 1 9 6 1 1: 344, quoted by M. C. Hartwig, "Aborigines and Racism: An Historical Per spective, " in Stevens, Racism 2:9. 27. For a classic analysis, see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann ( 1 9 5 2; rpt. New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1 9 6 8 Ii and for a recent exploration, Lewis R. Gordon, Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Hu manities Press, 1 9 9 5 1, esp. chaps. 7, 1 4, and I S , pp. 29-44. 97-I03, 1 04-16. 28. Gordon, B a d Faith pp. 99, 1 0 5 . 2 9 . Frankenberg, White Women, chap. 3 . 3 0 . Fanon, Black Skin; Charles Herbert Stember, Sexual Racism: The Emotional Barrier to an Integrated Society (New York: Elsevier, 1 9761; Johv. D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New York: Harper and Row, 1 9 8 8 1, chap. 5 , "Race and Sexuality, " pp. 8 5-108. 3 1 . Susan Mendus, "Kant: 'An .}Ionest but Narrow-Minded Bour geois' ? " in Women in Western Political Philosophy, ed. Ellen Kennedy and Susan Mendus (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1 9 8 7 1, pp. 2 1-43 · 3 2 . Aristotle, The Politics, trans. T. A . Sinclair ( 1 962; rev. ed. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1 9 8 1 ), pp. 63-7 3 . 3 3 . White, "Forms of Wildness," p . 1 7 . 3 4 . Jennings, Invasion of America, p. 6 . 3 5 . See Cornel West's description o f the emergence in the modern period of the "normative gaze" of white supremacy: "A Geneal ogy of Modern Racism," chap. 2 of Prophesy Deliverance!: An Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Phildelphia: West minster Press, 1 982), pp. 47-6 5 . 3 6 . M. 1. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: Viking Press, 1 9 80), p. 1 44. 37. Lucius Outlaw Jr., "Life-Worlds, Modernity, and Philosophical
1 47
NOTES TO PAGES 57-64
38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.
44.
45.
46. 47. 48.
Praxis: Race, Ethnicity, and Critical Social Theory, " in Outlaw, On Race and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 1 6 5 . Quoted in Drinnon, Facing West, p . 7 5 . Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. 5 2 , 5 9 . Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, vol. I of Freedom (New York: Basic Books, 1 9 9 1 ) . Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1 992). Quoted in Pearce, Savagism, pp. 7-8. For a discussion, see, for example, Stephen Tay Gould, The Mis measure of Man (New York and London: Norton, 1 9 8 1 ); and William H. Tucker, The Science and Politics of Racial Research (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1 994). Tucker asserts flatly (p. 5 ): "The truth is that though waged with scientific weapons, the goal in this controversy has always been political." Harmannus Hoetink, Caribbean Race Relations: A Study of Two Variants, trans. Eva M. Hooykaas ( 1 962; rpt. London: Oxford University Press, 1967). George 1. Mosse, Toward the Final Solution: A History of Euro pean Racism ( 1 978; rpt. Madison: Univer,sity of Wisconsin Press, 1 9 8 5 ), Pp. xii, I I . Winthrop D. Tordan, White over Black: American Attitudes to ward the Negro, I S 50-I 8I2 (1968; rpt. New York: Norton, 1977). Franklin, Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind ( 1 7 5 1 ), quoted in Tordan, White over Black, pp. 270, 1 4 3 . See, for example, Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall, The Color Complex: The Politics of Skin Color among African Americans (New York: Harcourt Brace Tovanovich, 1 992).
49. Frank M. Snowden Tr., Blacks in Antiquity.' Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1 9 70); Frank M. Snowden Tr., Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1 9 8 3 ) . 5 0 . Theodore W. Allen, Racial Oppression and Social Control, vol. I of The Invention of the White Race (New York: Verso, 1 994); Ian F. Haney L6pez, White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996). 5 I . Tennings, Invasion of America, p. 60.
1 48
N OTES TO PAGES 64-68
5 2 . Hugo Grotius, The Law of War and Peace, trans. Francis W. Kelsey (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1 92 5 ), chap. 20, "On Punish ments," of bk. 2, p. 5 06, quoted in Williams, "Algebra," p. 2 5 0. 5 3 . For the following, compare Tames Tully, Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cam bridge University Press, 1 9 9 5 ), esp. chap. 3, "The Historical Formation of Modern Constitutionalism: The Empire of Unifor mity, " pp. 5 8-98. I thank Anthony Laden for bringing this book
to my attention, which I only learned about when my own manuscript was on the verge of completion. 54. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 89· 5 5 . Richard Ashcraft, "Leviathan Triumphant: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Wild Men, " in Dudley and Novak, Wild Man, PP · 146-47. 5 6. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 89-90. 5 7 . Two hundred years later, by contrast, the British colonial enter prise, with the accompanying ontological dichotomization, was so well entrenched that Tohn Stuart Mill experienced not the
g
slightest qualm in assertin (in an essay now seen as a classic humanist defense of individualism and freedom) that the liberal harm principle "is meant to apply only to human beings in the maturity of their faculties," not to those "backward states of society in which the race itself may be considered as in its nonage" : "Despotism is ' a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improve ment. " Tohn Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Writings, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 989), p. 1 3 · 5 8 . Locke, Second Treatise, chap. 5 , "Of Property. " 5 9 . Robert A. Williams Tr., "Documents of Barbarism: The Contem porary Legacy of European Racism and Colonialism in the Narra tive Traditions of Federal Indian Law, " Arizona Law Review 2 3 7 ( 1 989), excerpted in Critical Race Theory.' The Cutting Edge, ed. Richard Delgado . (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1 9 9 5 ), p. 103. 60. Locke, Second Treatise, chap. 1 6, "On Conquest. " 6 1 . See, for example, 'Tennifer Welchman, "Locke on Slavery and
149
NOTES TO PAGES 77-85
NOTES TO PAGES 68-76
62. 63. 64. 65.
66.
Inalienable Rights, " Canadian Journal of Philosophy 25 ( 1 9 9 5 ) : 67-8 1 . Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, pp. 8 3 , 87, 90, 1 3 6, 1 40, 145 (nonwhite savages), 140 (European savages). Ibid., p. I I 6 . Rousseau, Social Contract, bk. I, chap. 8 . Emmanuel Eze, "The Color of Reason: The Idea of 'Race' in Kant's Anthropology, " in Anthropology and the German En lightenment, ed. Katherine Faull (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Uni versity Press, 1 9 9 5 ), pp. 1 96-2 3 7 . Eze cites the 1 9 5 0 judgment of Earl Count that scholars often forget that "Immanuel Kant produced the most profound racio logical thought of the eighteenth century. " Earl W. Count, ed., This Is Race: An Anthology Selected from the International Literature on the Races of Man (New York: Henry Schuman, 1 9 5 0 ) , p. 704, quoted in Eze, "Color of Reason, " p. 1 9 6 . Compare
67. 68.
69. 70. 71.
72.
73. 74. 75. 76.
the 1 9 6 7 verdict of the German anthropologist Wilhelm Muhl mann that Kant is "the founder of the modern concept of race, " quoted in Leon Poliakov, "Racism from the Enlightenment to the Age of Imperialism," in Racism and Colonialism, ed. Robert Ross (The Hague: Leiden University Press, 1 9 8 2 ), p. 5 9. Mosse, Final Solution, pp. 30-3 I . Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960 ), pp. I I I- I 3 . Eze, "Color of Reason, " pp. 2 1 4- 1 5 , 209-15, 2 1 7 . See David Lehman, Signs of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul de Man (New York: Poseidon Press, 1 9 9 1 ) . Janet L Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1 2 5 0-1 3 5 0 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1 989 ) . Fredric Jameson, "Modernism and Imperialism, " in National ism, Colonialism, and Literature, ed. Seamus Deane (Minneapo lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1 990 ), pp. 50-5 1 . Steinberg, Turning Back, p . 1 5 2 . Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, pp. 84, 97-98. Morrison, Playing, p. 46. See the discussion of "idealizing" abstractions in Onora O'Neill,
1 50
"Justice, Gender, and International Boundaries, " in The Quality of Life, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1993 ), pp. 303-2 3 . 7 7 . Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of R a c e and Rights (Cam
bridge: Harvard University Press, 1 9 9 1 ), pp. I I 6, 49· 78. Bill E. Lawson, "Moral Discourse and Slavery, " in Howard
McGary and Bill E. Lawson, Between Slavery and Freedom: Philosophy and American Slavery (Bloomington: Indiana Uni versity Press, 1 992 ), pp. 7 1-89. 79. Anita L. Allen, "Legal Rights for Poor Blacks," in The Underc1ass Question, ed. Bill E. Lawson (Philadelphia: Temple University
Press, 1992 ), pp. 1 17-3 9 · 80. Rawls, Theory of Justice; Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1 974 ) · 8 1 . Isaacs, "Color, " p. 2 3 5 · 8 2 . Earl Miner, "The Wild Man through the Looking Glass," in
Dudley and Novak, Wild Man, pp. 89-90. 83. Jordan, White over Black, p. 254· 84. Drinnon, Facing West, p. xvii. But see Allen, Invention of the White Race, for the contrasting position that the Irish were
indeed made nonwhite. 8 5 . Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995 ) · 86. See John W. Dower, War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1 9 8 6 ) . 87. Gary Y. Okihiro, "Is Yellow Black or White? " in Margins and Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle:
University of Washington Press, 1994 ), pp. 3 1-63. 88. Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1 9 9 1 ) . 89. Again, it could be argued that a better formulation is to say that
actually, by the terms of the Racial Contract, they are not the same crime, that the identity conditions change with the perpe trator, so that there is really no inconsistency. The judgment of inconsistency presupposes the background of the social contract. 90. According to the NAAcp Legal Defense and Educational Fund in
New York, of the 380 people executed since the reinstatement of 1 51
NOTES TO PAGES 86-94
capital punishment, only 5 were whites convicted of killing blacks. 9 I. William Brandon, The American Heritage Book of Indians (New York: Dell, 1964), p. 327, quoted in Jan P. Nederveen Pieterse, Empire and Emancipation: Power and Liberation on a World Scale (New York: Praeger, 1 9 8 9 ), p. 3 1 3 . 92. Kiernan, Lords, pp. 198, 47. 93· Locke, Second Treatise, p. 274. 94· Ralph Gi=burg, ed., roo Years of Lynchings ( 1 9 62; rpt. Balti
more: Black Classic Press, 1 9 8 8 ) . 9 S · C. J. Dashwood, quoted in Price, White Settlers, p. l I 4. One
white settler, "in revenge for having been speared, had shot on sight 37 natives." Ibid., p. l I S . 9 6 . Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (New York: Viking Penguin, 1 982), p. 1 3 S . 9 7 · Carter G . Woodson, The Mis-Education of the Negro ( 1 93 3 ; rpt. Nashville, Tenn.: Winston-Derek, 1 990). 98. James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Na tive Son ( 1 96 1 ; rpt. New York: Vintage International, 1 9 9 3 ), p. 9 6 .
99· Pieterse, Empire and Emancipation, p. 3 1 7.
1 00. Quoted from Survival International Review 4, no. 2 ( 1 979), in
Moody, Indigenous Voice, p. 248. r o I . Jerry Gambill, "Twenty-one Ways to 'Scalp' an Indian, " 1 9 6 8 speech, in Moody, Indigenous Voice, pp. 293-9 5 , quoted from Akwesasne Notes I, no. 7 ( 1 979). 1 02. Fanon, Black Skin. 103· Blackisms, quoted from Mureena, Aboriginal Student News
paper, 2, no. 2 ( 1 972), in Moody, Indigenous Voice, pp. 290-92. 1 04· Ngiigi wa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Lan guage in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1 9 8 6 ),
pp. 3, 1 2 .
CHAPTER 3. "NATURALIZED" MERITS I. Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Thought ( 1 979;
rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1 992). 1 52
NOTES TO PAGES 94-95
2. For Hume, see the 1 7 5 3-S 4 edition of his essay, "Of National
Characters, " quoted, for example, in Jordan, White over Black, p. 2 5 3 ; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introduction to The · Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (New York: Dover, 1 9 5 6 ), pp. 9 1-99. For a detailed critique of Locke and Mill in particular, and their "colonial liberalism," see Bhikhu Parekh, "Decolonizing Liberalism, " in The End of "Isms " l Reflections on the Fate of Ideological Politics after Communism's Collapse,
ed. Aleksandras Shtromas (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1 9 94), pp. 8 S -1 03; and Bhikhu Parekh, "Liberalism and Colonialism: A Critique of Locke and Mill," in The Decolonization of Imagi nation: Culture, Knowledge and Power, ed. Jan P. Nederveen Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh (London: Zed Books, 1 9 9 5 ), pp. 8 1-98. 3 . To be fair to Mill, he does have a famous exchange with Thomas Carlyle on the treatment of blacks in the British West Indies, in which he comes out for "progressive" (relatively, of course) social policies. See Thomas Carlyle: The Nigger Question; John Stuart Mill: The Negro Question, ed. Eugene R. August (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Crofts Classics, 1 9 7 1 ) . But the difference is basically between less and more humane colonial policies; colonialism itself as a politico-economic system of ex ploitation is not being challenged. 4. Alvin 1. Goldman, "Ethics and Cognitive Science, " Ethics 103 ( 1 9 9 3 ): 3 37-60. For further reading on the developing dialogue between the two, see Mind and Morals: Essays on Ethics and Cognitive Science, ed. Larry May, Marilyn Friedman, and Andy Clark (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1 9 9 6 ) . S . Cf. Frankenberg, White Women, who distinguishes between the older discourse of essentialist racism, "with its emphasis on race difference understood in hierarchical terms of essential, biological inequality," and the current discourse of essential "sameness," "color-blindness," "a color-evasive and power evasive" language that asserts that "we are all the same under the skin," which in ignoring the "structural and institutional dimensions of racism" implies that "materially, we have the same chances in U.S. society, " so that "any failure to achieve is therefore the fault of people of color themselves" (pp. 1 4, 1 39).
1 53
NOTES TO PAGES 95-97
NOTES TO PAGES 98-99
6. For example, Donald Kinder and Lynn Sander s conclude in their
analysis of American attitudes on race that on many issues of public policy, " [individual] self-interest turns out to be quite unimportant ." What matter are group interests, "intere sts that are collective rather than personal, " involving percep tions of deprivation as relative, "based less in objective condit ion and more in social comparison, " i.e., the notion of "group relative disadvantage ." And races, it turns out, are the most important social group, since race "creates divisions more notabl e than any other in American life" : "Insofar as interests figure promi nently in white opinion on race, it is through the threat s blacks appear to pose to whites' collective well-being, not their personal welfare. " Divided by Color, pp. 262-64, 2 5 2, 8 5 . 7 · Susan V. Opotow, ed., "Moral Exclusion and Injusti ce, " TournaI of Social Issues, 46, special issue ( 1 990): I, quoted in Wilmer,
15. 16.
Indigenous Voice. 8. See, for a discussion, Cheryl 1. Harris, "Whiteness as Property, " Harvard Law Review ro6 ( 1 99 3 ): 1 7 09-9 1 ; and Welchman,
"Locke on Slavery. "
9· Consider the "racial etiquette" of the Old South,
�
as documented
in John Dollard's Caste and Class in a Southern Town, 3d ed. ( 1 937; rpt. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1 9 5 7 ), and explored, say, in William Faulkner's novels and Richard Wrigh t, "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow" ( 1 9 37 ), in Bearing Witnes
s: Selections from African-American Autobiography in the Twentieth Cen tury, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Panthe 1 9 9 1 ), pp. 39-5 1 .
on Books,
r o. Kiernan cites the view held by many whites about slavery that "Negroes have far duller nerves and are less susceptible to pain than Europeans. " Lords, p. 199. I I . Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man ( 1 9 5 2; rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1 972), pp. 3, 14. 1 2 . Baldwin, Nobody Knows, p. 1 72; James Baldwi n, The Fire
17. 18. 19.
Next
Time ( 1 9 63; rpt. New York: Vintage Intern ational, 1 9 9 3 ), PP · 5 3-54 ·
1 3 · Drinnon, Facing West, pp. 1 3 8-39 . 14· W. E. H. Stanner, After the Dreaming ( Sydney : Boyer Lectures,
1 54
1 9 6 8 ), p. 2 5 , quoted in Hartwig, "Aborigines and Racism" in Stevens, Racism 2:ro. Gordon, Bad Faith, pp. 8, 7 5 , 87. David Stannard, American Holocaust. The standard response to this accusation is to claim that the vast majority of Native Americans were actually killed by disease rather than warfare or general mistreatment. Stannard replies that: no factual evidence has been presented to back up this standard claim, and even if it were true, culpability would still remain, along the same lines that we hold the Nazis morally responsible for Jewish deaths from disease, malnutrition, and overwork in the ghettos and the camps. It is estimated by some scholars that more than two million Jews actually died from these causes rather than from gassing or shooting. See, for example, Raul Hilberg, The Destruc tion of the European Tews, rev. and definitive ed., 3 vols. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1 9 8 5 ); and Arno Mayer, Why Did the Heavens Not Darken! The "Final Solution " in History, with a new foreword ( 1 9 88; rpt. New York: Pantheon, 1 990). Nonethe less we do of course-as' we should-assign blame for these ' deaths to azi policy, as ultimately causally responsible. For rival positions in this often angry debate, see David E. Stannard, "Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship" (where these points are made and these sources cited), and Steven T. Katz, "The Uniqueness of the Holocaust: The Historical Di mension," both in Is the Holocaust Unique! Perspectives on Comparative Genocide, ed. Alan S. Rosenbaum (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1 9 9 6 ): 1 6 3-208 and 1 9-3 8. See also Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard ( 1 982; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1984), esp. chap. 3, "Love, " pp. 1 27-82. Drinnon, Facing West, p. 1 9 9 · See Stannard, American Holocaust, pp. 3 1 7-1 8 . E. D . Morel, The Black Man's Burden ( 1 920; rpt. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1 9 6 9 ). The same estimate is given by Jan Vansina, professor emeritus of history and anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. Stannard, American Holocaust, p. 1 2 1 . Jonathan Swift in Gulli ver's Travels ( 1 ]26) has his protagonist make shoes and a canoe
20.
1 55
NOTES TO PAGES 99-1 01
out of the skins of the subhuman/human Yahoos of part 4 (them selves based on the "Hottentots," the Khoi-khoi people of South Africa). The sail of the canoe was "likewise composed of the Skins of the same Animal; but I made use of the youngest I could get, the older being too tough and thick. " Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1 9 7 7 ), P· 284. 21. Clive TUInbull, "Tasmania: The Ultimate Solution," in Stevens, Racism 2:228-34. 22. Dower, War without Mercy, chap. 3, "War Hates and War
Crimes, " pp. 3 3-7 3 . 2 3 . C. 1 . R . James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2d ed. ( 1 9 3 8; rpt. New York: Vin tage Books, 1 9 6 3 ), pp. 1 2-1 3 . 2 4 . Ida Wells-Barnett, O n Lynchings (New York: Arno Press, 1 9 6 9 ); GinzbUIg, roo Years. 2 5 . Daniel R. Headrick, The Tools of Empire: Technology and Euro pean Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1 9 8 1 ), pp. 1 02-3 . The bullet was so named because it was manufactured at a British factory at Dum-Dum, outside Calcutta. 26. Sven Lindqvist, "Exterminate All the Brutes, " trans. Joan Tate ( 1 992; rpt. New York: New Press, 1 99 6 ), pp. 3 6-69; and see also Ellis, Machine Gun, chap. 4, "Making the Map Red," pp. 79-109. Lindqvist points out (p. 46) that an additional sixteen thousand Sudanese were wounded in the "battle," and few or none of them survived either; being summarily executed in its' aftermath. 2 7 . Dower, War without Mercy, pp. 37-3 8.
NOTES TO PAGES 1 02-106
a hit song in his honor: "The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley." Four Hours, pp. 3 3 8-40. For Algeria, see Fanon, Wretched of the Earth;
and Rita Maran, Torture: The Role of Ideology in the French Algerian War (New York: Praeger, 1 9 8 9 ). Maran's conclusion is
that the widespread use of tortUIe by the French troops (in viola tion of French law) was made possible by the mission civilisa trice, since, after all, Western civilization was at stake. In Vietnam, by contrast, American troops committing atrocities simply appealed to the well-established moral principle of the M.G.R.-the "mere gook rule." See Drinnon, Facing West, PP · 4 5 4-5 9 · 30. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens! pp. 1 5 - 1 6 . Mayer is reporting
rather than endorsing this view, since his own account seeks to locate the "Judeocide" in the context of Hitler's anticommunism and the extreme violence in EUIope dUIing and after the Great War. His explanation is a pUIely internalist one, jumping three centUIies from the Thirty Years' War ( 1 6 1 8-48) to the aftermath of the Great War, with no attention paid to the racial violence inflicted by Europe on non-EUIope in the interim. But in our own centUIY, just before World War I, there were the examples of the Belgian-made holocau�t in the Congo and the Germans' own genocide of the Hereros after the 1 904 uprising. 3 I . Simpson, Blowback, p. 5 · 32. Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham ( 1 9 5 5; rpt. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1 972), p. 14 · 3 3 . Kiernan, Imperialism, p. 1 0 1 . 3 4 . Robert Harris, Fatherland ( 1 992; rpt. New York: Harper Paper
backs, 1 9 9 3 ) .
2 8 . Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews; Ian Hancock, "Re
3 5 . Bartolome de Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief
sponses to the Porrajmos: The Romani Holocaust, " in Rosen baum, Holocaust, pp. 3 9-64; Christopher Simpson, Blowback:
Account, trans. Herma Briffault (New York: Seabury Press,
America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War
36. Stannard, American Holocaust; Bruni Hofer, Heinz Dieterich,
(New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1 9 8 8 ), chap. 2, " Slaughter on the Eastern Front, " pp. 12-2 6 . 29. Quoted in Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai (New York: Penguin, 1 992), p. 3 3 6. One popular Saigon graffito of the time was "Kill a Gook for Calley," and telegrams to the White House ran a hundred to one in his favor. There was also
and Klaus Meyer, eds., Das Fiinfhundert-iiihrige Reich (Medico International, 1990); Lindqvist, "Exterminate All the Brutes, " pp. 1 60, 172. 37. Norman G. Finkelstein, Image and Reality of the Israel Palestine Conflict (London: Verso, 1 9 9 5 ), p. 9 3 · 3 8 . Adolf Hitler, 1932 speech, in The Years I 9 3 2 t o I934, vol. I of
1 56
1 974).
1 57
NOTES TO PAGES 1 1 3-1 7
NOTES TO PAGES 1 07-1 1 3
Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, r93 2-r945, ed. Max Do
(
marus, trans. Mary Fran Gilbert 1 9 62; rpt. Wauconda, Ill.: Bolchazy-Carducci, 1990 , p. 9 6 . For this reference, I am indebted to Finkelstein, Image and Reality, pp. 9 3 -94. Finkelstein points out that many of Hitler's biographers emphasize how frequently he invoked as a praiseworthy model to be emulated the success ful North American extermination of the "red savages. " 3 9 · Locke, Second Treatise, pp. 346-49. 40. David Hume, "Of the Original Contract" 1 748 , anthologized, e.g., in Barker, Social Contract, pp. 1 47-66. 4 1 . There is now an American journal with the title Race Traitor: A TournaI of the New Abolitionism. For a collection of articles from it, see Race Traitor, ed. Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey (New York: Routledge, 1996 . 42. Maran, Torture, p. 1 2 5 n. 30. 43 · The slogan of Race Traitor. 44· Quoted in Drinnon, Facing West, p. I 6 3 from the nineteenth century American novelist Robert Montgomery Bird. 4 5 · Chomsky, Year SOl, p. 3 1 . 46. Roger Moody, Introduction (to the first edition), Indigenous Voice, p. xxix. 47· Bilton and Sim, Four Hours, pp. 1 3 5 -4 1 , 1 76-77, 204-5 . 48. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk 1 903; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1 9 8 2 . 49· Sitting Bull, quoted in Moody, Indigenous Voice, p. 3 5 5; Church ill, Fantasies; David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (Baltimore, Md.: Black Classic Press, 1993 , pp. 3 3 , 4 8 ; D u Bois, Souls, pp. 1 22, 2 2 5 ; W. E. B. D u Bois, "The Souls of White Folk," in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1 9 9 5 , p. 456; Richard Wright, "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow"; Marcus Garvey, The Philoso phy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, vols. I and 2, ed. Amy Jacques-Garvey 1 923, 1 9 2 5 ; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1992 ; Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India 1 946; rpt. New York: Anchor Books, 1 9 5 9 , quoted in Chomsky, Year SOl, p. 20; Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait 1963; rpt. New York: Men tor, 1964 , p. 82; Malcolm X, 8 April 1964 speech on "Black Revolution, " in I Am Because We Are: Readings in Black Phi-
)
(
)
)
�
(
)
)
)
(
)
)
1 58
(
(
)
losophy, ed. Fred Lee Hord (Mzee Lasana Okpara) and Jonathan
)
Scott Lee (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995 , pp. 277-78; Fanon, Wretched, pp. 40-42; Cesaire, Discourse, pp. 20- I; "Statement of Protest," in Moody, Indigenous Voice, p. 3 60. 50. "Knox was an influential figure in the development of British 'race science'-perhaps the most influential at mid-century whom Darwin cites with respect if not absolute approval. " Pat rick Brantlinger, " 'Dying Races': Rationalizing Genocide in the Nineteenth Century, " in Pieterse and Parekh; The Decoloniza tion of Imagination, p. 47· 5 1 . Lindqvist, "Exterminate, " pts. 2 and 4; and Brantlinger, '' 'Dy
�
ing Races.' " 52. Quoted i n Cook, Colonial Encounters, p. 1 . 5 3 . Kiernan, Imperialism, p. 1 4 6 . See also Okihiro, chap. 5, "Perils
of the Body and Mind, " in Margins and Mainstreams, pp. I I 8-47· 5 4. Kiernan, Lords, pp. 1 7 1 , 237.
55. Madison Grant, The Passing of the Great Race; or, The Racial Basis of European History (New York: Scribner's, 1 9 1 6 ; Lothrop Stoddard, The Rising Tide of Color against White World
)
)
Supremacy (New York: Scribner's, 1 920 . For a discussion, see Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of an Idea in America 1963; rpt. New York: Schocken, 1 9 6 5 , chap. I S . Gossett points out that Stoddard's book turns up in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Great
)
(
Gatsby, disguised as The Rise of the Colored Empires.
5 6 . Kiernan, Lords, p. 27. 5 7. Quoted in Dower, War without Mercy, p. 1 60. 5 8 . Kiernan, Lords, pp. 3 1 9-20. 5 9 . Ibid., p. 69· 60. Drinnon, Facing West, pp. 3 1 3-14. 61. Dower, War without Mercy, pp. 1 73-78. 62. Okihiro, "Perils, " pp. 1 3 3 , 129. 6 3 . W. E. B. Du Bois, "To the Nations of the World, " and "The Negro
(
)
Problems" 1 9 1 5 , both in Lewis, Du Bois, pp. 639, 48. 64. Richard Wright, The Color Curtain: A R eport on the Bandung Conference
)
( 1 9 5 6;
rpt. Jackson: University Press of Missis
sippi, 1994 . 6 5 . See Moody, Indigenous Voice, pp. 498-5 05.
1 59
NOTES TO PAGES 1 28-32
NOTES TO PAGES 1 1 8-28 6 6 . Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Nation alist Ideas in Europe, trans. Edmund Howard ( 1 9 7 1 j rpt. New York: Basic Books, 1 974), p. 5 . 6 7 . Douglass, Narrative, p . !O7. 6 8 . Baldwin, Nobody Knows, pp. 67-68. 69. See Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berke
ley: University of California Press, 1 982). 70. Young, White Mythologies. 7 1 . See, for example, Edward Blyden's A Vindication of the African Race ( 1 8 5 7 ). 72. See Russell et al., The Color Complex. 7 3 . For the long history of the systematic evasion of race by the
most famous theorists of American political culture, see Rogers M. Smith, "Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multi ple Traditions in America, " American Political Science Review 87 ( 1 9 9 3 1 : 5 49-6 6 . Smith points out (pp. 5 5 7-5 8 ) that "the cumu lative effect of these persistent failures to lay out the full pattern of civic exclusion has been to make it all too easy for scholars to conclude that egalitarian inclusiveness has been the norm," whereas "the exceptions obviously have great claim to be ranked as rival norms." 74. Or at least my preferred version does. As earlier mentioned,
racist versions of the "Racial Contract" are possiblej these would take whites to be intrinsically exploitative beings who are bio logically motivated to set up the contract.
Policy with the 7 8 . Dower, War without Mercy, chap. !O, "'Global . Yamato Race as Nucleu s," pp. 262-90
Harvey,
David 79. For a critique from the Left, see, for example, the Origin s into y Enquir An : The Condition of Postmodernity 990). 1 ell, Blackw of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil rse of Modernity: 80. Jiirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discou
ridge: MIT Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Camb Invention , Dussel le, examp for Press, 1 987). For critiques, see, nity, and Moder orlds, Life-W " , of the Americas; and Outlaw Philosophical Praxis."
8 1 . O'Neill, "Justice."
Does the Negro 82. Richard R. Wright Jr. (not the novelist), "What the Emergence From : 2 10-193 Want in our Democracy?" in 19 vol. 3 of A Deal, New the of ing of the NA.A. C.P. to the Beginn States, United the in People Documentary History of the Negro 1 9 7 3 ), Press, Citadel N.J.: t Aptheker (Secaucus, ed. Herber
PP · 28 5-93 ·
y: A Theory of 8 3 . Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monke Oxford Uni York: (New sm African-American Literary Critici 49· 47, versity Press, 1 9 8 8 ), pp. xxi, xxiii,
the Difference It 84. Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Writing 'Race' and nce (Chicago: Differe and , Makes, " in Gates, ed., "Race, " Writing 1-20. pp. ), ( University of Chicago Press, 1 98 6 es, Racism, 8 5 . Anthony H. Richmond,· Global Apartheid: Refuge sity Pre�s, and the New World Order (Toronto: Oxford Univer 1 994).
7 5 . For representative works in legal theory, the original home of
the. term, see Delgado, Critical Race Theory; and Kimberle Cren shaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds., Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Move ment (New York: New Press, 1 99 5 ). The term, however, is now
beginning to be used more widely. 7 6 . Quoted in Dower, War without Mercy, p. 1 6 1 . 7 7 . Boston Globe article by the Japan historian Herbert Bix, 1 9 April 1 992, quoted by Chomsky, Year 501, p. 239. See also James Yin
and Shi Y�mng, The Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs, ed. Ron Dorfman and Shi Young (Chicago: Inno vative Publishing Group, 1 996).
160
1 61
INDEX
Abu-Lughod, Janet 1., 72 Adams, John, 57
Africa.
Barbarians: Grotius on, 64; and Mill's harm principle, 94,
See Dark Continent Africans. See Blacks; Slavery
23; status of, compared to
Algerian war, 101, I 5 6-57n29
Subpersons
Alcoff, Linda, I 3 9nI I , I43n4I
I49n57; and Roman precedent, savages, 1 3 , 5 7 , 7 9 .
See also
Allen, Anita L., 77 Allen, Theodore W., I48n50,
Barker, Ernest, I 3 5 n2, I 3 7nI
America, Richard F., I44-4 5 n 5 6 Amin, Samir, 3 4
Beccaria, Cesare, 99-100
I 5 rn84
Apartheid, 28, 4 8 , 86, ro9
Aristotle, 5 3 -54, 5 9 , 93
Ashcraft, Richard, I49n 5 5
Association, French colonial, doctrine of, 2 5 -26
Bataille, Gretchen M. , I 3 9-40nI 3 Belgian Congo, 99, 104, I 5 5 n I 9, 1 5 7n30 Bell, Derrick, I44n54 Belloc, Hilaire, I 3 9n6 Berkhofer, Robert, Jr., I 3 9-40nI 3
Atomic bomb, use of, 100
Berlin Conference, 30
Australian Aborigines: aesthetic status of, 6 1 ; epistemic status
Bilton, Michael, I 5 6-57n29,
Augustine, 5 4
of, 60; honorary, 108; killing of, 28-29, 8 3 , 87, 99, I P n95; moral status of, 79-80;
nonexistence of, 5 0, 97; protest statement of, 1 1 2-1 3; in white schools, 89 Baldwin, James, 88, 97, I I 9 Bandung Conference, I I 7
Bernal, Martin, 44-45 I 5 8n47 Bird, Robert Montgomery, I 5 8n44 Bix, Herbert, I 6 0n77 Black Peril, I I 4 Blacks: aesthetic status of, 6 1-62; bodies of, 5 I-5 3; ideological conditioning of, 88; as ignorant, 44-46; as
1 63
INDEX
INDEX
Blacks
(cont.)
invisible, 96-97; Kant on, 7 1 ;
killing of, 9 9 , 1 5 5nI9, 1 5 6n26;
and Locke, 67-68; moral status of, 2 1 , 24-2 5 , 26, 28, 30, 5 7 ;
oppositional theory of, 1 3 1-32;
struggle for respect of, I l 9-20 Blaut, James M., 34, 143-44n45 , 144n50 Blyden, Edward, 1 60n7 1
Body, nonwhite: aesthetic norming of, 6 1-62;
Dollard, John, 1 5 4n9
cognitive dysfunction, 1 8-19,
Douglass, Frederick, 88, I l 9
structure, 1 2 3-24; and white
Dorfman, Ron, 160nn
(see also Sexual Contract); and
94-98
Dower, John W., 1 5 1n86,
9 3 -94; and state-of-nature
(see also Epistemology:
of ignorance, prescribed by
Racial Contract); and whites as
real cognizers, 44-46
Colonialism, European: 1 3 ,
20-21, 29-30, 73; and colonial contract, 2 5 -26, 83-84; and
education, 89; and Jewish Holocaust, 103-6; and rise of
appropriation of, 99,
Europe, 34-3 5 ; and silence of
120; microspace of, 5 1-5 3
wars of, against nonwhites,
1 5 5 - 5 6n2o; and body politics,
Body, white, 6 1
Bowser, Benjamin P., 141n30, 143n41
Boxer rebellion, 85, I l 4
Brandon, William, 1 5 2n9 1
Brantlinger, Patrick, 1 5 9nn50, 5 1
Brown, John, 109
Browne, Robert S., 1 4 5 n 5 9
Brunschwig, Henri, 1 43n38
Buck, Pearl, I l 5
Bull, Sitting, I l l-12
-Burke, Edmund, 1 2 3
most European ethicists, 94; 8 5 -86, 98-100
Conrad, Joseph, 45, 47, 105
Consent: in ideal contract, 3, 106-7, 1 3 6n7; in Racial
Contract, I I , 14, 106-7, 1 37nI l
Contract.
See Racial Contract;
Sexual Contract; Social
contract
Cook, Scott B., 146nI l, 1 5 9n52 Coppola, Francis Ford, 47 Count, Earl, 1 5 0n66 Crenshaw, Kimberle, 1 60n75 Curtin, Philip D., 23
Cabixi, Daniel, 88 Caldwell, Malcolm, 144-45n56
Calley, William, 1 0 1 , 1 5 6-57n29 Carey-Webb, Allen, 140-4In21 Carlyle, Thomas, 1 5 3n3
Cesaire, Aime, 103-4, I l 2
Chaudhuri, Nupur, 1 37-38n3 China, and Chinese, 79, 8 1, 8 5 , 1 1 4, 1 2 8
Chinweizu, 143n38
Chomsky, Noam, 105, 108, 144n52, 1 6 0nn
Christianity, colonial role of, 22-2 3, 46, 5 4-5 5
Churchill, Ward, 1 1 2, 1 3 9n12
Clark, Andy, 1 5 3n4 .
Cognition: and concepts, 6-7; and ethics, 94-96
1 64
(see also
contract theory, 6, 1 3 6-37n9
Herrenvolk ethics); and social
Dark Continent, 44-46 Darwinism, and Social
Darwinism, 3 3 , 60, I l 3, 1 2 5 , 1 5 9n50
1 5 6nn22, 27, 1 5 9nn57, 6 1 ,
1 60n76, 1 6 1n7 8
Dred Scott
v.
Sanford, 24-25
Drinnon, Richard, 28, 49-50, 80, 97, 146n14, 148n38 , 1 5 5nI7, 1 5 6-57n2 9, 1 5 8n44, 1 5 9n60 Du Bois, W. E. B., 3 3, 109, 1 1 2, I l 7, 1 3 2 Dudley, Edward, 145n3
Dussel, Enrique, 1 3 9-40n 1 3, 1 6 1n80
Ellison, Ralph, 96-97
Enlightenment, 23, 61, 64, 122, 129 Epistemology: and cognitive
Denton, Nancy A., 142-43n37, 144n54, 1 5 0n74
d'Entreves, A. P., 1 3 9n7
Dieterich, Heinz, 1 5 7n36
Diop, Cheikh Anta, 1 4 5 -46n8 Discovery, Doctrine of, 24
Finkelstein, Norman G., 1 5 7-5 8nn37, 3 8
Finley, Moses I., 5 5 , Frank, Andre Gunder, 3 4 1 5 3n5
Franklin, Benjamin, 62 1 3 9-40nI3, 142-43n37
Freedman, Estelle B., 147n30
Gambill, Jerry, 88-89 Garvey, John, 1 5 8n41
resistance, I l 9-20, 1 3 1-32;
Garvey, Marcus, I I 2 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., ' 1 6 1nn83,
communities, 1 3 9nI I; of
84 Genocide.
and epistemological
ignorance, prescribed by Racial
See Holocaust;
Rwanda genocide
Contract, 1 8-19, 93, 96-98;
Gibson, William, 1 8
5 9-6 1; and norming of space,
Gierke, Otto, 1 3 7nl Ginzburg, Ralph, 1 5 2n94, 1 5 6n24
standpoint theory, 109- I I
Goldberg, David Theo, 47-48
and norming of individual,
44-46; political, 1 22-24; and Europe: and atrocities against nonwhites, 98-1 01
(see also
Holocaustl; and borderline
Colonialism, European); and
de Man, Paul, 7 1-72
Fieldhouse, D. K., 143n38
Filmer, Robert, 8 1
Friedman, Marilyn, 1 5 3n4
Engels, Frederick, 1 9, 94
Delgado, Richard, 149n59,
D'Emilio, John, 147n30
See also
Women, subordination of
Fredrickson, George M.,
Ellis, John, 1 3 9n6, 1 5 6n26
Europeans, 78-80, 104; and
1 60n75
gender equality, 32.
Frankenberg, Ruth, 52, 1 37-38n3,
Dashwood, C. J., 1 5 2n9 5
de Beauvoir, Simone, 108
male political philosophy,
European colonialism
(see
European miracle, 3 3 -34, 74-75
Eze, Emmanuel, 70-71 Fanon, Frantz, 48, I I 2, 1 40n 1 5 ,
Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur, I I 7 Goldman, Alvin 1., 9 5
Gordon, Lewis R., 5 1, 97-98 Gossett, Thomas F., 1 5 9n5 5
Gotanda, Neil, 1 60n75
Gould, Stephen Jay, 148n43 Grant, Madison, 1 5 9n5 5 Great Chain of Being, 1 6 Grotius, Hugo, 64, 9 4
Habermas, Jl1rgen, 70, 129 Hacker, Andrew, 8 1 , 144n 5 4
1 47nn27, 3 0 , 1 5 2nl02,
Haitian revolution, 8 5 -86, I I 4
Feminist theory, 2-3; and
Hampton, Jean, 1 3 5 n2, 1 3 6n7,
1 5 6-57n29
cognition, 123, 1 3 9nI I; and
Hall, Ronald, 1 48n48, 1 60n72 1 37nI I
1 65
INDEX
INDEX
Hancock, Ian, 1 5 6n28 Hanke, Lewis, 1 40nn I 9, 20
Harding, Sandra, 34, 146n9 Harmand, Jules, 2 5 -2 6
Harris, Cheryl 1 . , 1 5 4n8
Harris, Robert, I04
Hartwig, M. C., 147n26, 1 5 4-5 5n14
Hartz, Louis, 142n3 5
Harvey, David, 1 6 In79
Headrick, Daniel R., 1 5 6n25 Healy, David, 143n38
Knox, Robert, I I 3 Kymlicka, Will, 1 3 5 n2, I 3 8n5
Innocent IV, 22 Irish, 78-80, 1 5 In84
Isaacs, Harold R., 1 4 In30, 1 5 In81
Jackson, Helen, 1 4 In3 1
Jamaican Morant Bay uprising, 85 James, C. 1. R., 1 5 6n23 Jameson, Fredric, 74
Japan, and Japanese, 3 1, 3 6; as honorary whites, 80-8 1;
Hegel, G. W. F., and
postwar victory plans of, 128;
Heidegger, Martin, 71-72
supremacy, I I 5 - 1 6, 127-28;
Hegelianism, 5 8 , 82, 94
Hereros, 8 5 -86, 1 5 7n30
Herrenvolk democracies, 28 Herrenvolk ethics, 1 6-17, 23, 27, 9 6, 108, I I O-I I
Herrnstein, Richard J., 144n5 3
as threat to global white
victory over Russia, 1 1 4, I I 6; war crimes against, 99-IOO;
war crimes of, 127-28; and Yellow Racial Contract, 127-28
Hilberg, Raul, 1 5 5 11I 6, 1 5 6n28
Jefferson, Thomas, 28, 62
Hobbes, Thomas, 5, 12; and
Jews: as borderline Europeans,
Hitler, Adolf, I05-6, 1 5 7-5 8n3 8 cognition, 1 2 3 ; and
conventionalist morality, 1 4-1 5 , 1 3 9n6; and natural law,
1 7; racialized state of nature
in, 47, 64-67; unsafe state of
nature in, 3 2
Hoetink, Harmannus, 6 1 Hofer, Bruni, 1 5 7n3 6
Holocaust: African
(see Slavery:
death toll of African);
American
(see Native
Americans: genocide of);
debate over uniqueness of.
Jewish, 102-6, 1 5 5 n I 6, 1 5 7n30; Jewish, 100-101, I I?
Horsman, Reginald, 142n34
Hulme, Peter, 1 3 9-40nI 3
Hume, David, 5 9, 94, 107
Ignatiev, Noel, 1 5 In85, 1 5 8n41 Imperialism. European
See Colonialism,
Indian Mutiny, 8 5 -86
1 66
Jennings, Francis, 49, 5 4-5 5 , 64 78-80, I04; genocide of, IOO-IOI, 1 5 5n I 6
(see also
Holocaust: debate over
uniqueness of Jewish)
Jones, Eric, 143-44n45
Jordan, Winthrop D., 6 1-62, 80 Kant, Immanuel, 5; as father of the modern concept of race,
Las Casas, Bartolome de, 23, I 0 5 , 108 Lawson, Bill E., 7 7 Lehman, David, 1 5 0n70
Lessnoff, Michael, 1 3 5n2, 1 3 7nI Lindqvist, Sven, 105, 1 5 6n26, 1 5 9n5 1
Locke, John, 5 ; and cognition, 123; and expropriation and slavery contracts, 67-68 ; and
Herrenvolk Lockeanism, 96;
and natural law, 1 7, 86-87; objectivist and egalitarian . morality in, 14-16; and pnvate property, 3 1-32; and ta it
L6pez, Ian F. Haney, 148n50 Lovejoy, Arthur 0., 1 3 9nlo Lynching, 5 2, 86-87, 100 Macleod, Don, 108
Malcolm X, I I 2 Maran, Rita, 1 5 6-5 7n29, 1 5 8n42 Marketti, James, 1 4 5 n 5 8
Marx, Karl, and Marxism, 3 3, 82, 94, 1 2 1 , 123, 1 3 1
Massey, Douglas S., 142-43n37, 144n54, 1 5 0n74
Kantianism, 96; objectivist and unwritten books of, 94; and
Mendus, Susan, 147n3 1
Herrenvolk
egalitarian morality in, 14-16;
women, 5 3 .
See also Persons
Katz, Steven T., 1 5 5 n I 6
Kellner, Douglas, 146n I 5
Kiernan, Victor G . , 3 5 , 8 6 , I04,
I I4-1 5 , 14onI6, 143nn38, 40,
1 44n5 I, 1 5 4nlo, 1 5 9nn 5 8, 5 9 Kinder, Donald R., 144n54, 1 5 4n6
King, Martin Luther, Jr., I I 2 Kipling, Rudyard, 5 7
ideal contract, 5, IO; origins of, in Racial Contract, IO-I I, 23,
�
40, 57, 72, I02; racialized s : subject for study by cogmuve science, 92-96. See also Herrenvolk ethics; specific contracts
Morel, E. D., 1 5 5 n I 9
Morrison, Toni, 5 8, 7 6 Mosse, George 1., 61, 7 0 Mudimbe, Valentin Y., 44, 46, I 3 9-4011 I 3 Miihlmann, Wilhelm, 1 5 0n66 Murray, Charles, 144n 5 3
My Lai, 4 7 , 101, I08, 1 5 6-57n29
�
consent, 72, 107; unwn tten books of, 94; voluntary consent in, 8 1-82
May, Larry, 15 3n4 Mayer, Arno, I02-3, 1 5 5 nI6,
69-72, 1 5 0n66; and
Moral psychology: origins of, in
1 5 7n30
Mestizaje, Latin American, 30, 1 43n41 Meyer, Klaus, 1 5 7n 3 6 Mill, John Stuart, 60, 94, 149n57, 1 5 3n3 Miner, Earl, 15 In82 Minority Rights Group, 143n41 Montesquieu, 97
Moody, Roger, 1 3 5n3, 1 5 8n46, 1 5 9n65
NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People), 1 5 1-5 2n90
Native Americans: education of,
88-89; epistemic status of, 5 9;
genocide of, 28, 83, 98-99,
1 5 5 11 I 6 , 1 5 7-58n38; Hitler on, 1 5 7-58n38; Hobbes on, 6 5 -66;
Jefferson on, 28; Kant on, 7 1 ; Locke on, 67; moral status of, 2 1 -24, 28 , 30, 46, 5 7 , 7 1 , 14In3 I; nonexistence of,
49-50, 97; numbers of, 142n3 5 , 146n21
Naturalized account, 5 -7, 9 1-92, 1 :1.0-24 Natural law, 1 5 -17, 4 6
Nazi policy: and borderline
Europeans, 78-80, 100-101;
and debate over uniqueness of Jewish Holocaust, 102-6,
1 5 5 n I 6, 1 5 7n30; and Kantian
theory, 72; and race science, 125 Nehru, Jawaharlal, I I 2 Nonwhites.
See Subpersons
Novak, Maximillian E., 1 4 5 n3 Nozick, Robert, 77
1 67
INDEX
INDEX
Off-whites.
See Europe: and
borderline Europeans
Okihiro, Gary Y., I I 6-17, 1 5 1n87, I 5 9n 5 3
Okin, Susan Moller, 1 3 6-37n9, 1 5 2nl
Oliver, Melvin 1., 37-38
Omdurman, battle of, 100, 1 5 6n26
O'Neill, Onora, 1 30, 1 5 0-5 1n7 6 Opotow, Susan v. , 96
Outlaw, Lucius, Jr., 5 6, 1 6 1 n80
Price, A. Grenfell, 142n3 5 , 1 5 2n95
Race: centrality of, to moral and political theorizing of
subpersons, I I O-13; as
constructed, I I , 6 3 , 1 2 5 -27;
and critical race theory,
1 2 5 -27; and disparities in
wealth, 3 6 -40; evasion of, in
political theory, 160n73; and
group interests, 1 5 4n6; as
Pagden, Anthony, 2 1 , 140n l 6, 1 4 1n24, 143n38
Pal, Radhabinod, 100
Parekh, Bhikhu, 1 5 3n2
Pateman, Carole, 6, 1 9, 1 3 6-3 7ll9
Patterson, Orlando, 5 8
Paul III, 22
Pearce, Roy Harvey, 43, 1 48n42 Peller, Gary, 1 60n75
Persons: centrality of, in modern moral theory, 1 5 -1 6, 5 5 -5 6; created as white, by Racial
Contract, I I, 6 3 -64; relation of, to subpersons, 1 6- 1 7, 5 6- 5 9 .
See also Subpersons;
Transformation of humans; Whites
Philosophy, whiteness of, 1-2, 4, 92-93, 1 2 1-22, 124, 1 3 5nl
Pieterse, Jan P. Nederveen, 145n2, 1 5 2nn9 1, 99
Pittock, A. Barrie, 147n23 Plato, I S, 93, 1 2 3
Poliakov, Leon, 1 1 7- 1 8, 1 5 0n66 Popes, and papal
pronouncements, 20, 22-23, 1 00
Postmodernism, I I I , 1 2 9 Potter, Elizabeth, 1 3 9nI I Pratt, Mary Louise, 43
1 68
14, 26-27, 5 6-57, 93, 122; and
origins of racial oppression, 2 I , 62-63; and racial etiquette,
5 2-5 3, 1 5 4n9; and racism as
bad faith, 98; as replacing
religious exclusion, 2 3 , 5 4-5 5 ; and subject races, 1 6-17, 5 7 ; traitors, 1 07-9, 126-27.
See
also Persons; Racial Contract;
Space in Racial Contract;
Subpersons; Transformation of
humans; Whites; White supremacy
Shapiro, Thomas M., 37-38 Signifyin/g), 1 3 1-32
1 3 6n5 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas, 108
Silet, Charles 1. P., 1 3 9-40n I 3
Reparations, 3 7-40
Simpson, Christopher, 1 5 6n28,
Requerimiento, 22-23
normative rather than deviant, Pacific War, 1 27-28
Rape of Nanking, 1 2 8 Rawls, John, 4 - 5 , 1 0 , 1 9, 70, 77,
Retamar, Roberto Fernandez, 1 3 9-40n I 3 Reynolds, Henry, 142n3 5 Rhodes, Cecil, I I 4
Richmond, Anthony H., 1 6 m8 5 Rodney, Walter, 3 4
Roediger, David, 1 3 7-38n3 Romani, 1 0 1
Roosevelt, Theodore, 5 0
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: a s cited by Harmand, 26; and ideal
contract, 69; and naturalized
bogus contract, s;
Sim, Kevin, 1 5 6 -5 7n29, 1 5 8n47 1 5 7n3 1
Slavery: contract, 24-25, 67-68, 8 3-84, 1 3 1; contribution of African, to industrial revolution, 34; death toll of African, 83, 99; and education of slaves, 88; Locke on, 67-68; Montesquieu on, 97; moral improvement of Africans through, 94; as natural, 5 3 -54; punishments of, 100; relationship to freedom of, 5 8 ; and seasoning of slaves, 84
transformation of human
Slavs, 78, 1 0 1
nonwhite savages in, 68-69
Smith, Rogers M., 160n73
population in, 12; white and Russell, Kathy, 148n48, 160n72 Rwanda genocide, 129 Ryan, Michael, 146n1 5
Smith, Adam, 3 5 , 3 8 Snowden, Frank M., Jr., 63 Social contract: economic, 3 1-32; epistemological, 9, 17-1 8; golden age of, s, 6 3 -64;
Said, Edward W., 27, 5 8,
hypothetical, normative, and
essentialist versions of, 6 3 , 78,
Sanders, Ronald, 145n2, 146n 1 3
naturalized, descriptive, and
colors of, 127-29; exploitation
Savages: and Doctrine of
Racial Contract /actual): as
8 3 -84; constructivist and
1 3 9-40 1ll 3, 143n39 Sanders, Lynn M., 144n54, 1 5 4n6
1 2 5 -27, 1 60n74; different
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 20, 98, 1 08
colonial contract, 2 5-26, 5 7,
as motivation fo!, I I; as
Discovery, 24; Hobbes on,
83, 1 4 1n3 1 ; repudiation of,
Americans as, 24, 28, 6 5 , 89;
expropriation contract, 24, 5 7, 106-9; as slavery contract,
24-2 5 , 8 3 -84; statement of, I I
Racial Contract, theory of: motivation for, 3-7; and
postmodernism, 129; relation of, to oppositional black
political theory, 1 3 1-32; as this-worldly, 129-3 I
Racial polity. supremacy
See White
Raleigh, Walter, 6 5
6 5 -66; Irish as, 79; Native
as outside moral and legal
sanctions, 64; relationship of,
to wild space, 42-43; Rousseau on, 68-69; status of, compared to barbarians, 1 3, 57, 79; as taking the jungle with them,
47-48, 86-87; and white settler state, 1 3 .
See also Subpersons
Schindler, Oskar, 108
Sexual Contract, 6, 1 9, 62, 1 3 6-37n9
ideal, s, 10, 76, 8 1-82, 120-22, 129-30; moral, 9-10, 14-16; nonideal, 5-7; political, 9-10; relation to Racial Contract, 63-72; as theory, 3-7; updated use qf, to explain the state, 1 3 6n7, 1 3 7 n I I South Africa, 28-29, 4 8 , 5 0 , 86, 1 09 Space, in ideal contract, 4 1 -42.
See also State of nature Space, in Racial Contract, 41-43; epistemological norming of, 44-46; local norming of, 47-49, 5 0-5 1; macrolevel norming of, 43-47, 49-50, 74-75; micro level
1 69
INDE X
INDEX
Space
(cont.)
norming of, 5 I-5 3 , 87; moral
norming of, 46-5 3 .
See also
Thagard, Paul, 1 3 7nIO
Thiong'o, Ngiigi wa, 89 Thomas, Kendall, 1 60n7 5
Savages; State of nature
Thompson, Hugh, 108
29-30, 3 5 , 44, 9 8
Todorov, Tzvetan, 1 5 5 n I 6
Spain, and Spanish, 22-2 3 , Stannard, David E . , 1 0 5 , 1 42n32, I46n2I, 1 5 5 nn I 6, 18, 1 5 5-5 6n20
Stanner, W. E. H., 1 5 4-5 5 n I 4 State o f nature: and
appropriation, 3 1 -32j
Hobbesian, 64-67; in ideal
contract, 3, 10, 12, 42, 46-47;
as incarnated in (wildfjungled)
bodies of subpersons, 42-43,
Thompson, Leonard, 147n24 Transformation o f humans: by
aesthetic norming, 6 1-62j by
cognitive norming, 5 9-6 1 ; in ideal contract, 9-10, 12; through ideological
conditioning, 87-89; by moral! legal norming, 5 5 -5 9; in Racial Contract, I I- I 3 , 5 3-62, 6 3 , 78; through violence, 83-84.
also Persons; Subpersons
47-48, 5 I-5 3, 8 3 , 87j Lockean, 67j in Racial Contract, 1 3 , 43 ,
Tucker, William H., I48n43
68-69
Turnbull, Clive, 1 5 6n2 1
46-47, 86-87j Rousseauean,
See
Treaty of Tordesillas, 30
Tully, James, 149n5 3
Steinberg, Stephen, 144n54,
Twain, Mark, 108
Stember, Charles Herbert,
United States: and Americanness
1 5 0n73
147n30
Stevens, F. S., 142n3 5
as whiteness, 5 8-5 9, 62;
discrimination in, 37-39,
Stoddard, Lothrop, 1 5 9n5 5
48-49, 5 2, 75; immigration to,
Strobel, Margaret, 1 3 7-38n3
nonwhites, 84-8 5 , 86-87,
Subpersons: aesthetic status of,
state, 28-29, 30, 46, 49-50, 97,
Story, Joseph, 24
Sublimis Deus, 22
6 1-62j created by Racial
Contract, I I , 1 6-I7, 20j
epistemic status of, 5 9-6 Ij
ideological conditioning of, 87-89j and Kantian theory,
69-72j moral status of, 5 6-59;
personal struggles of, I 1 8-20j political struggles of, I I 5 - 16 j
violence against, 8 3-87j voices of, I I I- I 3 .
See also Persons;
Transformation of humans
Swift, Jonathan, 1 5 5 -5 6n20
Swinton, David H., 145nn5 7, 5 9 Takaki, Ronald, 1 42n34 Taney, Roger, 24-25
1 70
79, 8 I j and violence against
99-100, I I 6j as white settler 14 In3 1 .
See also Native
Americans; Slavery
Utilitarianism, 5 5 ; 96
Herrenvolk,
Valladolid Conference, 3 0
Wannsee Protocol, 1 2 8 Ward, Russel, 147n 26 Washington, George, 28 50n6 I, Welchman, Jennifer, 1491 5 4n8 Wells-Barnett, Ida, 1 5 6n24 West, Cornel, 147n 3 5 White, Hayden, 43, 5 4 White life, greater value of, 8 5 -86, 10 1-2
See White moral psychology. Moral psychology 1 2 6-27 White renegades, 107-9, itions Whites: and changing defin and class 78; of whiteness, ng, gender differentiation amo 7; 1 3 7-38 n3; Hobbes on, 66-6 as invented by Racial t on, Contract, I I , 1 3, 6 3 ; Kan and 67; on, e Lock ; 71 . to oppositional relationshIp 23, 1, 20-2 , 6-17 1 s, hite nonw 5 5 -5 9; as the people who 0; really are people, 3, 27, 49-5 p ivileging of, 32-33, 3 6 -40,
�
te 7 3 -74; as rulers (see Whi ons; supremacy). See also Pers Transformation of humans 3, White settler states, 12-1
28-29 al, de White supremacy: as glob al, facto, 36-3 7, 73-7 4; as glob 73, 1, 29-3 27, , 1 20-2 de jure, 1 1 3 - 1 5 ; as invisible in
ry mainstream political theo of y: olog tem (see also Epis . RacIal ignorance, prescribed by 5; Contract), 1-2, 3 1 , 77, 1 2 1-2 a s political, 1-3, 7, 1 2-14 , f 76-7 7, 82-8 3; as writing itsel out of existence, 7 3-7 7,
I l 7-18 , 1 5 3n5 White wealth. See Race : and disparities in wealth Wicker, Tom, 144n 54
Wild Man, 42-43, 5 4 re Wildness. See Stat e of natu 34 , Eric Williams, 7 Williams, Patricia J., 76-7 1-22, 2 Jr., A., rt Robe Williams, 24, 64, 67 Wilmer, Franke, 49 2 Wilson, Midge, I48n 48, 1 60n7
Wolf, Eric R., 1 60n69 1 9-20, Women, subordination of, n3 7-38 3 1 4, 62-6 3, 93-9
Woodson, Carter G., 88 3n37 woodward, C. Vann, 1 42-4 7, 1 5 4n9 Wright, Richard, 1 1 2, I I 6 rn82 Wright, Richard R., Jr., 1 Yamato race. See Japan, and Japanese Yellow Peril, 1 1 4 Yin, James, 1 60n77 Young, Iris Marion, 1 3 6n4 Young, Robert, 1 3 9-40n I 3 , 1 60n70 Young, Shi, 1 60n77
Van den Berghe, Pierre 1., 23, 28 Vansina, Jan, 1 5 5 n I 9
Vietnam, and Vietnam war, 47, 101, I I 6, 1 5 6-57n29
Violence, to enforce Racial Contract, 28-30, 8 3 -87,
98-10 1 .
See also Holocaust
Voltaire, 60
Walker, David, 1 1 2
Wallerstein, Immanuel, 34
1 71
