The racial contract

"Holding up a mirror to mainstream philosophy, this book explains the evolving outline of the racial contract from the time of the New World conquest and subsequent colonialism to the written slavery contract, to the "separate but equal" system of segregation in the twentieth-century United States. The contract has provided the theoretical architecture justifying an entire history of European atrocity against non-whites, from David Hume's and Immanuel Kant's claims that blacks had inferior cognitive power, to the Holocaust, to the kind of imperialism in Asia that was demonstrated by the Vietnam War. The ghettoization of philosophical work on race is no accident. This work challenges the assumption that mainstream theory is itself raceless. Just as feminist theory has revealed orthodox political philosophy's invisible white male bias, Mills's explication of the racial contract exposes its racial underpinnings"--

"With a new preface by the author and a foreward by Tommie Shelby"-- page 1 of cover.

"First edition published 1997 by Cornell University Press"-- title page verso.

The Racial Contract : what's old is new again -- The Racial Contract is political, moral and epistemological -- The Racial Contract is a historical actuality -- The Racial Contract is an exploitation contract -- The Racial Contract norms (and races) space -- The Racial Contract norms (and races) the individual -- The Racial Contract underwrites the modern social contract -- The Racial Contract has to be enforced through violence and ideological conditioning -- The Racial Contract historically tracks the actual moral/political consciousness of (most) white moral agents -- The Racial Contract has always been recognized by nonwhites as the real moral/political agreement to be challenged -- The "Racial Contract" as a theory is explanatorily superior to the raceless social contract.