The Racial Contract

Each subsection of the book is named for a thesis Mills explores. In the first thesis, Mills defines the dimensions of the Racial Contract. Typical contract theories focus on the political and moral dimensions of society. The political dimension entails an account of the origins of government and individuals’ political obligations to it. This dimension is typically broken down into the establishment of society and the establishment of the state. The moral dimension of contract theory explains the foundation of moral codes that regulate citizens’ behavior, and there are two interpretations of those foundations that Mills goes on to explain later. Mills’s articulation of the third dimension, the epistemological, in terms of the Racial Contract, suggests that the Racial Contract clarifies the “prescribing norms for cognition” (11), which are implicit in the social contract rather than explicitly stated. Having already established in his Introduction that he is directly inspired by Carol Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988), the three dimensions of Mills’s Racial Contract exemplify this inspiration as Pateman’s theory puts forth the same three dimensions.

Where typical contract discourse suggests that all individuals participate in the social contract, Mills argues that the Racial Contract is an agreement between white people only.