It’s not a book, but a pomegranate. This explosive intellectual device published in 1997 shatters the bedrock of certainties on which Western political philosophy and practice are based.
The overpowering essay by American philosopher Charles W. Mills (1951-2021) that Ali Ndiaye, alias Webster, rapper and Quebec anti-racist activist has just translated, is called The racial contract. The fire, published by the Quebec house Mémoire d’encrier, postulates that the social contract of liberal societies is in fact based on an implicit racial contract to maintain white supremacy in defiance of all other racialized groups.
The incipit sums up the thesis: “White supremacy is the political system which, without ever being named, has made the modern world what it is today”.
Webster first read this sentence in 2020 while preparing for a debate organized by UNESCO on the plight of racialized people in the pandemic. “I was blown away,” he said. Each of the paragraphs of the book allowed me to put words to things that I knew. »
In the family, however, we master the subject, concretely and theoretically. He and his father, of Senegalese origin, Cheikh Tidiane Ndiaye, professor of political science, participated in the collective work 11 short essays against racism (All in all, 2019).
The end of reading Racial Contract coincided with the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police. Webster found that The Racial Contract had not been translated into French and he decided to tackle the task himself.
In fact, the pomegranate was so ripe that a week after signing the contract with the American house that held the rights, a competing Franco-French publisher sought to obtain them. The book, launched in Quebec this Wednesday 1er February, Black History Month, will be available from March 3 in Europe.
“I think that the long delay in translation into French is also explained by the racial contract,” says Ali Ndiaye, a history graduate from Laval University. White philosophy for a long time did not consider critical theory related to racialized or Indigenous people. Moreover, in French, it took a non-translator and a non-philosopher to translate it. »
A philosophy
Webster got help from the pros to fully grasp the philosophical concepts. Because it is indeed a work of philosophy written by a philosopher.
Charles Mills, born in London to Jamaican parents, holds a doctorate in this discipline from the University of Toronto. His 1985 thesis was on the notion of ideology in Marx, and he remained Marxist in the sense that his ideas want to serve to change the world.
Mills’ philosophy, created in the black radical tradition, was “born out of the struggle of the oppressed.” She wants to create a global theoretical framework to situate discussions of race and white racism and ultimately challenge the universalist claims of Euro-American political philosophy, one of the still whitest disciplines in academia.
The shadow of John Rawls and his justice theory (1971) hovers over The racial contract. Rawls thinks of society as a collection of members that must cooperate for mutual benefit. Mills criticizes this theory of the social contract by integrating the question of race (at least as a social construction) in a radical and fundamental way. It shows that racism is not an anomaly of colonial and imperialist societies and that white supremacy is somehow the hidden face of liberal social justice theory.
To change it, to tackle this problem, we must obviously start by admitting the reality of it. Charles Mills has this terrible remark about it: “’Negroes want to be treated like men’, wrote James Baldwin in the 1950s. A perfectly clear sentence in eight words. There are people who have assimilated Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud and the Bible and find this idea completely incomprehensible. »
Mills’ demonstration is organized around a dozen theses on what he therefore calls the racial contract. The first argues that this contract is “political, moral and epistemological”. The second is that this system leads to a logic of exploitation creating “a global European economic domination and a white national racial privilege”. Another thesis asserts that the world is thus divided between “persons and sub-persons” and that the social contract is constantly rewritten from this perspective.
Webster’s rapping practice served to replicate a certain musicality of Mills’ style, his flow of intellectual, developed on 200 pages. In any case, the language offered in translation is clear and flowing.
These qualities are affirmed from the epigraph to the first chapter, citing a popular American aphorism: “When white people say justice, they mean just us”. The striking assonance in English between “Justice” and “Just us” is thus preserved in French.
“For me, in writing, everything goes through subtlety,” says the grenade thrower. It was sometimes difficult to translate the subtleties of Mills. I have often relied on the clarity and lucidity of the project. »
Meanwhile in Quebec