The Social Contract and Racial

The Social Contract and Racial Dominance in America Mills' essay "Race and the Social Contract Tradition" (2000) makes a compelling argument about the nature of social power dynamic in America, evaluating issues related to race, racial identity and the defacto acceptance of a social contract which uses these traits to define a clear hierarchy. The social contract is elaborated in the Mills text in order to examine the hegemonic impulses which it supports. In particular, this essay will evaluate Mills' conception of the dominance contract as reflecting the ethical and ideological distortions used to reinforce continuing racial inequality in the economic, political and social context.

According to Mills, in spite of the many legal and ideological changes which have occurred across the last century, racial qualifiers remain a powerful force with respect to opportunity and social order. The Caucasian population of the United States most assuredly enjoys a singular reign at the top of a racially loaded hierarchy which calls into question the logic of the 'social contract.' To the point, Mills raises the threshold question of whether the denials, fallacies, and unconscious perceptions of racial hierarchies are attributable to the inherent problems with the mechanics of social contracts or primarily consequences of the particular beliefs and social history of American society. To an extent, he proceeds to make the argument that some intercession of both is responsible for the inequality in our society. Mills contends that "insofar as the contract classically emphasises the centrality of individual will and consent, it voluntarises and represents as the result of free and universal consensual agreement relations and structures of domination about which most people have no real choice, and which actually oppress the majority of the population." (Mills, 441) This is to suggest that the assumption of a social contract is a tool of authority in and of itself which dictates an involuntary consent of all individuals to a common moral disposition. The result is a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the supposed ethical responsibility of all to a social contract is assumed without consideration of the contract's possible inherent flaws. In the case of the social contract which might be said to exist in the United States, the inherent racialist biases in our history combine with the shortcomings of the social contract in order not only to extend a set of expectations to all citizens but to attach these falsely to moral turpitude. In the case of the case of the dominance contract, this false moral turpitude is tantamount to the ethical defense of racial inequality. Mills also suggests that racial inequalities in contemporary American society are substantially less resolved than typically represented. Mills addresses the issue of defining the nature of the debt owed by the white majority to racial groups which they had subjugated for centuries. Mills outlines the contextual understanding of contractual relationships by differentiating literal contracts from the hypothetical, and descriptive contracts from defacto contracts. In that regard, much of Mills' argument is that contemporary American society is substantially defined by a defacto contract in the form of the accepted historical narrative of the evolution of Western society According to the author, the shared history of human societies has produced a tacit contract endorses the responsibility of all individuals to their respective societies. In the case of Western European societies in general and the United States in particular, the social contract emergent in our national history functions as a form of mutual agreement that would ignore many inconvenient historical truths, such as the manner and degree to which the white races have relied on their exploitation of non-whites (and to which white males have relied on exploiting females, and the rich on exploiting the poor throughout an even longer history). Importantly, Mills remarks that the assumption of this contract seems to have emerged almost spontaneously as a device through which to construct an inherency to such inequalities. Mills tells that "if collectivity is understood as embodying agreement, it does not necessarily follow that any such agreement between parties ever actually took place in historical time. . . A contraction political theory, therefore, can be entirely hypothetical, analyzing state and society as if agreement must always be presumed." (Mills, 444) Naturally, this creates quite a bit of latitude for those who have simultaneously reported to the existence of such a contract and who have further appointed themselves as distinctly qualified to enforce such a contract. This allows for what Mills refers to as a naturalization of the social contract, in which the hegemonic claim and enforcement of such a contract allows it to manifest as something real. Where it would be hypothetical in its originally incarnation, its execution as a mode to the extension of social control, political exclusivity and economic imbalance would make it a very real force. Such is to say that the theoretical construct of the social contract is more accurately understood in the actual formulation of a dominance contract. Accordingly, the characterization of racial exploitation through dominance and repression presented by Mills suggests that the contemporary white majority still dominates minority races unjustly by virtue of the identical methods used historically by the upper classes to dominate the lower classes, and prehistorically by males to dominate females. By rendering political and economic institutions in which those of the ruling demographic are able to formalize and legitimize otherwise theoretical inequalities, Mills denotes that white men have succeeded in establishing a hierarchical order which functions across characteristics of gender, wealth, and race. Race is an issue which has especially garnered intense focus both by those that would defend the legitimacy of the dominance contract and by those that have sought to reaffirm the validity of the social contract by removing it from the machinations of white supremacy. Quite to the point, it is not that social contract in and of itself which comprises the greatest problem for human civility. Instead, it is a failure to critically acknowledge that the social contract is vulnerable to distortion when brandished by an unequal force. This points to the underlying concern that governments have historically tended toward this inequality by allowing for or benefiting from notable racial disparities. This is something which Mills acknowledges in pointing to ways of refining the social contract theory. He makes the case that an understanding of the social contract with a concession to the realities of racial disparity is necessary if it this is to be understood as an instrument for social order rather than the retention of classicist dominance. So remarks Mills, describing "what has come to be called 'critical race theory' began in legal theory, as a response to racial minorities' dissatisfaction with the critical legal studies movement. So this was, so to speak, a critique of the crits, the claim that their analysis of the deficiencies and silences of mainstream legal theory did not pay sufficient attention to race." (Mills, 447) This is an idea which helps to underscore a view of the social contract as having been stewarded to reflect society's racism and not necessarily the other way around. In this regard, the social contract is not a threat to racial equality but becomes a channel by which inequality can be both manifested and entrenched. As Mills finds, there is nothing inherently immoral, unjust, or problematic, in principle, with the social contract model. Rather, the justness or unjustness and the social utility of social contracts lies in the factual validity and ethical fairness of their underlying assumptions and presumptions. Ultimately, Mills will actually come to find the social contract a useful instrument for assuring that the moral constants which help to protect a society from its own internal destruction are defined and accepted. With respect to the definition of the law, it is expected that our collective submission to this force is demonstrative of the social contract in full and defensible respect. In its absence, a society could descend into chaos. Ultimately, this denotes that the principal requirement to resolve the problems introduced by social contracts, therefore, is not to abolish them altogether but to examine the impulses that have caused them to misrepresent ethical determinations. Naturally, this is more easily said than done, but it is an imperative underscored by Mills' argument, which emphasizes the need to deconstruct the racialist falsehoods that are more a function of political imperative than biology. Mills indicates that "if there is a key point, a common theoretical denominator, it is the simultaneous recognition of the centrality of race and the unreality of race, its socio-political rather than biological character. The cliche? that has come to express this insight is that race is not natural but 'constructed'. So race is made, unmade, and remade; race is a product of human activity, both personal and institutional, rather than DNA." (Mills, 448) This means that in order to free the social contract from the dominance framework, we must collectively unlearn that which we have come to accept about race and society. Mills details the manner in which the contemporary historical narrative of the United States (and of the evolution of Western civilization, more generally) are based on various historical fictions and the denial of extensive moral transgressions. Namely, the institutions of slavery and Jim Crow that were used to constrain the growth and advancement of African Americans are today disregarded as being directly relevant to the fortunes and opportunities of blacks in America. This is both unrealistic and unethical, with the denial of its lasting impact casting American racism in an historical light rather than one which is still present and problematic. It is thus that the social contract today serves the interests of dominance even as it feigns to have disavowed these aspects of itself. A true resolution to the failures of the social contract may only really occur when the discourse on America's racialist past and the lasting effects of this on the current fortunes of African Americans is resolved. In that regard, Mills regards it as largely a fiction that racial discrimination ended in any meaningful way after the Emancipation Proclamation; rather, racial prejudice and systematic subjugation continued overtly well into the 20th century, continuing still today albeit primarily covertly and unconsciously. Mills characterizes American blacks as having been granted the permanent status of "outsiders" in American society from the standpoint of equal rights and their second-class citizenship. For that matter, Mills also considers the prevailing social contracts to relegate women to second-class citizenship through the same process. Essentially, Mills characterizes the position of racial minorities as enjoying a lesser type of "equality" than white males that makes them "sub-persons" in American society. Ultimately, this speaks to the core racial failures in American society that have distorted the social contract. If the veracity of the social contract is to be defended, then it must be removed from a context in which its primary purpose has become the extension of racial dominance and a resultant disorder of society.