Thinkers from here and elsewhere | Charles Mills: The Racialized Contract

In this series, our collaborator Jérémie McEwen introduces us to essayists who think about the contemporary world

I have read this book, The racial contract, as I was reading philosophy classics 20 years ago at university. By finding the ideas presented very relevant, but by sighing a little.

It’s a dense book, a real treatise on philosophy, with which I was far from falling in love as I can do these days with literary essays. Nevertheless, when I resubmitted it, I said to myself: here is a new compulsory reading for any thinker worthy of the name, and here is a new author’s name that will be on the blackboard of my own courses at CEGEP until the end of my career.

The book can be summarized by three ideas.

1. We are all tacit signatories of a contract with the State which ensures our security. This contract (call it the Constitution of the country, if you will) gives us rights, duties, etc. This first idea is borrowed from the classical theoreticians of the social contract, Hobbes and Rousseau at their head. Charles Mills will severely criticize these theoreticians, but remains deeply attached to this idea of ​​contract.

2. The classic social contract claims to be neutral and abstract, i.e. no one really sat down at a table to say “yes, I’m signing” the day they got their driver’s license, but we are nevertheless bound in equal parts by the contract.

3. Contrary to its claims, the classical social contract is in fact not neutral and abstract. Its strings are pulled by a class of racist citizens, who exclude those they do not consider to belong to them from their designs. It is therefore a racialized contract.

I turned around in my office at Cégep to summarize the thesis to my young colleague, the one who has a copy of the Second sex of Simone de Beauvoir permanently seated on her table. She said to me: “Of course. I said, “Right.” I sighed, then continued reading.

There is no shortage of examples, at the bottom of the texts of all these classic thinkers of the social contract, of an uninhibited and disastrous racism.

There is no lack of examples in North American history either to convince oneself of the reality, of the inescapable fact that our societies are built on the blood of people considered to be sub-persons.

It will no doubt be noticed that I put, in the title of this article, “racialized” and not “racial” as Mills does. This second word, still used in the country of the author of the book, is confusing. It may suggest that we are referring to a biologically determined reality, while the author insists that these racial divisions are rather those imposed by the power in place. “Racialized” underlines this nuance better in Quebec in my opinion.

The translator of the first French version of the book, Aly Ndiaye, alias Webster, wanted to keep as much as possible the link to the original language of the author and therefore kept “racial”. While reading a first version of the translation of the one who insists on saying that he is “neither a translator nor a philosopher”, a philosophical adviser, Ryoa Chung, told him of her concern with regard to certain flights that are strayed from the original text. “In philosophy, words are important,” she allegedly pleaded, bringing Webster back to a little more sobriety and textual dryness. To the benefit of the philosophical accuracy of the text, no doubt, but at the cost of the pleasure of reading, I believe.

I had some reservations about the subject, which I discussed with the translator on the phone. Webster is a friend, we mutually preface each other’s books, I had the trust of good faith on the phone.

The examples given of the racialized contract, in the majority of cases, are American. But the author insists on claiming a universal scope for his thesis: he is a philosopher, after all. And if we rely on the overwhelming majority of echoes of his text (I spotted only one other translation, also from this year, in German), he is an American thinker who thinks America. Webster understood my reservations, but nevertheless gave me Canadian examples of the racialized contract in return, with regard to certain immigration policies, for example. I also thought of the Indian Act, Of course. Either then, the thesis can be exported, but I remain skeptical vis-à-vis the idea of ​​everything universal in philosophy.

Twenty-six years after the events, the Black Lives Matter movement goes much further than Mills, who remains committed to liberal thought of the social contract (Webster read the book in 2020, in the wake of the murder of George Floyd ). And if, precisely, it is the very idea of ​​contract that was flawed? Webster abounded in my opinion: all that can be thought of much more radically, in a questioning of capitalism itself, for example.

Finally, towards the end of the book, whose roots we feel in the philosophical debates of the 1990s, Mills opposes the thought of deconstruction (Jacques Derrida), then in vogue in the United States. Yet, as the following decades have shown, deconstruction is an essential ally vis-à-vis gender theory, just as it is in the definitive blasting of any biological essentialism linked to the idea of ​​“race”. However, we must not hold absolutely to the thesis of some contract which precedes us.

The world, each morning, can be new, in the meeting of two friends talking on the phone.

The racial contract

Charles W. Mills (translated from English by Aly Ndiaye, alias Webster)

inkwell memory

204 pages