The Racial Contract

Charles Mills (1951-2021) was a Jamaican American philosopher and political theorist with an extensive career in academia. Mills received his BSc in Physics from the University of West Indies and 1971 and obtained an MA in 1976 and a PhD in 1985 from the University of Toronto. Mills taught physics and philosophy at the College of Arts, Science, and Technology and Campion College in Kingston, Jamaica; the University of Oklahoma; the University of Illinois at Chicago; Northwestern University; and the City University of New York. He is the author of five other books that, like The Racial Contract, address the central questions in his work—race and personhood.

Mills is a pioneering scholar of Critical Race Theory (CRT), which The Racial Contract exemplifies. CRT’s emphasis on naming white supremacy and understanding how it functions and perpetuates itself is made apparent in the opening lines of Mills’s book. He states: “White 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” (1). The second sentence of the aforementioned quote implies an important corollary to identifying white supremacy as the dominant political system of the modern world—how the colorblind

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