“White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.” So begins The Racial Contract, and in the mere 133 pages that follow this line the book deftly marshals evidence from the Western political tradition and general history to effectively place race at the heart of political theory. It centrally elucidates the ways in which the social contract has unspoken suppositions which in actuality make it a handshake between whites to exploit the lands, labors and bodies of nonwhites. These suppositions include the understanding that the peoples and places it “races” are not fully human–an idea that has legitimated 500 years of Western atrocities and exploitations exacted upon countries with peoples of color. Thus it also calls into question the popular idea that racism is merely a misguided worldview, and says rather that it is solidly within the epistemological, political and moral understandings of the West.

Mills places his theory firmly within the liberal conception of rights and so explores the ways in which such rights (as to life and labors) have been systematically alienated from nonwhites. Hence, those who have called this work a “deconstruction” or anti-Enlightenment are quite wrong. Mills: “Though it may appear to be such, the ‘Racial Contract’ is not a ‘deconstruction’ of the social contract…. The ‘Racial Contract’ is really…pro-Enlightenment…and antipostmodernist” (129). The reason that this is so important to Mills’ project is that he is not proposing that ethics are relative or that there are no ethical norms that can coherently be placed at the center of a political project. He proposes that there are such norms but that they have been systematically denied to nonwhites. He also puts forth the very unpostmodern idea that there is a correct metanarrative of history–one that identifies white supremacy and conquest as the unnamed political system making the world what it is today. Hence, this work is more correctly placed in the tradition of the “radical and to-be-completed Enlightenment” (129). (In other words, if prospective readers are looking for contemporary continental thought–go to [my favorites] Zizek, Foucault or Fanon, not to Mills.)

I hope that this does not sound too academic or technical. I have read plenty of dry and boring theoretical texts, and this simply is not that. I stayed up until four in the morning finishing The Racial Contract in one sitting–it is perhaps my favorite book read thus far in college. Anyone concerned about the problems of race–whether familiar with political theory or not–can (and should) read this book and get a tremendous amount from it.