"Charles Mills's treatment of the biases in western philoso phy in The Racial Contract is a tour de force." -Award Statement, Gustavus Myers Center for the Study of Bigotry and Human Rights in North America
"To take the arguments that Mills makes in The Racial Contract seriously is to be prepared to rethink the concept of race and the structure of our political systems.Th is is a very important book indeed, and should be a welcome addition to the ongoing discussions surrounding social con tract theory.... It would be an excellent critical comple CHARLES W. MILLS ment to any course that covers the history of social con tract theory or that deals with issues surrounding race and racism."-Teaching Philosophy The Racial Contract
CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS ITHACA AND LONDON This book is dedicated to the blacks, reds, browns, and yellows who have resisted the Racial Contract and the white renegades and race traitors who have refused it.
Copyright © 1997 by Cornell University
All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or parts thereof, must not be reproduced in any form without permission in writing CONTENTS from the publisher. For information, address Cornell University Press, Sage House, 512 East State Street, Ithaca, New York 14850.
First published 1997 by Cornell University Press. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix First printing, Cornell Paperbacks, 1999 INTRODUCTION 1
Printed in the United States of America 1. OVERVIEW 9 The Racial Contract is political, moral and Cornell University Press strives to use environmentally responsible suppliers epistemological 9 and materials to the fullest extent possible in the publishing of its books. The Racial Contract is a historical actuality 19 Such materials include vegetable-based, low-VOC inks and acid-free papers The Racial Contract is an exploitation contract 3 I that are recycled, totally chlorine-free, or partly composed of nonwood fibers. 2. DETAILS 41 For further information, visit our website at www.comellpress.cornell.edu. The Racial Contract norms (and races) space 41 The Racial Contract norms (and races) the individual 53 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Racial Contract underwrites the modern social contract 62 Mills, Charles W. (Charles Wade) The Racial Contract has to be enforced through violence and The racial contract / Charles W. Mills. ideological conditioning 81 p. cm. 3. "NATURALIZED" MERITS 91 Includes index. The Racial Contract historically tracks the actual moral/ ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-3454-9 (cloth : alk. paper) political consciousness of (most) white moral �gents 91 ISBN-IO: 0-8014-3454-8 (cloth: alk. paper) The Racial Contract has always been recognized by ISBN-13: 978-0-8014-8463-6 (pbk. : alk. paper) nonwhites as the real moral/political agreement to be ISBN-IO: 0-8014-8463-4 (pbk. : alk. paper) challenged 109 The "Racial Contract" as a theory is explanatorily superior 1. Race relations. 2. Racism. 3. Social contract. 4. White to the raceless social contract 120 supremacy movements. 5. Political science-Philosophy. 1. Title. NOTES 135 HTI523.M56 1997 305·8-DC21 INDEX 163
Cloth printing IO 9 8 7 6 5 4 Paperback printing IO 9 8 7 6 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
he history that inspires this short book goes back a Tlong way, and I have been thinking about that history, and how to incorporate it into a philosophical frame work, for a long time. Along the way I have incurred many debts, some of which I have certainly forgotten, and this list of acknowledgments is only partial. First of all, of course, to my family: my parents, Gladstone and Winnifred Mills, who brought me up to give equal respect to people of all races; my brother, Raymond Mills, and my cousin, Ward Mills, for consciousness-raising; my uncle and aunt, Don and Sonia Mills, for their role in Jamaica's own 1970S struggle against the legacy of the global Racial Contract. My wife, Elle Mills, has supported my work from the outset, sometimes having greater faith in me than I had in myself. Special friends, past and present, should also be cited: thanks to Bobs, for old times' sake; to Lois, a friend indeed, and a friend in deed; to Femi, fellow Third worlder, for numerous conversations since our days in grad school together about how philosophy in the academy could be made less academic. Horace Levy, my firstphilosophy teacher, and for many years the mobile one-person philosophy unit of the Mona campus of
ix AC KNOWLEDGMENTS AC KNOWLEDGMENTS
the University of the W�st Indies, deserves particular mention, critiqued by members of the Politically Correct Discussion as do Frank Cunningham and Danny Goldstick of the Univer Group of Chicago (PCDGC); I have benefited from the criti sity of To ronto, who welcomed me to the Philosophy Depart cisms of Sandra Bartky, Holly Graff, David Ingram, and Olu ment graduate program there more years ago than any of us femi Taiwo. Jay Drydyk read the manuscript and gave valuable cares to remember. John Slater's confidence in me and support input and encouragement . I have also benefited from audience of my candidacy, despite my almost nonexistent undergradu feedback at the following presentations, from 1994 to 1996: ate background in the subject, were crucial. To all of them, I the Institute for the Humanities, UIC; the Society for the am obligated. Humanities, Cornell University; a colloquium at Queen's Uni I originally started working on these issues on a 1989 junior versity; a panel at the annual meeting of the Society for Phe faculty summer research fellowship at the University of Okla nomenology and Existential Philosophy; and a conference homa. A first draft was written in my 1993-1994 year as a titled "The Academy and Race" at Villanova University. Fellow of the Institute for the Humanities, University of Illi I have consistently received special encouragement in the nois at Chicago (UIC ), and the final draft was completed during project from feminist theorists: my friend Sandra Bartky, Paola my sabbatical in the spring term of 1997. At both my previous Lortie, Sandra Harding, Susan Babbitt, Susan Campbell, and and my present institution, I have been fortunate to have had Iris Marion Young. I have also learned a great deal over the a series of Chairs who have been very supportive of applica years from feminist political theory and obviously owe a debt tions for grants, fellowships, travel, leave, and sabbaticals: John to Carole Pateman in particular. My focus on race in this book Biro and Kenneth Merrill at the University of Oklahoma; Rich should not be taken to imply that I do not recognize the reality ard Kraut, Dorothy Grover, and Bill Hart at UIe. Let me say of gender as another system of domination. how deeply grateful I am to them for that support. In addition, Alison Shonkwiler, my editor at Cornell "University Press, I have made endless requests for assistance from Charlotte was highly enthusiastic about the manuscript from her very Jackson and Valerie McQuay, the UIC Philosophy Depart first reading of it, and it is in large measure her conviction ment's invaluable administrative assistants, and they have that persuaded me there was indeed a book here, and that I been endlessly patient and helpful, greatly facilitating my should write it. For her energy and drive, and the keen editorial work. eye that has undoubtedly made this a better book than it would I thank Bernard Boxill, Dave Schweickart, and Robert Paul otherwise have been, I express my deep appreciation. Wolff for their letters of endorsement for my application for Finally, as a stranger in a strange land, I have been welcomed the UIC Humanities Institute Fellowship that enabled me to here by the American Philosophical Association Committee begin the original manuscript. It was Bob Wolff's suggestion, on the Status of Blacks in Philosophy. I would like to single seconded by Howard McGary Jr., that I go for " a short, punchy out and thank Howard McGary Jr., Leonard Harris, Lucius book" that would be accessible to an audience of nonphiloso Outlaw Jr., Bill Lawson, Bernard Boxill, and Laurence Thomas, phers. Hope this is punchy enough for you, guys . for making me feel at home. As a beneficiary of affirmative An earlier and shorter version of this book was read and action, I would not be in the American academy today were
x xi AC KNO WLED GMENTS
it not for the struggles of black Americans. This book is in part a tribute to, and a recognition of, those struggles, and, more generally, of the international black radical tradition of political resistance that they exemplify. c. W. M.
The Racial Contract
xii INTRODUCTION
When white people say "Justice," they mean "Just us." hite supremacy is the unnamed political system -black American folk aphorism Wthat has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory, or even advanced, texts in political theory. A standard under graduate philosophy course will start off with plato and Aris totle, perhaps say something about Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli, move on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Marx, and then wind up with Rawls and Nozick. It will introduce you to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism, representative government, socialism, welfare capitalism, and libertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political thought and runs the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years. And this omission is not accidental. Rather, it reflects the fact that standard textbooks and courses have for the most part been written and designed by whites, who take their racial privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political, as a form of domination. Ironi cally, the most important political system of recent global history-the system of domination by which white people
1 THE RACIAL CONTRACT INTRODUCTION have historically ruled over and, in certain important ways, would correspond to feminist theorists' articulation of the continue to rule over nonwhite people-is not seen as a politi centrality of gender, patriarchy, and sexism to traditional cal system at all. It is just taken for granted; it is the background moral and political theory. What is needed, in other words, is against which other systems, which we are to see as politicat a recognition that racism (or, as I will argue, global white are highlighted. This book is an attempt to redirect your vision, supremacy) is itself a political system, a particular power to make you see what, in a sense, has been there all along. structure of formal or informal rule, socioeconomic privilege, Philosophy has remained remarkably untouched by the and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth debates over multiculturalism, canon reform, and ethnic di and opportunities, benefitsand burdens, rights and duties. The versity racking the academy; both demographically and con notion of the Racial Contract is, I suggest, one possible way ceptually, it is one of the "whitest" of the humanities. Blacks, of making this connection with mainstream theory, since it for example, constitute only about 1 percent of philosophers uses the vocabulary and apparatus already developed for con in North American universities-a hundred or so people out tractarianism to map this unacknowledged system. Contract of more than ten thousand-and there are even fewer Latino, talk is, after all, the political lingua franca of our times. , Asian American, and Native American philosophers.! Surely We all understand the idea of a "contract/ an agreement this underrepresentation itself stands in need of an explana between two or more people to do something. The "social tion, and in my opinion it can be traced in part to a conceptual contract" just extends this idea. If we think of human beings , array and a standard repertoire of concerns whose abstractness as starting off in a "state of nature/ it suggests that they then typically elides, rather than genuinely includes, the experience decide to establish civil society and a government. What we of racial minorities. Since (white) women have the demo have, then, is a theory that founds government on the popular graphic advantage of numbers, there are of course far more consent of individuals taken as equals.2 female philosophers in the profession than nonwhite philoso But the peculiar contract to which I am referring, though phers (though still not proportionate to women's percentage based on the social contract tradition that has been central to of the population), and they have made far greater progress Western political theory, is not a contract between everybody in developing alternative conceptualizations. Those African ("we the people"L but between just the people who count, the American philosophers who do work in moral and political people who really are people ("we the white people"). So it is theory tend either to produce general work indistinguishable a Racial Contract. from that of their white peers or to focus on local issues (af The social contract, whether in its original or in its contem firmativeaction, the black "underclass") or historical figures porary version, constitutes a powerful set of lenses for looking (W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke) in a way that does not aggres at society and the government. But in its obfuscation of the sively engage the broader debate. ugly realities of group power and domination, it is, if unsupple What is needed is a global theoretical framework for situat mented, a profoundly misleading account of the way the mod ing discussions of race and white racism, and thereby challeng ern world actually is and came to be. The "Racial Contract" ing the assumptions of white political philosophy, which as a theory-I use quotation marks to indicate when I am
2 3 THE RACIAL CONTRACT INTRODUCTION
talking about the theory of the Racial Contract, as against the tractarianism and focuses instead on the justification of the Racial Contract itself-will explain that the Racial Contract basic structure of society.5 From its 1650-1800 heyday as a is real and that apparent racist violations of the terms of the grand quasi-anthropological account of the origins and devel social contract in fact uphold the terms of the Racial Contract. opment of society and the state, the contract has now become The "Racial Contract," then, is intended as a conceptual just a normative tool, a conceptual device to elicit our intu bridge between two areas now largely segregated from each itions about justice. other: on the one hand, the world of mainstream (i.e., white) But my usage is different. The "Racial Contract" I employ ethics and political philosophy, preoccupied with discussions is in a sense more in keeping with the spirit of the classic of justice and rights in the abstract, on the other hand, the contractarians-Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, and Kant.6 I use it world of Native American, African American, and Third and not merely normatively, to generate judgments about social Fourth World3 political thought, historically focused on issues justice and injustice, but descriptively, to explain the actual of conquest, imperialism, colonialism, white settlement, land genesis of the society and the state, the way society is struc rights, race and racism, slavery, jim crow, reparations, apart tured, the way the government functions, and people's moral heid, cultural authenticity, national identity, indigenismo, Af psychology.? The most famous case in which the contract is rocentrism, etc. These issues hardly appear in mainstream used to explain a manifestly nonideal society, what would be political philosophy,4 but they have been central to the political termed in current philosophical jargon a "naturalized" ac struggles of the majority of the world's population. Their ab count, is Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality (1755). Rousseau sence from what is considered serious philosophy is a reflec argues that technological development in the state of nature tion not of their lack of seriousness but of the color of the brings into existence a nascent society of growing divisions vast majority of Western academic philosophers (and perhaps in wealth between rich and poor, which are then consolidated their lack of seriousness). and made permanent by a deceitful "social contract."B The great virtue of traditional social contract theory was Whereas the ideal contract explains how a just society would that it provided seemingly straightforward answers both to be formed, ruled by a moral government, and regulated by factual questions about the origins and workings of society a defensible moral code, this nonideal/naturalized contract and government and to normative questions about the justifi explains how.an unjust, exploitative society, ruled by an op cation of socioeconomic structures and political institutions. pressive government and regulated by an immoral code, comes Moreover, the "contract" was very versatile, depending on into existence. Ifthe ideal contract'is to be endorsed and emu how different theorists viewed the state of nature, human lated, this nonideal/naturalized contract is to be demystified motivation, the rights and liberties people gave up or retained, and condemned. So the point of analyzing the nonideal con the particular details of the agreement, and the resulting char tract is not to ratify it but to use it to explain and expose the acter of the government. In the modern Rawlsian version of inequities of the actual nonideal polity and to help us to see the contract, this flexibility continues to be illustrated, since through the theories and moral justificationsoffered in defense Rawls dispenses with the historical claims of classic con- of them. It gives us a kind of X-ray vision into the real internal
4 5 THE RACIAL CONTRACT INTRODUCTION
logic of the sociopolitical system. Thus it does normative work generalize, analogize.lO Correspondingly, the lack of appro for us not through its own values, which are detestable, but priate concepts can hinder learning, interfere with memory, by enabling us to understand the polity's actual history and block inferences, obstruct explanation, and perpetuate prob how these values and concepts have functioned to rationalize lems. I am suggesting, then, that as a central concept the oppression, so as to reform them. notion of a Racial Contract might be more revealing of the real Carole Pateman's provocativefeminist work of a decade ago, character of the world we are living in, and the corresponding Th e Sexual Contract, is a good example of this approach (and historical deficiencies of its normative theories and practices, the inspiration for my own book, though my use is somewhat than the raceless notions currently dominant in political the different), which demonstrates how much descriptive/ex ory.ll Both at the primary level of an alternative conceptualiza planatory life there still is in the contract.9 Pateman uses it tion of the facts and at the secondary (reflexive) level of a naturalistically, as a way of modeling the internal dynamic critical analysis of t�e orthodox theories themselves, the "Ra of the nonideal male-dominated societies that actually exist cial Contract" enables us to engage with mainstream Western today. So this is, as indicated, a reversion to the original "an political theory to bring in race. Insofar as contractarianism thropological" approach in which the contract is intended to is thought of as a useful way to do political philosophy, to be historically explanatory. But the twist is, of course, that theorize about how the polity was created and what values her purpose is now subversive: to excavate the hidden, unjust should guide our prescriptions for making it more just, it is male covenant upon which the ostensibly gender-neutral so obviously crucial to understand what the original and continu cial contract actually rests. By looking at Western society and ing "contract" actually was and is, so that we can correct for its prevailing political and moral ideologies as if they were it in constructing the ideal "contract." The "Racial Contract" based on an unacknowledged "Sexual Contract," Pateman should therefore be enthusiastically welcomed by white con offers a "conjectural history" that reveals and exposes the tract theorists as well. normative logic that makes sense of the inconsistencies, cir So this book can be thought of as resting on three simple cumlocutions, and evasions of the classic contract theorists claims: the existential claim-white supremacy, both local and, correspondingly, the world of patriarchal domination and global, exists and has existed for many years; the concep their work has helped to rationalize. tual claim-white supremacy should be thought of as itself My aim here is to adopt a nonideal contract as a rhetorical a political system; the methodological claim-as a political trope and theoretical method for understanding the inner logic system, white supremacy can illuminatingly be theorized as . of racial domination and how it structures the polities of the based on a "contract" between whites, a Racial Contract. West and elsewhere. The ideal "social contract" has been a Here, then, are ten theses on the Racial Contract, divided central concept of Western political theory for understanding into three chapters. and evaluating the social world. And concepts are crucial to cognition: cognitive scientists point out that they help us to categorize, learn, remember, infer, explain, problem-solve,
7 6 OVERVIEW
w:ll s�art with.moverview oJ the Racial Contract, high· lighting its differences from, as well as its similarities to, the classlcal and contempor�ry sociillcontract. The Racial Contract i.s political, moral, and epistemological; the RacialI Contract is real; and economically, in determining who gets what, the Racial Contract is an exploitation contraCt.
, ." .
The RacIal Contract is political, moral, and eplstemologlcal.
The "social comraet" is actually several contracts in one. Contemporary contraCtarians usually distinguish, to begin with, between the political contract and the 'moralcontract, before going on to make[subsidiary] distinctienswithin both. I contend, however, that the orthodox social contract also tacitly presupposes an "epistemological" COntraCt, and that for the Racial Contract it is crucial to make this expliclt" The politicalcontract: is ana.COOUntof the origins of govern� ment and our �litical obligations to it. The subsidiary distinc� tion sometimes made in the politiCAl contrAct1s: between. the
contract to establish societyjt:hcrcby taking "natural;" pteso-
9 C,/£R,/IEW
cja] individuals OUt of the state oi nature and reconstfueting way they should he-the normative-sinee indeed one of its and constituting them as members of a collective body! and the complaints about white politieal philosophy Is precisely its contraCt tocstzhlish the state (thereby transferringontrightor orherworldiness, its ignoring of bask political realities,) But $<;,. \V delegat mg lU t1 relationship or trust the rightS and powers we the Racial Comract, as we will see,.1s' epistemological, � have In the s;:ate of nature to a sovereign govetrung entity).l prescrihing norms for cogniti.on to which its signatories must The mora:l contract, on the other hand, 1$ rhe foundatlOn of adhere. A preliminary characterizationwould tun something the moral code estabUshed for the SOcletYI by whieh the citi" like this:
zens arc supposed to regulate their behavior. The subsidiary The Raeial ContraCt is that set of formal or informal agree
distinction here is between !;wo interpretations (to be cis. ments Ot meta-agreements (highet-level contracts aboiltcon cussedj of the relationship between the mand contraet ane. tracts) which set the limits of the contracts' validity)between
sr:ue·of·na.ture morality. In modern versions of the conu·act, the members of one subset of humans, henee£onh designAted most notably Rawls's of course, the political contract largely by (shifting) "racial" [phenotypicalfgenealogieal/cultunill cri vanishes, modern anthropology having long superseded the teria el, C1., C3 ". as "whitc/ and coextensive (mAking naive socialorigin histories of the ClAssic contracta:ians. The due aHowance for gender differentiationl with the class of focus is then almostexcl.nsively on the mor",1 contract, This full persons, to categorize the remaining subset of hum:tlls is not concei.ved of as an actual historie:alevent that took place as "nonwhite" and of a different arul,inferior mOfOli st,;ttus, on leav ing the state of nature. Rather, the slate of nature subpersons, so that they have a subordinate�ciV:il standing in survives only in the attenuated form of whnt Rawls culls the the white or white-ruled politics the whit� either
tbcy came to be that Way-the descriptive-as well as the a contract to which the nonwhite subset of humans can be a
10 11 ;H5 RACIAL Cm,rpJlCT
gcnuineiy consenting pany (thougll/ dcpcndillg again on the phosis is the preliminary conceptual partitioning and corres- circumstances, it rn-aysometjmes be politicto pretend that this ponding transformation of huma.n populations into " wrote" is the casel. Rather, it, is a COntractbetween those categorized as and "nonwhitel' men, The role played by the "state of nature" ;vhite ovet the nonwhites, who are thus the objects�-r;ltlier then becomes tadicaUy different.ln the white settler state, its than the subjects of the agreement, role is not ptimarily to dematcate the (temporarily) prepoliti- The logic of the classic social can trAct, pohtical, mora!, and cal stateof "all"men (who are really white·menJ, but ratherthe epistemoLogical, then undergoes a corresponding tefraetion, permanently pIepolitic.aI stateor, perhaps better, nOl1Political with shifts, accordingly, in the key terms and prinCiples, state (insofar as "pre-" suggests eventual internal movement Politically, the commct to estaWish society l' 13 ' . ,.'" ; . ;;,: "lfE RAClhL COMRACT OVERVIEW juridical system, where the Status of whites and nouwhites interests without con.fliet with those other people who are is clearly demareated , whether by law or cusw;n. And the doing d.e slime thing.5 purpose of this state, by contrast with the neutral strite of The Racial Contract can ttccommodate both e v rsions, but c1:Jsslc contt.:lctarianism, is, inter alia, specifIcally ro mamtain as it is the former version (the contract as described in Locke and reproduce this racial order, seeuring the privileges an d . and Kant) rather than the latter version ,the contraet as de advantages of the fullwhite citizens And maintaining the sub scribed in Hobbesl which represents the mainstream of the ordination of nonwhites. Correspondingly, thc "consent" ex contract tradition, t fceus on that one.6 Here, the good polity pected of the white eitizens is in part coneeptualized as a is taken to rest on a precx:lstingmoral fouudation, Obviously, consem, whether ",,-plieitor tacit, to thc racial order, to white this is 11 far more attraetive conception of a political system supremacy, whateould be co.lledWhitenc.�s. T o the extent rho:t than Hohbes1s view. The ideal of an objeeti��ly just polis to those phemnypicaUy/genealogieally/culturaHy categorized as which we should aspire in out political activism goes back in white fail(0 li"c up to (he CIVic and political responsibilities the Western tradition all the Way to Plato. In the medieval Christian woddview which continued to influence eon � of Whiteness, they 14 15 CVEflV;EW Etaw of nature" As Locke writes in the Second Treatise, "To tively appropriately known as "subjeet races" And these understand Political Power right, and derive it from its Origi subpersons-niggers, mjuns, ehinks, wogs, greasers, blaeruel nal, we must consider what State all Men arc naturally ius and �OWSt kaIRrs, coohes, abos, dinks, googoos, gooks-are biologi. that is, a Statc of petfect Freedom to order their Actions.... A cally destined never to penetrate thenormative rights ceiling StaW also of Equality. wherein ali the Power and ,unsdicrion estabHshed lor them below white persous. Henceforth, then, is reciprocal, no one having more than another."� For Kant, whether openly admitted ot not, it is taken for &'!anted that similarly, it isourequal moral personhood,� ContractarLanisUl the grand ethical theories propounded in the development of is {supposedly) oommitted to moral egalitarianism, the moral Western moral and political thought are of restricted scope, equality ol all men, the notion that the imerests of all men explicitly or imphdtly intended by their proponei\ts to be matter equally and all men must have equal rights, Thus, restricted to persons, whites. The terms of theRatial Contraet contractarianism is also committed to a prineipled and loumia " set the parameters for white morality as a whole, $0 that t:onal opposition to the traditionalist hierarchical ideology of competing Lockean and Kantian contrnctarian theones of the old feudal order, the ideology of inhereut ascribed s:mU$ natural rights and duties, or later aJ1tieontractarian theories and natural subordination,It is thislanguage of equalIty which such as nineteenth-eentury utilitarianism, are all limited by echoes in the American and French Revolutions,thc Ded:ml' its stipulations. tion of Independence, and the Declatation of the Rights of Finally, the Racial Contract requires its own peculiar moral Man. Alld il is dus moral egalitarianism that must be rctniued and empirical epistemology, its norms and procedures for de· in the allocation of rights aua liberdes in civil society, When termining what COunts as moral and factual knowledge of the in a modern Western society people insist on their rights atl;:] wodd. In the standard accounts of contractarianisrn it is not freedoms and �xpress their outrage at not beIng treated equally, usual to speak of there being an "epistcmologiea1" cammet, it is to these classie ideas that, whethe:t· they know it or not, hut there isan epistemology assoeia ted with contractarianism J they are appeDling. in the form of naturaf law. This provides us with a moral But as we wm sec in greater detail later on, the color-coded compass, whethet in the traditional version of Locke-the morality ot the Racial ContrAct restricts the possession of this light of re.1son implanted in us by God 50- we ean discern . natural freedom and equality to wmte men. By virtue of their objective right and wrong-ar in the revisionist version of complete nonrecognition, or at best inadequate, myopic reoog- Hobbes---the ability to assess the objectively optimal pruden nition, Ot the duties of natural law, nonwhire..<1arc approprhnely tial eourseofaetion ,andwhatlt requires of us forsell-interested relegated toa lower rung on the moraUadder (the GreatChHin cooperation with others. So through our natural rnculties we l of 13dng).1° They arc designDted as born unfree and unequal. come to know reality in both its factual and valuational as A partitioned social ontology is therefore created, a universe pects, the way things objeetively are and what is objectively - divided between persons and racial subpersons, Umer- good or bad about them, I suggest wc can think or this as an mtmscbun, who may variously be black, red, brown, ydlow idealized consenSus about cognitive norms and, in this respect, slaves, aborigines, colonial populations-but who are collec- an agreementor "eontract" oisorts. There is an understanding 16 17 frE RACIAL CO�Tf!ACT OVERVIEW about what counts as a correct, objective illtcrpl'etat�onOf the population, countries that never were, inhabited by people world, and for agreeing to this view, one is {"contractUally"; who never were-CaHbans and Tontos, Man Fridays and granced full eognitive standingjn the polity, the oHidal epistc� Sambas-hut who attain a virtual reality through thelr exis mic community.!l tence in travelers' tales, folk myth, popular and highbrow fic Bue/or the Racial Contraet thingsnre necessanly more com tion, colomal reports, scholarly theory, Hollywood cinema, plieated. The requirements of "objective" cognition, foctual living in the white imagination and determinedly imposed on and mOlo}. m a raeial poll ty are in a sense more demonding their 18 19 THE P}' CIAL CO\TP.ACT O\'£lW:r.w half of the species, as radical feminists have argued-it is of fomtalized legal structutes of diffetential treatment; and dearly lost in antiquity. thc routinizatlon of informal illegal or quasi-legal practices By contraSt, ironically, the Racial Contr ,. 21 TP.5 MOt.l CONTRACT OVERVIEW logical one, with nonnlltivc inelusion and exclusion manifest. incomprehcnsib,e to ., non�Spanish �'PC aker, reading tllp iug itself as che demarcation between Christians andhearhens. docu:nent pIOvided sufficient justification for dispossession The pope's powers over the SOCietas Christiana, the universal of land and immediate ensl:wement of the indigenous pen_ Christian commonwealth, were seen as "extending not only pie. [Bartolome de] Las Casas's famous comment on the l I over aU Christians withIn the universal commonwealth, hut requerJmiento was tbar one does not know "v.rhethe.r to : ' over untegenetatcd hearhens and infidels as well, It and dus I'Hlgh or cry at rhe absurdity ofjr." , . , Wlulc appearing to policy would subsequently underwrite not merely the Cru· respect "rights" the requerimiento, in faet, takes them sades "gainst Islam but the later voyages to rhe Ameneas. Sometimes papal pronouncements did grant rights and ratio l' nalityto nonbelievers. As a resuit of dealing with the Mongols In effect, then, the Catholic Church's deelara�ions cither for in the thirteenth eentury, for example) Pope Innocent IV "con mally legitimated conquest 'or could be easily circumvented ceded that infidels and hC right to eleet their own secular leaders, JJ and Pope Paul ill's The growth of the Enlightenment and the rise of secnlarism famous Sublimis Deus itS37) stated that Native Amer:'cans did not cballenge this stri1tegic dichotomization (Christian/ were rational beings, not to be rreared as "dumb brutes created infidel) so much as translate it into othcr forms. Philip C\ll'tin [or our serviee" bur "as truly men ...capable of understanding refers to the characteristic "exceptionalism in Euxopcan the Co.tholie faith.11l� But as Williams pOints oue, the latter thought flbout the non-West," "a conception of the wodd qU of the Christi course, a language they did not undetst ( sent a just war eould lawfully be waged ag: The requeri:miel1!o is the ptorotypiC 22 23 THE flAC1AL CONTRACT OVEHViE\,/ propounded which eall be seen as specific manifcst o\ lati s with tribal societies, II a on Western w s central to thc ( c: an absolute dominion over the whole rcnitories afterwards any "contmctarbm" in character, hom the French imperial. occupied by them, not in vittue of uny conquest of, or ces theorist Jnles Harmund \r845-19.21), who devised the notion I . sion by, the Indian natives, bUt as it right D-equired by of association: discovery_ .. " The title of the Il)dians was nol tre:ltcd as il right of propcrty and dominion, but tiS a mere right 01 Expansion by conquest, however necessary, seems espe oceupancy. As infidels, heathens, ,\lnd saVD-gcs, they werc not cially unjust and distUrbing to the conscience of allowed to possess :he prerogatives belonging to absolute, demoeracies, , .. Dut to transpose democra tic institutions smrcre:gn, and independent nations. The territory over into 5llch a setting isab errant nonsense. Tiro subject people anno which thcy wandered, tlr.d whieh they used for thcir tflmpe� afC nor and c t become citizens in the democratic sense as tary and fugjtive: purposcs, was, in respcet to Christj;ms, of the term" . " .It is necessary, then, toa ccept a prinClple deemed as if ir were inhabited only by brute animaIs"]� and point of departure tbe faet that there is a hierarchy of races and civiJiutioll.$, ;md that we belong to tbe superior Similarly. the slavery contract gave Europeans the right to race and dvilization. , ..The basic legitimationof conquest enslave NativeAmericans and Africans at a time when slavery ovcr native pcoples is the convietion of om superiority, not was in t merelyour metharuc.al, economic,.and military superiority, dead or dying out Europe, based on doctrines of he , inherent inferiority of these peoples. A classic Statement of butour moral superiority. OUJ'dignity rests on rhat quality the slavery ronuilct is the 1857 DIed Scott v. SfIJ'l/ord U.S. and it underlies our right to direct the rest of humanity, Supreme Court decision of Chief Justiee R.oger Taney, which stilted that blacks What js therefore necessary is a ''''Contract'' of Association": 24 25 THe MCtAl COtlTHAGT OVERvlEr,l Whboutblling into Rousseauan reveries, it is worth noting ,ion from European Enlightenment hutTulnism. Racher, it thm assoeiation implies a concrnct, and this idell, though needs to be realized that, in keeping with the: Roman prece nothing more than an illustration, js more appropnatcly dent, European humanism usually meant that only Europeans applied to,the coexistence of tWO profoundly different soelt,:. were buman. European moral and political theory, like: Euro des thrown sharply and artifidnlly into contact than it is pean thought in general, developed within the hamework ot to the single society formed by naturAl proeesses whlch the Racial Contract and, as a rule, took it for gt,mted. As Rousseau envisaged. This is how the terms of tbis implicit Edward Said points out in Culture and Imperialism, \\'C must agreement c;m be conceived. The Europc;;m conqueror not see cnltute as "antIseptically quarantined from its worldly hrings order, foresight, and sccurity to a human society afffiiations." But this occupational blindness has in fact in which, though ardentlyaspiring for these rund,;l1nental va! fected mos: "professional humanists" land ecrtauHymost phi· ues w:irhaut: which no community CAn make progress, still losophersj, so that "as a result [they are] unable to make the ll1cks the aptitude to achieve thcm [rom wi.thin itself. , eonnectio:r. between the prolonged and sordid cruelty ofprac, Wah these mental and material instruments, wbich :it tiees such as slavery, colonialist and racial oppression, and :llcked and now receives, it gaius the idea and <1mbidon for imperial subjection on the one hand, and the poctry, Bction, a better existence, and thc meanS of achieving it. We will philosophY of the society that engages in these practiccs on obey you, say the subjects, if you begin by proving yourself the other. ,m By the ninetecnth century, conventional white worthy, We will obey you if yOU can succeed in convincing opinion casually assumed the uncontroversial vali&ty of,a us of the superiority of that c:iviliziltion of whieh you t:llk hierarchy of "higher" and "lower," "master" and "subject" so much."" races, for whom, it is obvious, different rules must a.pply. The modern world was thus expressly creaccd as a racially Indian laws, slave codes, and colonial native acrs formally hierarchical polity, glohally dominated by EutOpeans, A 1969 codified the subordinate status 01 nonwhites and (ostensiblyl Foreign AffaiIs article WOrth.rereading today reminds us that xcgulated the�r rreatUlent, creating a juridical space fox non as late as the 1940$ the world "was still by and Jarge a \Vestern Europeans as a sepax;lte category of beings, So even if there white-dominated worJd. The long-established patterns of waS sometimes an attempt to prevent "abuses" {and these white power and nonwhite non-power wese still the generally codes were honored far more often in the breach than the aee.epted order of things. All thc accompanying assumptions observance!, the point is that " abuse" as a concept presupposes ;lndmythologies about r,;tee and color were still mostly taken as a norm the legitimacy of the subordination. Slavery and for granted . . _ . (Wlhite supremac y was a generally assumed colonialism arenol conceived as wrong intheir denial ofauron and accepted state of affairs in the United States as well as J omy to persons; whar is wrong is the improper administration inEurope's empires!'.;!'; But statements or sueh frankness are 01 these regimes. rare or nonexiStent in mainsue.;tm white opinion today, whieh [t would be g fundamental error, then-a potnt to which 1 generally seeks to rewrite the past so as to deny or minlm(ze wiH n:tum-'to see racism as anomalous, a mysterious devia· the obvious bct of global white domination. 2£ 27 THE RACIAL CONTRACT OVERVIEW Yet the United States itsclC of course, is a whitc settler emtion Rhodesia Inow Zimhabwe) and South AIric� is well st,!te on territory expropria.ted from its aborginal inhabitants known, not so familiar may beth e faet that the United States, , thl'Ough a combination of military force, disease, and a "cen Canada, and Australia all maintained "whitej immigration tury of dishonor" of broken uea:i:es.): The expropriation In� policies until a few decades ago, aud uative peoples in all three valved literal genocide fa word now unfortuuately devalued countries suffer high poverty, infant mortality, and suicide by h)tpcrbolic overuse) of a kind that some recen� revisionist rates. historians have argued needs to be seen as compara.bIe to the Elsewhere, in latin America, Asia, And Alriea, large pans Third Reich'sP Wa shington, Father of the Nationt was, under of the worM were colonized, that is, formally brought: under pe,1 standably, known somewbRt differently co the Senecas as the :rule of one or another of the EUfO n powers tor, later, pires "Tmvn Destroyer. ".l.i In the DeclAra tion of Independence, JcI. Ll )e United StatesJ: the early Spanish :rod Ponugu�sc em terson characterized Native Americans as "mctciless Indian in the Amerieas, the PluJlppmes, and south Asia; the jealous Savages," and in the Constitution, blacks, of course, appear competition from Britain, France, nnd HoUand; the British only obliquely, through the famous "60 percen t so2ution." conquest of India; the French expansion intoAlgeria and Indo ; Thus, as Richard Drinnon concludes: "ihcFr:llncrsmnnifcsrly cbina the Duteb advance into Indonesi.a; the Opium Wars established a government under which non.Europcans were against Chlna; the late nineteenth-century IIscr,amble for AI· not men created equal-in the white polity .. , they were rica"; the U.S. war against Spam, seizure ufCuba, Puerto Rico, nonpeoples."·� Though on ,a smllller scale and not always so and the Philippines, and altJtexlltion of Hawa.ii.J� The pace of ruthlessly (or, in thc case of New Zealand, because of more ehangc this eentUl'y has beeu sn dramatic that it is easy to " successful indigenous resistance], whnt are standardly elassi forget that less than a hundred years ago, in I9I4, EUl'ope fied as the other wbite settler states-for example, Canada, beld agrandtotal of roughly 8 5 pereent ofthe earth as colonies, Australia, New Zealand, Rhodesia, ,andSouth Africa�were all proteetorates, dependencies, dominions, and commonwealths, founded on similar polieies; the extermination, displacement, No other associated set of eolomes in history was as large, andior herding onto rcservations of the aboriginal populatlou,·t> none so totally dOminated, none so unequal in power to the Plerre 'fanden Bcrghe bas coined tbe illuminatiug pbrase "Her Western metropolls.";wOne could say that the Racial Contract mmsn tion virtual communit renvolk democracies" to deseribe these politics, which cap. ereates a. a al white polity, a y of tures perfectly the dichotomization of the Rneial ContracL;& people linked by their eictzenshiplnEurope at home and abroad Their subsequent evolution has been somewhat different, hut (Europe proper, tbe colonial greater EUl'ope, And the "frag defeuders of South Africa's system of apartbeid often af!,'ued ments" of Euro-America, Eurn·Austraha, etc.!, andconstituted that u.s. criticjsm was hypocritical in light of its own history in opposition to their indigenous subjects, In most of Africa of jim crow, especially since de facto segregatlon remains sui flnd Asia, where colonia! rule ended only alter World War n, fieicndy entrenched that even today, forty yea.rs after Brown rigid " color bars" maintained the separation between Europe, v. Board of Education, tWO Americ,m SOciologists ean til Ie ans and indigenes. As European, as white, one knew oneseH their srudy American ApartheidY ihe racist record of preHb. to be a memher of the superior race, one's skin being one's 28 29 nlE �C:fo,t CONTMC� QVERVIE',I( passport: "Whatever a white man did must in some grotesque toRght under theirrcspectivebanncts, and thes)'stemof white fashion be 'civilized,"'.\!) 50 rhough there were local variations domination itself rarely being challenged. !The exception, of in the Racial Contrllct, depending on circumstances and the course, is Japan, which esC4lpeO colonization, and so for most partICular mode of exploitation-Jor example, a bipolar racial of the twenticth eentury has had a shifting and ambivalent system in the (Anglo) United States, llS against a subtler color relationship with the global white polity,) The legacy of this hierarchy in IIberianJ latin Ameriea·-lt remains the Cilse dUll world is, of course, still with us today, in the economic, politi the white tribe, as the global representative of civiliz�tion and cal, and cultural domination of the planet by Europeans .and modetnity, is generally on top of the social pytamid.'! their desc endants. The fact that this racial structure, clearly We live, then, in a wotld buHt on the Racial Contract. That political in character, and the struggle against it, equally so, we do lS simultaneously quite obvious if yon think abou: it have not for the most pan been decmed approp!iate subject {the dates and details of colonial conquest, the constitutions matter for mainstream Anglo·American political philosophy of these states and their exelusionary juridical mechanisms, and the fact that rhe very eoncepts hegemonic inthe discipline the histories of oHkial racist ideologies, the battles against are re1raetory to an understanding Ot these realities, rcveal at slavery and eoloniaHs01, the formal and informal structures best, a disturbingprovineialisfil and an ahistoricity profoundly of disctimination, are all within recent historieal mcmory at odds with the radically foundational questioning on which lind, or course, massively documented in otherdisciplinesl and philosophy prides itself and, at worst, .l complicity with the nonobvlous, since most whites don't think about it or don't terms of the Racial Contrae� itself, . think about it as the outcome Or a history of political apples , : sian but rather as just "the way things are." iI/you sa.y we're siavery and abolitionism, the Berlin Conference \ISS4-ISS51 ground sense that the point of leaving the state of nature is \ , . to partldon Africa, the vurious inrer-European pacts, treaties, in pan to secure a stable environment for the industrious I and informal arrangements O!l policing their eolonies, the appropriation of the world. IAftcr all, one famous dc£nition ( post-World War I discussions in Versailles after a war to makc or polities is [hat it is about who gets what and why.) Thus even J the world stlfe for democracy-we see for should sec) with in Locke's motalized state of nature, whexc peoplegenerally do complete clarity a world bemg governed by white people. 50 obey natural law, he is concerned abou t the safety of private though there is als!) internal conflict-disagreements, battles, pIOfW.Ity, indeed proclaiming that "the great and chief end cve.,'1 world wars-the dominant movers und shapers will be therefore, of Mensuniting into Commonwealths, and putting Europeans at home and abroad, with non-Europea.ns lining up themselves under GO\'crnmcnt, is the Preservation of their 30 31 THE nACIAL CONTFlACi OVERVIEW . '. ,. Property.'"' ,1! And j n Hohhes's famously amoral and unsafe stllte ignared as nonwbitefsubpcrsons. There are other benefits ae of nature, we are told that "there is no place for Indusuy; eming hom the Racial Contmctr-far greater political bcclluse tbe fruit thercof lS uncertain; and consequently no inr1uence, cultural hegemony, the psychic payoff that comes Culturc of the Earth!"! So part ofthe point of bringing sociery from knowil1,g one is a member of the HerrerJvolk (what into existence, with Its laws and enforcers of the law, is to w. E. B. Du Bois onee called "rhc wages of whitencss"J0i4-but protect what you have accumul Today, correspondingly, though formal decolonization has duced by the Rncial Contract and in turn reinforces adherence taken place and in Atriea and Asia black, brown, and yellow to it in its signatories and benefieiaries. na:ivcs Me in office, ruling independent nations, the global Moreover, it is not mcrcly that Europe and the former white economy is essentially dominated by the former colonial pow. settler states nre glohally dominant but that vtithin them, ers, their offshoots !Euro-Unite:d States, Eum,C 3& 37 THE RACIAL CONTRACT OVERVIEW earned by white households, the comparative differential with insurance, I!tc.06 Many of these, by their very nature, are diffi regard to wealth is mueh greater and, arguably, provides a cult to qu,mtifYi moreover, there arc eosrs in anguish and more realistically negative picture of the prospects for closing suffer ing that ean never J;eally be compensated. Nonetheless, the racial gap: "Whites possess nearly twelve times as mueh those that do lend themselves to calculation offer some re median net worth as blacks, or 543,800 versus $3,700. In an markable figures. (The figures are unfortunately dated; readers evcn starker contrast, perhaps, the average white household should multiply by a faetor that takes fifteenyears of inflation controls 56,999 in net financial assets while the average blaek into acconnt.) Ifone were to do a calculation of the cumulative household retains no NFA nest egg whatsoever./I Moreover, benefits (through eompound interest) from lahor market dis the analytic focus on wealth rather than income exposes how erimination over the forty-year period from 1929 to 1969 and illusory the much-trumpeted risc of a "black middle class" adjust for inflatioll, then in r983 dollars, the figure would is: "Middle-class blacks, for cxample, earn seventy cents for be over $1.6 trillion.�7 An estimate for the total of "diverted every dollar earned by middle-elass whites but they possess income" from slavery, 1790 to 1860, compounded and trans only fifteen cents for every doll�r of wealth held by middle lated into 1983 dollars, would yield the sum of S2.1 trillion class whites." This huge disparity in white and black wealth to 54.7 trillion.5H And if one were to try to work out the is not remotely contingent, aecidental, furtuitous; it is the cumulative value, with compound interest, of unpaid slave direct outcome of Amcrican state policy and the collusion labor before 1863, underpayment since 1863, and denial of with it of the whitc citizenry. In eHect, "materially, whites opportunity to acquire land and natural resources available to and blaeks constitute two nations, II;; the white nation being white settlers, then the total amount required to eompensate constituted by the Amcrican Racial Contract in a relationship bla cks 1/ could take more than the entire wealth of the of structured racial exploitation with the hlack (and, of course, United States."59 historically also the rcd) nation. So this gives an idea of the eentrality of racial exploitation A collection of papers from panels organized in the 1980s to the U.S. economy and the dimensions of the payoff for its by the National Economic Associntion, the professional orga white beneficiaries from one nation's Raeial Contraet. But nization of black eeonomists, provides some insight into the this very centrality, these very dimensions render the topie mechanics and the magnitude of sueh exploitative transfers t,l boo, virtually undiscussed in the debates on justiee of most and denials of opportunity to accumulate material and human white political theory. If tbere is such a baeklash against af capital. It takcs as its title The Wealth of RlIces-an ironie firmative action, what would the response be to the demand tributc to Adam Smith's famous book The Wealth of Nations for the interest on the unpaid forty aeres and 38 39 der a hypothetical comroctarianism that evades the actual circumstances of the polity's founding is preferred!) Both gl.oinlHy and within particulur nations. then, white people, Europeans and their descendants, continue to hcneflt from the Racial Contract, which creates a world in their cuI. tural image, political states diffcrentiully fllvoring their inter ests, an econOmy strucrured n.round tJle rueh.l exploItation of others, and a mornl psyehoJogy Inot lust in whites buts ome DETAILS times in nonwhites alsol skewed consciously or unconsciously toward pri.... ileging them, ta.king the stiltus quo of differential racial entitlement as normativelY Legitimate, and ,not to hc investigated funher. that gives us rhe overview. Let lIS now move to Il closer examin:ul0n of the details ilndworkings of the RacinlO Contract: its n rmingof spaee and the rsub)pcr o son, its relation to the "offleial"soeial eontraet, and the terms ofS its enforcement. The Racial Gonlracl norms {and races] space, demarcating civil and wild spaces. Neither space nor the individual is usually an object of explicit and detailed nanning for the mainstream social con tract. Spacc is JUSt them. t"ken for granted, and the individual ist acitly posited as the White adult male, so that aU intHviduals arc obviously equal. Bllt for the Racial Comract, space itself and the individuals thcrem are not homogeneous; so explicit normative distinctions necessarily have to be made. 1 will treat the norming of space and the person separntely, though exegesis is complicated by the fa ct that they arc bound up together. The norrning of space is partiaHy done in terms of the racing 01 space, the depiction of Space as dominated by 40 41 nET THE ?ACIAL CONTRACT wood, sllvaticus, nomo sylvestr.L�, the man indiViduals (whether persons or suhpersons! oj it ccnain rAce. man of the has so deeply penetrated At the some time, the norming of rhe individual is partially whose being wildness, wilderness, to civilization, to the political, is barred) !You nchicved by spacing tt, that is, representing it as imprinted that the door out or the wilderness, hut you can't v/jth ,he characterlstics of a certain kind of SpaCe, So this.is can take the Wild Man Wild Man,) The Wild Man is a mmually suPPOrting cnaracterlzlItion that, for subpersODs, take the wilderness out of thc thought, Ul'::! domestic alltIpode becomes a ci:rcuJarindietment: "You tile What you are in {Mrt a crucial figllIC (n medieval and is one of the conceptual because you originllte hom a certain kind of space, and that lwithin Eutope) of civilization, Inter cxtra-Eutopean "savages."l As Hayden SpllCC has those propenies in pan because it is inhabited by anteeedentsof the of the "Wild Man" iUustrates creotures like yoursc1L" White poillts out, tbe creation self-definition by neg.lltion("4 the The supposedly abstract but actUally white social contract "the technique of ostensive of oneself by reference to what one is not. characterizes IEuropeanl space basically as prcsociopolitical eharacterization are the nOllsnvnges, Thus it is really here, in :'( the sta tc of nature")and postsociopolitical :the locus oj Itc ivil Who arc we! We as against the mythieal social society"J, But th,s characterization docsn ot reflect negatively the real·lifc Racial Contract, rhe "state of nature" and tOe "natural" play on the charaetcIlstics of the space itself orits denizerlS. This contract, rhat are in the state of nature, spa ee is our space, a space in which we �we white people) are their ,decisive theoretical role, They writes Roy HarveyPearce, "found at home, a cozy domestic spaee. At a cettain Stage, !white; and we are not. Englishmen, ,m uncivilized environmeht, but uneivi· Jlcople seeing the disadvantages of the state of nature volUntu in America ilot only it WIIS slIid, living in a natutal ily choose to lelive it, thenceforth estahlishing institutions lized men-natural men, as transforming its character. But there is nothing innate in the world."5 Correspondingly, ule Raeial Contract in its eatty ptecon space or rhe persons thllt eonnOles intrinsic defect. qUCSt versions mllSt neeessarily involve the pejorative charac By contrast, In loe social <:ontract's ilppucadon to nOll terization of the spaces that need tamin& the spaces in whieh Europe, where it becomes the Racial COil tract, both Spaee and the raeial polities arc eventually going lO eonstrueted. The its inhabitants are alien. So this space and these indjvidl1als be Raeial Contra cr is thus necessarily more openly materialthan need to be explicitly theorized about, since lir tUnis 011tj they the socia! conrract. These strange landscap s isa unlike those lircboth defective in a Wily that requires external intervention e at home:, this alien flesh [so different from out own!, must he to be redeemed \insoiar, that is, as redemption is possible). mapped and subordinated. Creating the eivil and rhe politieal Europeans, Ot ilt least fuB Europeans, were "civilized," and here thus requires an aetive spatial snuggle (this space is thjs condition was manifested in the character of the SpaCes resistant) against the savage and harharie/ an advaneing of the they inhllhited,lNon-Europeans were "savagest" ilndthis cou� frontier agai.nst opposition, E.uropeanization 'Of the world. 43 42 THE RACIAL CONTRACT OE7AllS countries and eontinentsl, the loca] level :eity neighhorboods), Athena that ancient Egypt waS a significantculrural influenee and ultimately even the microlevel of the body itself :the on ancient Creece, and that it waS ro a large extent a black contaminated edge of science, universals) is not possible. Significantcultural approptiated by Europe without acknowledgmer:t, in effeet achievement, intellectual progress, is thus denied to those denying the reaiity that "/the Wcst' has always 'bcen a multi spaees, which are deemed (failing European intervention) ro cultural creation."? be permanently locked into a cognitive state of superstition This norming is, of course, also lmnifested i.llthe vocabulary and ignorance. Va lentin Mudimbe refers to this as an "eptstc of "discovery" and "explotation" still ln use until recently, mologieal ethnocentrism." Countervailing evidence maythcn hasically implying that if no white person has beeu there be be treated in different ways. It may simply be destroyed, as fore, then cognition cannot really have taken place. In Heart for eXilmple the invading Spanish conquistadors burned Aztee of Darkness, Joseph Conrad's Marlow pores OVOl' the globe and manuscripts. It may be explained away as resulting from the notes that "there were many blank spaces on the earch.olD intervention of oursiders, for example from a previously un And this blankness Signifies nor merely that Europeans have known contact with whites: "Since Africans eould produce not artived but that these spaces have not ar,dved, a blankness nothing of value; the rechniquc of Yorubn statuary must have of the inhabitants themselves. Afriea is thus the IIDark Conti come from Egyptians; Benin an must bea Portuguese creation} nent" because of tbe paucity of (rememberedj European con the architeetural achievement of Zimbabwe was due to Arab tact with it. Com:spondiugty, there are rituals of naming tecbnici 4. THE RACIAL wmACi O:TMlS validate local knowledge claims. Tn order fot these spaces to ttansformed'-;1 testimony to the superior rnorul eharaeteris be known, European perception is required, tics of this space and its inhabitants. (Hobbes's paradigmati Momlly, vice ano virtue are spatialized, flrsr on the mac· cally ferocious state of nature may appeat to be an excep tion, rolevel of a moral cartography that accompanies the litemi but as we will see later, ir is really only literal for non European mappjug of the world, so that entire regions, coun europeans, so that it actually confirms rather than challenges qualities. tries , indeed continems, are invested with moral the ruk] Thus Mudimbe dC$crihes the "geography of monstro;Hty" of Because o( th.is moralrzation of spacel the journey upriver early Euwp!;ancartography, which, in a framework still largeiy or in general the journey into the interior in imperial theologieal, panitlOns the known world and points out Where literature-the ttip away from the outposts of civilization into There B� Dragons.") Non-Europe;1n space is thus demonized native territoty--acquires deep symbolic significance, for it in a way th'lt implies the need fot Europeanization if moral is the expedition into hath the geographic llnd the' petsonal redemption is to bc possible. The link hetween the cognitive heart of darkness, the evil Without which correlates with the and the maritI. of course, connects the failure to perceive l1atu evil witbin. Thus in Apocalypse Now, Funeis Ford Coppokt's fill law with moral flaw: the darkness of the Dark Con tlncm 1979 rewriting ofConrad in the eonte.xt of Vi etnam, Willatd's is not merely the absence of a European presence but a blind [Nillrtin Shcenj jOUrllCY upnVer to find Kurtz {Marlon Branda), ness- to ChriStian light, which nc.cesso.tily results in moral whose stages are sartorially marked tiu:ough the gradual strip blackness, supers-tition, devil worship. Appropriately, then, ping away of the [eivilizedJ uniform of the US. army to the one of the medieval cartographic troditions was the mappa final mud-caked, machete-carrying �e indistinguishable mundL the map of the ""orld organized not on a grid system, from the ('. -ambodianvUlagers eeremonially killingthe buffalo, but around thc Christian cross, withJeruso.lem at the eenterP is botha norm�tivc descent mto moral corruption and a eogni SimIlarlY, European settlers in America described the area tive ascent to the realization that the war eould have been beyond the mountains as "Indian country,'1 "the D;1rk and won only by abandoning the restraints of Euro-American civi� Bloody Ground. __a howling wilderncss inhabhed by 'savages lization las demonstrated in My L:ti presumably) and embrae and wild be.1 $ts, ,tt or sometimes even " Sodom and Gomormh. IJ ing the " sl'lVageryn of the North Vietnamese aImy.15 The And the society they saw themselves foundjng WitS, ron e battle against this savagery is in ;1 sense permanent 46 41 THE MC!Al CONTPAC D€TA'lS true of racialized power, reflecrs und refines the spatial rela here!" The Racial Contract demareatcs spacej reservlngprjvi tions of irs inh<1b[fun tS,"l� Part ot the purpose of the eolor barl leged spaces for its fust-cl<1sS eitizens. the color linetapartheidliim crow is to maintain these spuees The other dimension ofmoral appraIsaland nmming, which in ril",i; ploce, to have the cheekcrboard of virtue and vice, is of course the one th .. tbeco mes more central with seculariza light and dark space, OillS and tlmirs, cle;trly dem,neated so tiOn, IS not traditional Christian vicc and virtue but the emer that the human geography prescribed by the fuiciHl Contract gent capitalist/Protestant ethic of settlement and industry. c.1 n be preserved, For here the moral topography is different and Franke Wiltner argueS that the ideology of "progress and mod the dvilizlnglflission as yet Incompiete, Of this partitioning of ernization" has served for five hundred yeilfS as the dominant justificution of Western displacement and killing of the space and person, Frantz Fanon writes: "'The eoloniul wOI�d "Fourth World" of indigenous pCQples.'�Here, spac� 49 CHAtS Drinnon desenbes how many European settlers in the United ie..!;., those of the inner cityjareintrinsicaliydoomed towelfare Stares thought of themselves as "inland Crusoesfl in an "un dependency, high street: crime, ullderduss status/ because of peopled" wilderness, eharacterized by Theodore Roosevelt as the charlleteristies of its inhabitantst so that the larger eoo "[he red wastes where the barbarian peoples of the worldhuM nomie system has no role in Cleating these problems. Thus "ll SWl!y. Similarly, "A.tthe time of fhst settlement in the Aus one of the interesting consequences of the Racial Contract is tralian colonies aUlands were deemed to be waSte l "bragged about theit bag of Bushmen 50 51 :tlE M:)IAl ::;ONTRi>.CT DETAILS rhythms, telegraphed from the $ptlee of saVager}', threatening there is a sense in which the rcal polity is the virtual white the civllized space of the white poliry and rhe carnul integriry polity, then, without pushing the metaphor tOO far, one could of its inhabitants. So when in the r950S wll ite artists did cover say that the nonwhite body is a moving bubble of wilderness versions of "tace records," songs on the jim-crowed rhythm tnwhite political space, a nodeofdiseontinultywhich is neces and hlues charts, they were silnHlzcd,cleaned up,rhe rhythltls sarily in permanent tension with it. rearranged; rhey were made recognizably "white.'" More generally, there is also the basic social requirement of disringuishingon the level ofcvcrydilY interaction tun inter· The RacIal Conlnet norlnS land races) the Individual. J3stab!!stdng action raking place not an some abstract plane but ..¥ithin this personhood ami subpersanliand. raeilllized space) personi>erson from person-subpcrson soclal intercourse Thus in the United States, from the epoch of In the disincarnate poHltcal theory of the orthodox social slavery and 11m crow to the modern period of formili liberty comract, the body vanishes! beeomes theoretically unimport. but continuing racism, the physicill interilctions between ant, just as the physical spaee inhabited by that body is osten· whites ;:::md blacks ate C'.lretully regulated by a shiiting tilc1lll. sibly theoretically unimportant. But this disappeilring act is etiquetre that is ultimately determined by the current fotm jU$t 52 53 OETM.S THE RA:;I�l CCNTR4(i7 tiveJ norm hut adherence to the actual norm. (Thus, I pointed reduced it to .a homily, deprived it of the shattering political Ollt earlier "exccption.uism " was the rUle.) The "Racial Con .force it once had. But what needs to be emphasized )5 that it tract" as a theory puts race where it bdongs-at eemer stage·� is only white persons land really only white males) who have and demonstrates how the polity was in fact a racial one, It !:>een able to take this for granted, for wbom it ean be an white-supremacist state, for which differential white racial unexciting truism. As Lucius Outlaw underlines, European entitlement and nonwhite Tileialsubordination were deftrtin& liberalism restricts "egali tarianism toequality among equals, " thus inevitably molding white moml psychology and moral and blacks and others are omo!ogieally excluded by race from lbeorizlng_ the promise of "the liberal project of modernity. "JI The terms the degra. This is most dearly the case, of course, for blacks, of the Raeial Comract mean that nonwhite s1.1bpersonhood is 'poimed of racial slavery meaning, as has often ,been ellShrined simoltaneously TNith white personhood. darion oLan.cient out, that for the first time land unlike the slavery So in order tounderstand the workings of the polities struc ac and Rome or the medieval Mediterranean) slavery tured bythe Radar Contract, I believe, we need to understand Greece per· a color. But for the colonial project in general, subpersonhood also. Subpersons are humanoid entities who, quired Jt would be raced, hence the concept of "subject raceS. because of racial phenotYpe/genealogy/eulture, are not fully sonhood and non· The erucial conceptual divide :is between whites human and therefore bave <1 different and inferior schedule of and subpersons, thongh onee this central cut tights and liberties applying to them, In other words, it is whites, persons (' vari· has becn made, other internal distinctions an�possible, possible to get away with doing things ro subpersons that one J as ear , of subpcrsonhood ("savagest! versus "barbarians," eouid not do to person.s, because they do not have the same eties Racial noted) corresponding to dUferent variants of the . rights as persons. Insofar as racism is addressed at all within lier !c:x:propriation/slave!colonialj. Thus ltipling's native mainstream moral. and political philosophy, it is usually Contract have more than one iaee-"half devil and hall chi1dlt� treated in a footnote as a regrettable deviation from the ideal. could kinds might so that while (ior the c)""Propriation contraetl some But treadng it this Way makes it seem contingent, accidental, have to be extel'minated ias in the Americas, Australial reSidual, removes it from our understandmg. Raee is made to simply eon tract) .a and South Atriea), for others las in the colonial seem marginal when in fact race has been central. The notion gUidance las in coionial Africa and Asia} might lead of subpersonhood, by contrast, makes the Racial Contract paternalist in all (as "m�norsJJ! ilt least partway to civilization. But explicit, showing that to characterize things in terms of "de. them entities the bottom line was that one was dealing with viations":is in.1 sense misleading. Rather, what is involved is cases, and seli on the same moral tier, incapable of autonomy compliance with a nor m whosc existence it is now embar. not "Negroes, Indians, and [KRffirs! cannot bear dcmoeraey," rassing to admit. $0 instead of )fetending [hat thc social eon. rule. l the Phantom, concluded John Adams,l-P. :Think of Tarzanand tract outlines the ideal that people tried to Iive up to but which jun. Sheena, white kings and q�eens ruling tbe black thc)' occasionally (tlS with aU ideals) fell short of, we should She and down the law to the lesser breeds without iLl suy fI'aukly that for whites the Racial Conuaet represented gle, laying the dynamic interrelation of the categorization the ideal, and what is involved is nOt devi:ttion from the :ffc. Moreover, 51 56 THE RACIAL CONTRACT DETAILS meant, as Hegelians would be quick to recognize, th.;tt the self·respect ure then intimately tied up with me' repudiation c,Hegories reeiprocally de(ennined eaeh otber. Being a person, of the blaek Other. No matter how poor one _was, one was being whitc, meam-dcfinitionally-not bejng a subperson, still able to affirm the whiteness that distinguished one from llOt having the qualities thnt dragged one down to tile next the subpersons on tite other side of the color Bne. ontological level, In the ido::al Kanctan world of �he raeeless Then:: is also 3 cognitive dimension that :islikcw iseenritmu soc);ll contract, persons can exist in ::ht;; nbstraet; jn the non. ous with thc Aristotelian traditiou. Historically the.paradigm iHC ideal world of the naturalized Racial Contract, persons indIcator of snbpersonhaod has been deficient Iationality, the necessarily related to subpcxsons. For these are Identities as inability to exercise in full the characteristic classically "contrapuntal ensembles," requiring their opposites, with the thought of as distinguishing us {lOrn animals. FoI the social "secondariness" of subpersons b� as Said phra.ses it, "'pala contraet,a rough equalityin men's eognitive powe.�s or.atle ast dorically, essential to the primariness of the European. "J9 a nccessary groundflooI capability of detecting the-imrnanent ' Where slavery was practiced, as in tbe United States and tlle moral structuring of the universe luatural law), or what is Americas, so that a sustsined reiation betwcen races obtained, rntiunaUy reqnired far social cooperation, is eIucial to the whiteness and blackness evolved in a forced intimacy of l.oath. argument. For the Racial Contract, correspondingly, a basic ing in which they determined each other by negation and inequality is asserted in the C.;tpacityof different human groups self-reeognition in part through tbe eyes of the ot!U',I. In his [0 know tbe world and to detect natural law. Suhpersons arc pIizewinning book on the evolution of the idea of freedom, deemed cognitivdy interior, lacking in the essential rational- . Orlando Patterson argues that freedom has been generated ity that would make them fully human. from the experience of slavery, that the slave establishes the In the early !theologieal)vcrsions of theRaeial Contract, this norm for JlUmans.�D Part of the preSCnt-d:lY probl�rn in trying difference was spelled out in terms of heathen unwillingnessto to assimilate black Americans into the body politic is.the deep recognize God's word. One early sevcnrccn th-century minister encoding in thc natioual psyche of the notion that, as To ni characterized NativeAmerieans as "having littleo-fHumanitic Morrison points Out, Americanness dcnnitionally means but shape, ignotant of Civilitie, of ArtS, of Religion, more \\'hiteness; European immigrants who came to America ;in the brmish than the beasts they hum. more wild and unmanly late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries proved their assimi· Ithani that unmanned wild CounIrey, which they range father lation by entering the club of whiteness, affirming their en· than inliabite; capuvated also to Satans tyranny."4! In lateI, dorsement of the Racial ContraeL�l The longtime joke in the secular verSIons. it is a meed incapaeityrorrationality, abstr-act black community is that the fhst word the German or Scandi thought, cultural development, eiviliza.tion in general lgener n,lVian or Italiau learns on Ellis Island fresh off the boat is atlng those clark cognitive spaces on Europe's mapping of the "nigger." Black American, At:dean AmerIcan, is oxymorouie, world), In philosophy one could trace this eommon thtead wIliIe White American, Euro-American, l$pleonastic, White· through Locke's speculatioIls on the incapacities of primitive ness is defined in part in respect to an oppositional darkness. minds, Davld Hume's denial that any other race but whites so that white self-conceptions of identity, pCtsouhood, aud had created worthwhile civilizations, Kant's thoughts On the 59 QUAilS r.,[ fACIAL ccrfrAAc� plications involve a shift epistemic agent, etc.j, iFurthcr com rarionaliry differentials between blacks and whites, Voltaire's a morc attenuated itom stmighrforw\ltd biological racism to polygene de conclusion that blacks were a dIstinct ;tnd less the epistemic IIculturnl" raelsm, where partial mcmbetshipjn able species, lohn Stuan Mill's judgment that those races "in all e cxtcnr towhlcb nonwhites communityis granted based th thei fit nl poti " r nonage" were o y for tldes sm. The assumption wmte Western culture.) showthemsclvcs capablc ofmastcring of nonwhite intellectual inferiority was widespread, even if involves a specific Finall.y, the norming ofthe individual also not always tricked out in the pseudoscientific appatatus that Judgments oimoraI norming of the body, an aesthetic norming. DarWinism would later make possible. Once this theoretical from judgments of worth are obviously coneeptually wstlnet advance h 51 60 DETAILS as Thomas Jefferson expressed their antipathy to Negroidfea Whereas relations between the sexes necessarily go back to tures:� (Benjamin Franklin, interestingly, opposed the slave the origin of the species, an intima te and central reiatlonship trade on grounds that were a, least partially aesthetic, as a between EurOpe a.<; .acolleetive entity and non"Europe, "white" kind of bellutifieation program for America. Voicing his con and "nonwhire" raees, is a phenomenon of the modem epoch. ce�n thac impona;:ion of Slaves had "blaeken'd half America," There is ongoing sch olarly controversyover tht!existence and he tlsked: " Why increase the Sons of Afnca, hy Planting rhem extent of racism in anttquity Ii/racism" ilS a complex ofidcas, in Ameriea, Whete wc have so fair an Opportunity, by exciud that is, as agai nst a dt!veloped politicoeeonomic system), with ing ;tIl BlacKs and Tawneys, of inereasing the lovely White some writC!s, such as Frank Snowden, finding a period "before and Red?"l'f color prejudice," in which blacks are obviously seen. asequals, To the extent tbat these norms are accepted, blacks will be and others claiming that Greek and Roman bigotry against the race most alkntltedfrom thcir own oodies -a fate particu blacks was there from the begi nning:9 Burohviously, w�tever laxly painfulfor blaek women, \'fho, like aU women, will (hy the disagreement on thiS point, it would have to be agreed lhe terms, here, of the Sexual COlUmet) be valued ehiefly by eh:tt the ideology of modem wcism is far more theoretically their physical appearance, whieh will generally be deemed to developed than ancient or medieval preludices and is linked fall shon of the Caucasoid or light-skinned ideaL4� Moreover, iw])atcver one's vieW, idealist or materialist, of C<'Iusal priority) apart from their obvious consequences for intra- and interra to a system of European domination. cial seXUtllrelationships, these norms wil] affeet opportuniti.es Nevertheless, this divergence does imply that different ac and employment prospects also, for studies have confirmed counts of the Racial Contract are possible_ The account I favor that a "pleasing" physical appearanee gives one an edge in job conceives the Metal Contract :as creating not merely racial competition. It is no aecident that bla[;ks of mixed race are exploitation, but race itself as a group identity. In a contempo· those who are differentially represented in employment in the Tlll'y vocabulary, the Racjal Contract "constructs" raee, (For " "white" world. They wiH, beeause 01 their background. often , . other accounts, for eXtlmple, more essentialist ones, meial (end to he better educated also, but an addi:ional faetor is that self-identmcation would precede the drnwing up of the Racial whites are less physically uncomfortable with them. "Ifwe Contraet.) "White" people do not preexist but are brought have to hire any of them," it may be thought, "at least this into existcnee as "whites" by the Raci.. ll Contrac t-hence the one laoks a bit like us," peculiar transformation of the human population that accom panies this contract. The whltc race is invented, and one 11M! becomes I'white 0y law, The Ratial Coniract underwrites the modern social conlract and Is In this framework, then, the golden. age of contract theory conlinually being rewrltte n_ {1050 to 18001 overlapped with the growth of a European capi talism whose development was stimulated by the voyages of Rildieal femi.nists argue that tbe oppression of women :is tbe explor.'llcion thatinereasingly gave theconrraetaracial subtcxt. oldest oppression. Racial oppression is much more recenr. The evolution of the modem version of the conrract, charac- 62 63 ------' ---�---�- THE ItAClAl COf1TRt\CT terized by an antipatdarchalist Enlightenment liberalism, was never generally so, over nU the world: bUl there are mony with its proclamations of the equnl rights, autOnomy, and places, where they live so 001.'01,11 hi" example being "the savage freedom of ..II meo, thus rook place simultaneousl)' with the people in rntmy places of America. "S< So a nonwhite people, massacre, expropriation, and subjection to hercdito.tyslavery indeed the very nonwhite people upon whose land his. fellow of men a t least apparenrly hUman. This contradiction needs £uropcnnswere then encroaching, 1..'1:his only real-life example to be reconciled; it is reconciled through the Racial Contract, ofpeople jn 3 srate of nature. lAnd in fact, it has been pointed which essentially denies their personhood and restricts the out thar the phr$lsingand terminology of Hobbes's character terms of the social COntract to whites. "To invade ilnd dispos iZlltion may well have beeo derived directly from the writings sess the people of an unoffcnding civilized country would ofcontemportl!ies abont settlement in the Americas. The "ex violate morality and trnnsgress the principles of international plorer" Walter Raleigh described a civil war as Ua state of War, law/, writes Jennings, "but savages were exceptional. Being which is- (he meer state of Natute ofMen out of communitYI uncivilized by definition, they were ourside rhe sanctiOns of wbere all have an equal right to all things.t' And two other both morality and lav.'. "Sl Thc Racial Comract is thus the authors ofthe time characterized the inhabltants of the Ameri· truth of the social contraet_ eas as "people [who] lived like wild bcosts, without religion, There is some direct evidence that it is in the writings of nor govcrnment, nor town, nor houses, without cultivating the clilssic contract theorists themselves. That is, it is 110t the land, not clothing their bodieslt ond "people hving yet as merely a matter Ot hypothetical intellectu ul reconstruction tbe first men, without lettcts/ without lawes,·without Kings, on my :pan, arguing from silence :hat "men" mllst really , Without common wealrhes, without arts .,. not civil by have meant "white men!' Already Hugo Grotit:st whose early nature." I''; sevc:nteenu)·century work on natural law provi.ded the crucial In rhe next paragraph! Hobbes gOes on to argue that "though thcoT 6. .5 "':HEP. ACIAL Co",TRACT rn:TAI� that there 1S a tacit racial logic in the text: the literal11tatcof ans would enjoy the benefits of liberal p Us,wages. " Indians,5¥ Though they share tIle state of nature for a time Hobbes has standard!y been seen as an awkwardly transi with nonwhites, then, their residence is necessarily hriefer, tional writer, caught between feudal absolutism and the rise since whites, hy appropriating and adding viilue to this natural of parliamentari:mism, who uses the eon tract now elassieaUy world, exhibit their superior rationality, So the mode of appro· assoeiated with the emergenee of liberalism to defend absolut pria tion of Native Americans is no real mode of appropriation ism. Bur it might be argued that he is tranSitional in another at all, yielding propeny tighrs that c:m be re •• 67 THf RACiAl CONTRACT DETAILS a defensive war of Hottemots and Caribs.6': IEuropeans arc so intrinsically civi. of civilized and savage remains quhe clear, lized that it takes upbringing by animals to turn them into Finally, Kant's version of the social contract is in a sense savages.) For Europe, savagery is in the dim distant past, since the best illustrot:ion of the grip of the Racial Contract on metaliurgy and agriculture are the .inventions leading to civili· Europeans, since by this time the aetual contractand the his· zation, and it turns Out that "one of the best reasons why torl�! dimension of contractarlanism had apparently van Europe, if not the earliest to be civilized, lias been at ICllSt ished altogethct. So here if anywhere, one would think-in more continuously and better civilized than other partS oi the this world of abstract personsl demarcated as such only by v,.-orld, is perhaps that it is ottonce 'the richestin jron and the their rationality-race would have become irrelevant. But as 69 OEiAILS Enlmanuel Eze has recently demonstrated in great detail, this corresponding intdleetual ability and limitation. Itonlyseems orthodox picture is radically misleading, and the nature of casual,unembcddcd in a lurgcrtheory/ because white<1eademic Kantian "persons" and the Kamian "contract" musr really be philosophy as an institution has had no interest in reseMching, rethought,M For it lutnS Out rhnt Kant, widely regarded as the pursuing the implications of, and making known to the world most important moral theorist of the modern period, in a sense this dimension of Kant's work. the father of modern mOta] theory, and-through the work In facr, Kant demarcates and theorizes a color�coded racial of Tohn Rawls and lurgen Habermas-incre8sing]y cenua! to hierarchy of Europeans, Asians, Africans, and Native Ameri modern political philosophy as weil, is also the father of the cans, differentiated by their degree of innate talent. Ezc ex modern conceptoi mee,(,(' His 1775 essay "The Dificrent Races plains: "'Talent' is that which, by 'nature.' guarantees for the of Manklnd" ! "Von den Vcrscbieden(.:n Rassen der Menschen") 'white,' in Kam's racial rational and mom] order,- the highest is a classic pro-hereditarhm, untienvinmmenral isl statement position above all creatures, fo1l9Wed by the�' yel 1ow/ the of "the immutability and permanence of race." For him, enm 'black,' and then the 'red: Skin eolor for Kant is evidence of menlsGeorge \1.osse, "racial make-up beeomes an unchanging superior, inferior, or no 'gift' of 'talent,' or the capa city to substance and the foundation of all physieal appeanmce and rcalize reaSOn 11M rational-morAl perfcctibility through human development, including intelligence, 'Ii; The famous education. .. It cannot, therefore, be Jlrsued that skin color theorist of personhood is also the theorist of subpersonhood, for Kam was merely a physical characteristic. It is, rnther, thoughrhis distinetion is, in what the suspicious might almoSt evidence of an unchanging and unchangeable Q'lorJlI quality.'" think a conspiracy to conceal embarrassing truths, far less Europeans, to no onc's surprise I presume, bave all the neces- weB knO>'t'n, 5JX)' talcl1ls to be morally self-educating; there is some hope As Ezc points out, Kanr taught anthropology and physical ior As:.ans, though they laek the abilhy to develop abstract geography for tony years, and his philosophical work really concepts; rhe innately idle Africans can at leasr be educated has to be read in conjunction with ul eselectures to understand as servants and slaves through the instruction of a split. how rncialized his views on mora.l charaetet were, His notori bamboo eime IKant gives some useful advice on how to beat Ous commcnt in Observations on tl1e Feeling of the Beautiful Negroes effieientlY); and thc wretehed Native Americans are and Sublime is well known to, and often cired by, black intel· justhopeless, and cannot be educated at all. So, in complete lectuals� "So fundamcntal is the difference between [the black opposition to the image of his work that has come down to and whitel races of man ...it appears to be as great in regard us and is. standardly taught in introduetory ethics courses, full to mental ell.pJ.eities as in color" so that "a clear proof that pcrsonhood for Kant is aetuaUy dependent upon race. InEze's what Ill. Negro] s.'lid was stupid" was rhat "tllis fellow was suliimnry, "The Wack person, for example, can accordingly be quite: black from head to foot ." &; The point of Eze's essay is denied full humanity sinee full and 'true' humAAity accrueS (ho.t dtisremark is by no means isolated or a casual throwaway only to the whlte European:'t� Hne that, though of course rcgrettable, has no bro",:ler implica The recent furor about Paul de ManJO and, decades earlier, tions. Rather, it comes out of a deVeloped theory of race 70 71 TI'iE it'\C;A1. CDNTit4cr !)F"AILS needs to be put jmo perspcctive. These arc cssemiaHy bit the period of formal, juri.dical white supremacy jthc epoch of players, mmor le,1guers. One needs to distinguish theory from the EUropean eonquest, Airlc:tn slavery, and EuropeAn colo actual practice. of course, and I'm not $ 73 DETA lS ThE Rl lenging that foundarion is a transgression of the !:erms of the reasons of local folly and geographical blight the inspiring soci<1l contract. :Though actuallY-in a sense-it is, insofar as model of the self«suffieicnt white social contraet eannot be followed. the Racial Contract is the -real meaning of rhesocial contract.) Globally, the Racial Contract eftccts a final plll adoxic.al Nationally, wirhin these racial poUties, the Racial Contuct manifestS itself inwhite resistance to anything more than the norming and racing of space, a writing out at the pollty of of abstract.social c tr certain spaces as conccptuaUy and hiscorieally irrelevant to for mal extension of the tenus the on act it that European and Em:o-world de velopment, so that these laced (and often to that also). Whereas before was denied spaces arc categorized as disjoined from rh.c path of elviUzation nonwhires were equal persons, it is now pretended that non (i.e., the European project). FredricJameson writes: "Colonial· whites am equal abStract persons who ean be fully included in y extending ism means that a significant structural segmem of the ecO the politymetely b the seope of the n1Qral operator, nomic system as a whole Is now located elsewhere, beyond without 74 75 CHALS [leVer knows for sure."''; Nonwhites then find th�t raee is, ofthings, '-;7 The black philosophy proies.sor Bill Lawson com paradoxieally, both everywhere and rlOwhcrc, s.trucruriugtheir ments on the deficiencies of the conceptual apparatus of tradi� poHtical}moral theory. Bves but not formaHy recognized in tional liberalism, which has no room for the peculiar post But In a raciaHy structtllcd polity, the only people who can Emancipation status or blneks, simultaneously citizens nnd nnd it psychologically possibie to deny the centrality of nlee noneitizens,1S The black philosopher of law Anitl1 Allen re are those who aTe racially privileged, for whom e is invisible (llc lllarks on the Hony of standard Amer ican philosophy of law precisely beellus.e the world :is structured around them, whitt: texts, which describe a univers e in whic h "all humans are ness as the ground against which the figures of other races- paradigm rightsholclers" and sec no need to point out that those who, unlike us, are raced�appcar. The fish does. nOt the aetual u.s. record is somewhat different,19 The retreat sec the water, and whites do not sce thc racial nature of a of mainstream normative moral and political thftory into an polity because it 15 natural to them, the clement in white "ideal" theory that ignores race merely reseripts thc Racial which they move, As Toni Morrison points out, thc:re are ('.antraet as thc invisible wrhing between the lines. So John ' contexts in which claiming raeelessness is itself a racial aet.�� Rawls, an Amcriean working in the late twentieth century, Contemporary debates between nonwhites and ..",hitcs abou t writes a bnok on jnst'i,ccwidely credited with reviving postwar the centrality OT periphera!ity of race c�n thus be sc..:n as polir:'eal philosophy in whieh not a single reference to Anlerl,. attempts rcspectively to point om, and deny, the existence of can slavery a.nd its legacy can be found, and Robert Noziek the Racial Contract that underpins the social contract, The erc.ates a theory of iustice in holdings predicated on legitimate frustrating problem nonwhi�cs ha'\'c always had, and continue acquisition and tram,ter without more than two or three sen to have, with m.ain.strealU political theory is not with abstrac tcneesncknowicdglus:theutter divergeneeot u.s. history from tion i[5e11 :after aU, tbe "Ra-cial Contract" is itself 1111 nbsuac this ideal. >(� CianI hut with all idenli:dng abstraction that abstrac ts away Thc silence of mainstream moral and politica.l philosophy from the erucial relllities of the racial polity,7!. The shift to on issues of race is a sign of the continuing, power of the the hypothetical, ideal c:oll�taCt eneour.1gcs and facilitates this Colttract over its s.ignamries, an illusory color blindness that ab5traction, since the eminendy nonidea1. features oj thc Leal actually entrenches white privilege. A genuine wlfl.seendenee part of the a world are not apparatus. There is then, in sense, ofits terms would require, as a preliminary, [hc acknowledg no eoneeptuill poim-or.emry to start talking about thc hmda ment of its past .md present existenee and the soeial, political, memal way in whieh (as aU nonwhitcs knO\\'! race structures eeonomic, p!'lyehologieal, and mornl implications it has had one's life and affeets one's life chances. both for its eomr:lctors and its v�ctlms, By treating tbe present The hlaek law professor Patrieia Williams eomplains about as II somehow neutrnl baseline, with its givet\ configuration an il ostensible neutrality that is Ct::ally "racism in drag/' sys ofwealth, property, social standing, and psychological willing , tem of ( racism as statUS quo" whiehis " deep, angry, eradicated ness to sacrifice, the idealized social eonttact renders pcrma make people "avoid from view" but continues to the phantom - nent the legacy of the Racial Contract. The ever-deepening as they did the substance," "deferlringl to the unsccn sbape abyss between the First World and the Thud World, where 76 77 OET.G!LS mHlions-latgcly nonwhite-die of starvation each year and course, Jews, In the colonial wars with Ireland, the English many more hundreds 0; mtllions-al.so largely nonwhite routinely used derogatory imagery-tlsavugcs," "cannibals!' live in wretched poverty. IS seen as unfortunate (calling, cer "bestial appearancc"-tnat it would now seem incredible to tainly, for the occasional charitab:e contribmionJ bm ume apply to whites,#lThc waye of mld�nineteenth*ccntury Irlsh lared to the history of transcontinental and intraeonrinental immigration into the United States stimulated one wit to racial exploitation. observe thut "it would be a good rhing ifevery Irishman were Finally, the Racial Contract evolves nm merely by altering to kHl a nigger and then be hung for it/' and,c.aricatures in the relalions berween whites and nonwhites but by shHti!1g the newspapers often represented the Irish as simian, European the criteria for who (;ounts as white and nonwhite, ;So it is racism ilgainsr nonwhites has been my focus, but there were not merely that relations berween rhe respective populations also intra-European varieries at tfrllcisml!-Teuton ism, A.. ,glo change but that rhe population bonndades themseh,es change Saxonism, Nordicism-whieh ale roday of largely antiquarian also.! Thus-at least in my preferred account of the Racial interest lmt which were sufficiently influential in the 1920S Contract !rtgain, orher accounts are possiblej-raee IS debm· that U,S, immigration law favored "Nordics"over "Mediterra logizcd. making explidt its political. founda:lon. In (I sense, nenn5." jThere lS some recognition of this distinctionin popular rIle Racial Contract construct!; its sjgnatorje,� as much as the)' culture, Clleers fans will remember that the l'ItalianlJ waitress construct:iL The overan trend is toward a limited cxpnnsioll Cnr!'l IRhea Perlman], curly haired and swarthy, sometimes of thc privileged human population through the "whitening" ea.lIs the biond, "alab;lster-skinned" WA SP Diane [Shelley of the previously excluded group in question, though there Long) "Whitey," and in the 1992 movie Zebrahead, two black may be local reversnls. teenagers discuss the question of wherher Italians are really The �azi project ean thell be scen in part as rbe Hnempt to white.: Fmally, 1ews, of COUIse, have been the victims of Chris turn the dock back by rewriting a more exclusivist version tian tUIOpe's anti·Semitic diserilninntion and pogroms since of the Racia1 Contract than wasglobally acceptable at the time. medieval times, this rccord of persecution rcachjng its horrific lOne writer suggests ironically thar this was "rhe attempt of climax under the Third Reich, the Germans to make themselves masters of the master How, then, should these Europeans be categorized, given Tace_"I�l A."'.Id this backtracking le,1dsro a prohlem. My catego tnc white/nonwhite dichotomization? One solution would be rization iwhhe/nonwhire, person/subperson) has the virtues to rejeet it for a three- or four-way division. But I am reluctant of elegance and simplicity and seemsro me w map the essential to do so, since t think the dyadic partition reatly does capture features of the tacinl polity accurately, to Carve the soelul the essential snucmrc of the global racial polity. My solution reality at its onwlogicnl joints. But sinee, as a pair of eonrrndie therefore is to retain but "fuzzify" the categories, introducing cories, thi s. categorization is ioindy exhaustive of the possibili interna.l distinctions within them , 1 have already pointed OUt ties, it raises the question of where to locate what could be rhat some nonwhites V' barbarians" as against "savagesU) celled "borderline" Europeans, white people with a question ranked higher than others; forexampJc, the Chinese .andfAsian) mark-the Irish. Slavs, Mcdltemmeans, and above all, of Indians would have beenplaced aboveAfticans and Australian 78 79 iMc RACIAL COUTPACT DETA!LS Aborigines. So it wonld seem that onc could also rank whitest they were in South Africa under apartheidJ, whilebeing classi. and in raCt Winthrop Jordan notes that "if Europeans were fled as verminous nonwhites with respect to the Western AJ white, some were whucr than orhers. "iU AJl whites are equal, lies, inhcritors of the global Racial Contraet.% A eenturyago, then, but some are whiter, and so mme equal, than Others, at the time of theEuropean domination of China and the Boxe! and all nonwhites are unequilL but some arc blackcr, and so rebellion, the Chinese were a degradetl race, signs were POSted more unequal, than others. The fundamen:al coneeptual CUt, saying "No dogs or Chinese allowed/, and they faced heavy the primary division, then remains that between whites and imm.igration !es.t1ietions and diserjmination in the United nonwhites, and the fuzzy statuso£ lnfcnor whites is,lceommo States. "Yellow Peril" depictions of Chinese in the American dined by the category of "off-white" rather than nonwhite. popu:ar media in the early twentieth century included the Comm.enthlg on the failure of the "valiant efto! tS of thc E.nglish sinister Orientals of Sa.xRohmer's Fu M,!nehu novels and the to turn their ethnocentric feelings of supcriority over the Ming the Meleiles� nemesis of Flash Gordon. But today in the 'bJack' Irish into racism," Richard Drinnon concludes that United States, Asians are seen as a "model minority," even "the Celts remained at most 'wllice niggers' in their eyes."·';� laecording to Andrew Haeker) "probationary whites," who And whh the exeeption of Nnzi Germany, to he discussed might make it if they hang in there long enough. "Is Yellow later, this seems to me " judgmenr that could be generalized Black or Whitc!" asks one Asian Ameriean historian; the an_ fo!' aU these cases of borderline EuropellnS-that they were swer varies.SI The poim, then, is that the membership require not subpersons in the [utI technical sense and would all have ments for Whiteness are rewritten over time; with shifting been ranked olltologically above genuine nonwhites. The c,lse criteria prescribed by rhe evolVing Racial Contract. with which they have now been assimilared into postwar Eu rope and aeeepted as full whites in the united States is somc evidence for rhe correctness of this way of drawing the The Racial C{mtracl has to be enforced ItJrough violenca and distinction, Ideological conditioning. Nt:vertheless, these problem caseS afC useful in illustrating�agniJtst essentialists-thc social rather tban bio The .sociAl COntract is, by definition, claSSically volunturjs logical basis of the Rae;al Contract. Phenotypical whiteness tie, modeling the polity on a basis of individuillized consent. and European origin were not .uwayssufficient for !ullWhitc What justifics the Iluthority of the state over us is that "we ness, acceptance into rhe inner sanctum of the racial elub, the people" agreed to give it that authority. IOn the older, and the rules had to be rewritten to permit inclusion. lOne "feudal" patriarchal model, by contrast-the moder of SirRoh. reeent book, for example, bc.arsthe tide How rhe Irish Became ert Filmer, Locke's tat:get in the Second Treatise-people were WIli!e.l£! On the other hand, thcre are groups "c1ear�y" nOt . represented as being born into subordil1 Japanese were classified as Nhonoraty whites" for the purpose signatories to transfer or del.cgat:etheir rightsto itl and its role of the Axis alliance, the restrictive, local Racial Contract {as in the mainstream moralized/constitutionalist version of the so B1 THE RACIAL CONTRACT DETAilS comract :Locke2.n/K'lI\ti,m) is, correspondingly, to protect it 50 that it couid guarantee the 5af<:ty not 10 be found in the [hose rights 2.00 safeguard the weUare of lis citizens. The 5tate of nature. /This was, aiter ali, part of the whole point of liberal-democratic state is then an ethical state, whcthc: in leaving the state ofnature in the first plaee.) By contrast, the the minimalist, night-v,-a.tchman LoekMn version ofenfordng state established by the Racial Contract 1s by definition not noninterference with citizens' rights or in thc more expansive ncutral, since its purpo.'le is to bring ahout conformity to the rcdistl'ihuti vist versionof a ctivel y promoting ci t izens' wel rate. terms of thc Racial Contractamong the subpcrson population, ]n both cases the liheril! stute is neuual ln thc sense of not which will obviously have no reason to accept these terms pnvileging some eitizens ovet others. Correspondingly, the voluntarily, since thccontraet is B2 83 �HE Me!!.! CQ'JTRACT DETA1LS resistance to me terms of the Raeial Contracr is required, If enterprise. There is a well-known pereeption 10 the bJack rhe social contrncr is predicated on voluntarized compliance, counmmity that the police-partieulal1y inthe jim crow days rhe Racia! ContraCt dearly requires compul!l.ion for rhe repro of segregation and largely white police fon:es-were basically duction of :he political system, In the slavery Contracr, in an "army of oeeu pation," particulaf, the terms of the contract requite of the slave llll Correspondingly, in aU these white and white-ruled politics, ongoing seU-oegadon of personhood, an aecepranee of ehnted <1ttacking or kHling whires has always beenmorally and juridi. status, psychologically harder to achieve and SO potemiillly caDy singled om as the crime of crimes, a horrWe break with more explosive than me varieties .of subpersonhoodimposed the natural otder/ not merely because of the greater vatue Ot either by the expropriation contract {where one wiU ei,her be white (I.e" a person'sj lile but because of its larget symbolic dCtld ar sequestered in a SPIU!C tClr away itom white persons� significance as a chnllenge to rhe raeial polity . The death pcn or the colonial contr,let (where the Status oj "minor" leaves Hity is dlfferen:ially applied to nonwhites both in the seope some hope eha, onc may be permitted to ilchiev\! adulthood of crimes CO'... ered ii-c., racially differentiated penalties for the some day!. Thus, in �he C.lribbean and on the mainland of the same cr.imcsJ;� aod in its actual carrying out. (In the history Amerieas, there Were sites where newly arrived Africans were of U.S. el1pital punishment, for example, over one thousand sometimes taken to be "seasoned" before being nanspotted people have been executed, but only vcry rarely has a white to the plantations, And this was basically the metl1physic;,ll been executed for killing a blaek.}W Individual acts of subper� opera tion, carried out through the physical, of breaking them, SOIl violence against whites and, even moresctrous, slaverebcl· transforming them from pctsons into subpersons of the chattel nons and (;olOnial uprisings are standardly punished in an va�iety. Bnt sinee people could always fake accepranceof sub· exemplary way , pour encouroger les outres. with torture and personhood, it was, of course, necessary to keep an eternally retaliatOry mass killings far exceeding the nllmber .of white vigilant eye on them for possible signs of dissemhHn& in keep vietims. Sueh acts htlVe to be seen nm as arbitrary, not as ing with the sentiment that eternal vigilance is the price of the product of individual sadism Ithough they encourage and freedom, provide an outlet for it), but as. the appropriate moral and The coercive afms of the stare, then�the pollee, the perull political reslXiose-prescribcd by the Raeial Contract-to a system, the army-need to be seen as in part the enforcers of threat to Jl system predicared on nonwhite subpcrsonllood. the Raeial Contract, working both to keep the peaee and pre. There is an outrage that is practieally metaphysical because vent crime among the white citizens, ond to maintain the one's self·eonceptkm, one's white identity as a superior being rllcia] ordet and detect and destroy challenges ro ir, so thnr entitled to rule, is under attaek. across the white settlcr. states nonwhites are incarcerated at Thus in the North and South American reactions to Native differential rates and for longer rerms. To understand thc longl American resistance and slave uprisingslin the European te bloody history of police brutality against blacks in the United sponses to the Saint Domingue (Haitianl revolution, the Sepoy States, for example, one llas to recognize it not as exceSSeS uprising{"Indian Mutiny"I, the Jamaican MorantBay insurree by individual racists but as an organie pan of this politiea.l tion, the Boxer tebelbon in China, the struggle of the HereTO:; 84 85 THE RAClAt CONTRACT DETAILS In German Alriea, in the twentieth century eolonial and neo whom Men can have no SOCiety nor Securi.ty;" mily licitiy colonial wars !Ethiopi 81 THE RAC!f,:' CONTRACT Ofi;.llS lear:; to see themselves. For the nonwhites, then, this if; somc� being ":o..1ake hinl a non�person, Human tights ale for pcople.. thing like the intellectual equivalent of the physical process Con ....inee Indians their nncestors were savages, that they were of "seasotting/' "slave breaking.." the tlim being to produce >Ln pagan."hU Likewise, in the coloni.al enterptise, ehHdren in the emity who aceepts subpersonhood. Fredcrick Dougl.1ss, in bis Caribbetln, Afriea, and Asia wew taught OUt of Britlsh or ramous firstautObiography, describes the need to "darken (the] French Or Dutch schoolbooks to see themselvcs us usphant moral and mental vision, and, as tar as possible, to annihil:tte IDut, of course, never full) colored Europeans, saved from thc the power of reason" of the slave: "He mUst he uble to detect barbarities of thdr OWn cultures by colonialintervention, duty no inconsistencies in slavery; he must be made to feel that wetting "OUt ances tors, the Gaulsl" and growingup into adults slavery is right; und he Can be brought to that only when he with "black skln, "White masks!'IOl Australian Aborigine stu ceases to be a man, "9t Originally denied education, bbeks were dents write: "Black is, wron�d at white schools but righted later, in the postbcllumperiod, given aneducation appropriale by expetience.... nIaek is, going to white school and earning to poste!l;;,t'tel status-the den!tll of a pnst, of history, of home again no wiser:'I!\1\ NgIlg'i wa Thiong'o deserlbes, from aehievement-so that as far �s possible they wouid llcccpt his experience in his native Kenyu, the "cultural bomb" of theJr prescribed roles of servant :lnd menial laborer, comic British imperialism, whieh prohihitcd learning in the oral tra coons �nd Snmbos, grateful Uncle Toms and Aunt Jemimas. dition of Gikuyu and trained him and his schoolfellows to see Thus in one of tbe most famous hooks from the black Ameri" themselves .tnd their country through the alien eyes of Call expcrienee, Carter Woodson indicts "the mis-edueatiOll H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan: "The effect of a cultural of the Negro."�� And as hne as the 1950S, James BaldWin could bomb is to annihilate a people's belief in their IUlmes, in their declare tha.t the "separate but equal" system of segregiltion languages, in their environment, in their hcritageof struggle, "has worked brilliantly, " for "it has allowed white people, in their unity, in theireapacitics and ultimately in themselves. \"/ith searedy any pangs of conscienee wh<.ltcvcr, to creme, in It makes them see their past as OtIC wasteland of noo every generation, only the Kcgro they wished to see. ,N" achievement and it makes them want to distanee themselves ln the cnse of Native Americans, whose resistance was hom that wasteLand. 'Il� Racism as an ideology needs to be largely over by the 1870S, 1Ipolicy of cultw;;tl i.lSsimilation was understood as aiming at the minds of nonwhites as well 3S introduced under the slogan "Kill the Indian, bUt save the whites, inculc.tring subjuga.tion. If the social contr:l.ct Iequires man," aimed at the suppression and eradication of native reli· that all citizens and persons learn to tespeet themselves and gious beliefs and ceremonies, such as the Sioux Sun Dance.A> each other, the Racial Contraet preserlbes nonwhite self· Similarly, a hundred yca.rs later, Daniel Cablxi, a BJtlzillan loathing and racial deference tn white ci.tizens. The ultimate I \ Pared Indian, eomplains that "the missions kill us from triumph of this education is that it eventually becomes possi. within. , .. They impose upon us ,;tnother teligion, belittling ble to characterize the Racial Contract 3S "consensual" and I '\ the ynlues we hold. This decharll.cteriscs us to tbe point where "voluntaristic" even fot nonwhites. we lire •• 89 NATURALIZED" MERITS inally, I want to point .out the merits of this model Fas a "naturalized" accouht of the actual historical record, one which has explanatory as well as norma tive aspirations. Arguably, we are in a better position to bring about the (supposedly) desired political ideals if we can identify and e;xplain the obstacles to their realization. In tracking the actual moral con�ciousness of most white agents, in depicting the actual political realities nonwhites have always recog nized, the theory of the "Racial Contract" shows its superior ity to the ostensibly abstract and general, but actually "white," social contract. The Racial"Gontract historically tracks the actual moral/political consciousness of (most) white moral agents. Moral theory, being a branch of value theory, traditionally deals with the realm of the ideal, norms to which we must try to live up as moral agents. And political philosophy is nowadays conceived of as basically an application of ethics to the social and political realm. So it is supposed to be dealing 91 THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS with ideals also. But in the first two chapters of this book, I lactic Central, say-to think that deviations from the ideal have spent a great deal of time talking about the actual histori have been contingent, random, theoretically opaque, or not 'c al record and the actual norms and ideals that have prevailed worth the trouble to theorize. Such a visitor might conclude in recent global history. I have been giving what, in the current that all people have generally tried to live up to the norm but, jargon of philosophers, would be called a "naturalized" ,ac given in�vitable human frailty, have sometimes fallen short. count, rather than an idealized account. And that is why I said But this conclusion is, in fact, simply false. Racism and racially from the beginning that I preferred the classic use of contract, structured discrimination have not been deviations from the which is seeking to describe and explain" as well as to prescribe. normj they have been the norm, not merely in the sense of But if ethics and political philosophy are focused on norms de facto statistical distribution patterns but, as 1 emphasized we want to endorse (ideal ideals, so to speak), what really at the start, in the sense of being formally codified,'written was the point of this exercise? What would be the point of down and proclaimed as such. From this perspective, the Ra "naturalizing" ethics, which is explicitly the realm of the cial Contract has underwritten the social contract, so that ideal? duties, rights, and liberties have routinely been assigned on a My suggestion is that by looking at the actual historically racially 'd ifferentiated basis.. �o understand the actual moral dominant moral/political consciousness and the actual his practice of past and present, one needs not merely the standard torically dominant moral/political ideals, we are better en abstract discussions of, say, the conflicts in people's con abled to prescribe for society than by starting from ahistorical sciences between self-interest and empathy with others but abstractions. In other words, the point is not to endorse this a frank appreciation of how the Racial Contract creates a deficient consciousness and these repugnant ideals but, by racialized moral psychology. Whites will then act in racist recognizing their past and current influence and power and ways while thinkJng of themselves as acting morally. In other identifying their sources, to correct for them. Realizing a better words, they will experience genuine cognitive difficulties in future requires n?t merely admitting the ugly truth of the recognizing certain behavior patterns as racist, so that quite past-and present-but understanding the ways.. in which apart from questions of motivation and bad faith they will be - these realities were made invisible, acceptable to the white morally handicapped simply from the conceptual point of view population. We want to know-both to describe and to in seeing and doing the right thing. As I emphasized at the explain-the Circumstances that actually blocked achieve start, the Racial Contract prescribes, as a condition for mem ment of the ideal raceless ideals and promoted instead the bership in the polity, an epistemology of ignorance. naturalized nonideal racial ideals. We want to know what went Feminist political philosophers have documented the strik wrong in the past, is going wrong now, and is likely to continue ing uniformity of opinion among the classic male theorists to go wrong in the future if we do not guard against it. on the subordination of women, so that as polar as their posi Now by its relative silence on the question of race, conven tions may be on other political or theoretical questions, there tional moral theory would lead the unwary student with no is common agreement on this. Plato the idealist and Aristotle experience of the world-the visiting anthropologist from Ga- the materialist agree that women should be subordinate, as . 92 93 THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS do Hobbes the absolutist and Rousseau the radical democrat.! and of white moral cognitive dysfunction. As such, it can With the Racial Contract, as we have seen, there is a similar potentially be studied by the new research program of cognitive pattern, among the contractarians Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, science. For example, a useful recent survey article on "natu Kant, and their theoretical adversaries-the anticontractarian ralizing" ethics by Alvin Goldman suggests three areas in Hume, who denies that any race other than the white one h'as which cognitive science may have implications for moral the produced a civilization; the utilitarian Mill, who denies the ory: (a) the " cognitive materials" used in moral thinking, such applicability of his antipaternalist "harm principle" to "bar as the logic of concept application, and their possible determi barians" and maintains that they need European colonial des nation by the cultural environment of the agent; (b) judgments potism; the historicist G. W. F. Hegel, wlw denies that Africa about subjective welfare and how they may be affected by has any history and suggests that blacks were morally im comparing oneself with others; and (c) the role of empathy in proved through being enslaved.2 So the Racial Contract is "or influencing moral feeling.4 thogonal" to the varying directions of their thought, the Now it should be obvious that if racism is as central to the common assumption they can all take for granted, no matter polity as I have argued, then it will have a major shaping what their theoretical divergences on other questions. There effect on white cognizer:s .in all these areas. (a) Because of is also the evidence of silence. Where is Grotius's magisterial the intellectual atmosphere produced by the Racial Contract, On Natural Law and the Wr ongness of the Conquest of the whites will (in phase one) take for granted the appropriateness Indies, Locke's stirring Letter concerning the Treatment of of concepts legitimizing the racial order, privileging them as the Indians, Kant's moving On the Personhood of Negroes, the master race and relegating nonwhites to subpersonhood, Mill's famous condemnatory Implications of Utilitarianism and later (in phase two) the appropriateness of concepts that for English Colonialism, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels's derace outraged political Economy of Slavery?3 Intellectuals write the polity, denying its actual racial structuring.s (b) about what interests them, what they find important, and Because of the reciprocally dependent definitions of superior especially if the writer is prolific-silence constitutes good whiteness and inferior nonwhiteness, whites may consciously prima facie evidence that the subject was not of particular or unconsciously assess how they're doing by a scale that interest. By their failure to denounce the great crimes insepa depends in part on how nonwhites are doing, since the essence rable from the European conquest, or by the halfheartedness of whiteness is entitlement to differential privilege vis-a.-vis of their condemnation, or by their actual endorsement of it nonwhites as a whole.6 (c) Because the Racial Contract requires in some cases, most of the leading European ethical theorists the exploitation of nonwhites, it requires in whites the cultiva reveal their complicity in the Racial Contract. tion of patterns of affect and empathy that are only weakly, What we need to do, then, is to identify and learn to under if at all, influenced by nonwhite suffering. In all three cases, stand the workings of a racialized ethic. How were people able then, there are interesting structures of moral cognitive distor consistently to do the wrong thing while thinking that they tion that could be linked to race, and one p.opes that this new were doing the right thing? In part, it is a problem of cognition research program will be exploring some of them (though the 94 95 THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS past record of neglect does not give any great reason for epistemological contract, an epistemology of ignorance. "Rec ognition is a form of agreement," and by the terms of the optimism). , This partitioned moral concern can usefully be thought of Racial Gontract, whites have agreed not.to recognize blacks as a kind of "Herren volk ethics," with the principles applicable as equal, persons. Thus the white pedestrian who bumps into to the white subset (the humans) mutating suitably as they the black narrator at the start is a representative figure, some cross the color line to the nonwhite subset (the less-than body "lost in a dream world." "But didn't he control that humans). (Susan Opotow has done a detailed study of morali dream world-which, alas, is only too real!-and didn't he ties of exclusion, in which certain "individuals or groups are rule me out of it? .-t\nd ifhe had yelled for a policeman, wouldn't perceived as outside the boundary in which morql values, I have been taken for the offending one? Yes, yes, yes! "11 Simi rules, and considerations of fairness apply"; so this'\vould be larly, James Baldwin argues that white supremacy "forced a racial version of such a morality')? One could then generate, [white] Americans into rationalizations so fantastic that they variously, a Herrenvolk Lockeanism, where whiteness itself approached the pathological," generating a tortured ignorance becomes property, nonwhites do not fully, or at all, own'them- so structured that one cannot .raise certain issues with whites 'selves, and nonwhite labor does not appropriate nature;8 a "because even if I should-speak, no one would-believe me," Herrenvolk Kantianism, where nonwhites count as subper and paradoxically, "they wOHld "not believe me precisely be sons of considerably less than infinite value, required to give cause they would know that what I said was true."12 racial deference rather than equal respect to white persons, Evasion and self-deception thus become the epistemic norm. and white self-respect, correspondingly, is conceptually tied Describing America's "national web of self-deceptions" on to this nonwhite deference/ and a Herrenvolk utilitarianism, race, Richard Drinnon cites as an explanation Montesquieu's where nonwhites count distributively for less than one and wry observation about African enslav:ment: ''It is impossible are deemed to suffer less acutely than whites.1O The actual for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing details of the basic values of the particular normative theory them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves (property rights, personhood and respect, welfare) are not im are not Christians." The founding ideology of the white settler portant, since all theories can be appropriately adjusted inter state required the conceptual erasure of those societies that nally to bring about the desired outcome: what is crucial is had been there before: "For [a writer of the time] to have the theorist's adherence to the Racial Contract. consistently regarded Indians as persons with a psychology of Being its primary victims, nonwhites have, of course, always their own would have upended his world. lt would have meant been aw are of this peculiar schism running through the white recognizing that 'the state of nature' really had full�fledged psyche. Many years ago, in his classic novel Invi sible Man, people in it and that both it and the cherished 'civil society' Ralph Ellison had his nameless black narrator point out that had started out as lethal figments of the European imagina whites must have a peculiar reciprocal " construction of [their] tion."13 An Australian historian comments likewise on the inner eyes" which renders black Americans invisible, since existence of "something like a cult of forgetfulness practised they "refuse to see me." The Racial Contract includes an on a national scale" with respect to Aborigines.14 Lewis Gor- 96 97 THE RACIAL CO NTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS don, working in the existential phenomenological tradition, advised when he shot a Sauk infant at the Wisconsin Bad Axe draws on Sartrean notions to.argue that in a world structured massacre,17 and "The only good injun is a dead injun"; the around race, bad faith necessarily becomes pervasive: "In bad slow-motion Holocaust of African slavery, which is now esti faith, I flee a displeasing truth for a pleasing falsehood. I must mated by some to have claimed thirty to sixty million lives convince myself that a falsehood is in fact true ....Under the in Africa, the Middle Passage, and the "seasoning" process, model of bad faith, the stubborn racist has made a choice not even before the degradation and destruction of slave life in to admit certain uncomfortable truths about his group and the Americas;18 t�e casual acceptance as no crime, just the chooses not to challenge certain comfortable falsehoods about necessary clearing of the territory of pestilential "varmints" the random killing of stray Indians in other people.... Since he has made this choice he w.ill' resist and "critters," of whatever threatens it .... The more the racist �lays �he game America or Aborigines �n Australia or Bushmen in South Af of evasion, the more estranged he will make himself from his rica; the massively punitive European colonial retaliations h death toll from the direct and indi- 'inferiors' and the more he will sink into the world t at is after native uprisings; the . required to maintain this evasion."ls In the ideal polity one rect consequences of the forced lahor of the colonial econo seeks to know oneself and to know the world; here such knowl mies, such as the millions '(priginal estimates as high as ten edge may be dangerous. million) who died in the Belgian� Congo as a r.esult of Leopold Correspondingly, the Racial Contract also explains the ac II's quest for ;rubber, though trangely it is to Congolese rather tual astonishing historical record of European atrocity against than European savagery that a "heart of darkness" is attrib the nonwhite body, not merely nonwhites, which quantitatively and qualitatively, in numbers uted;19 the appropriation of , and horrific detail, cumulatively dwarfs all other kinds of metaphorically (as the black body can be said to have been ethnically/racially motivated massacres put together: la ley consumed on the slave plantations to produce European capi enda negra-the black legend-of Spanish colonialism, de tal), but literally, whether as utilitarian tool or as war trophy. famatory only in its invidious singling out of the Spanish, since As utilitarian tools, Native Americans were occasionally it would later be emulated by Spain's envious competitors, the skinned and made into bridle reins (for example by U.S. Presi Dutch, French, and English, seeking to create legends of their dent Andrew Jackson),2° Tasmanians were killed and used as ' own; the killing through mass murder and disease of 9 5 percent dog meat,21 and in World War II Jewish hair was made into of the indigenous population of the Americas, with recent cushions, and (not as well known) Japanese bones were made revisionist scholarship, as mentioned, having dramatically in by some Americans into letter openers. As war trophies, Indian creased the estimates of the preconquest population, so that scalps; Vietnamese ears, and Japanese ears, gold teeth, and at roughly 100 million victims-this would easily rank as skulls were all collected (Life magazine carried a photograph the single greatest act of genocide in human history/6 the of a Japanese skull being used as a hood ornament on a U.S. infamous slogans, now somewhat embarrassing to a generation military vehicle, and some soldiers sent skulls home as pre living under a different phase of the Contract-"Kill the nits sents for their girlfriends).22 To these we can add the fact that and you'll have no lice!" as American cavalryman John Hous� because of the penal reforms advocated by Cesare Beccaria 98 99 THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS and others, torture was more or less eliminated in Europe by the camps and ghettos of Europe and the millions of members the end of the eighteenth century, while it continued to be of other "inferior" races (Romani, Slavs) killed there and by routinely practiced in the colonies, and on the slave the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front by the Nazi rewriting plantations-whippings, castrations, disme�berments, roast of the Racial Contract to make them too nonwh· IteSj 28 t h e ings over slow fires, being smeared with sugar, buried up to pattern of unpunished rape, torture, and massacre in the the neck, and then left for the insects to devour, being filled twentieth -century colonial/neocolonial and in part racial wars with gunpowder and then blown up, and so onj23 the fact that of Algeria (during the course of which about one million Algeri in America the medieval tradition of the auto-da-fe, the public ans , or one-tenth 'of the country's population, perished) and burning, survived well into the twentieth century, with thou Vietnam, illustrated by the fact that Lieutenant William sands of spectators sometimes gathering for the festiveI occa- Calley was the only American convicted of war crimes in sion of the southern barbecue, bringing children, 'picnic Vietnam and, for his rol� in directing the mass murder of five baskets, etc., and subsequently fighting over the remaihs to hundred women, children, and old men (or, more cautiously see who could get the toes or the knucklebones before ad and qualifiedly, "Oriental human beings," as the deposition journing to a celebratory dance in the eveningj24 the fact that put it), was sentenced to likathard labor but had his sentence the rules of war at least theoretically regulating intra-European quickly commuted by presidential intervention to "house ar combat were abandoned or suspended for non-Europeans, so rest" at his Fort Benning bachelor apartment, where he re that by papal edict the use of the ' crossbow was initially forbid mained for three years before "being freed on parole, then and den against Christians but permitted against Islam, the dum nOW doubtless a bit puzzle� by the fuss, since, as he told the dum (hollow-point) bullet was ' originally prohibited within military psychiatrists eXlj.mining him, "he did not fe�l as if Europe but used in the colonial wars,25 the machine gun was he were killing humans but rather that they were animals brought to perfection in the late nineteenth century in subju with whom one could not speak or reason.";l.9 gating Africans armed usually only with spears or a few obso For these and many other horrors too numerous to list, the lete firearms, so that in theglorious 1898 British victory over the ideal Kantian (social contract) norm of the infinite value of Sudan�se at Omdurman, for example, eleven thousand black all human life thus has to be rewritten to reflect the actual warriors were killed at the cost of forty-eight British soldiers, (Racial Contract) norm ofthe f�r greater value of white life, a long-distance massacre in which , no Sudanese "got closer and the corresponding crystallization of feelings of vastly dif than three hundred yards from the British positions,"26 the ferential outrage over white and nonwhite death, white and atomic bomb was used not once but twice against the civilian nonwhite suffering. If looking back (or sometimes just looking population of a yellow people at a time when military necessity across), one wants to ask "But how could they?" the answer could only questionably be cited (causing Justice Radhabinod is that it is easy once a ce,rtainsocial ontology has been created. Pal, in his dissenting opinion in the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, Bewilderment and puzzlement show that one is taking for to argue that Allied leaders should have been put on trial with granted the morality of the literal social contract as a normj the Japanese),27 We can mention the six million Jews killed in once one begins from the Racial Contract, the mystery evapo- 100 101 THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS after killing fields in rates. The Racial Contract thus makes White moral psychol been poetry before Auschwitz, and the of Native America, ogy transparent; one is not continually being "surpr ised" when America, Africa, Asia. The standpoint aware that Euro one examines the historical record, because t�is is the psychol black Africa, colonial Asia, has always been so that ogy the contract prescribes. (The theory of th� Racial Contract pean civilization rests on extra-European barbarism, is by no means is not cynical, because cynicism really implies theoretical the Jewish Holocaust, the "Judeocide" (Mayer), in the develop breakdown, a despairing throwing up of the hands and a renun a bolt from the blue, an unfathomable anomaly it represents use of ciation of the project of understanding the world and human ment of the West, but unique only in that Europeans. I say this in no way evil for a mystified yearning for a prelapsarian man. The "Ra the Racial Contract against to deny its singular cial Contract" is simply realist-willing to look at the facts to diminish its horror, of course, but rather with other policies without flinching, to explain that if you start with this, then ity, to establish its conceptual identity I you will end up with that.) carried out by Europe in non-Europe for hundreds of years, c Similarly, the "Racial Contract" makes the Jewlsh but using methods less efficient than those made possible by Holocaust-misleadingly designated as the Holocaust-----com advanced mid-twentieth-century industrial society.. prehensible, distancing itself theoretically both from positions In the twilight world of the Cold Wa r, the term "blowback" � that would render it cognitively opaque, inexplicably sui gene was used in American spy jargon to refer to "u expected�and ris, and from positions that would downplay the racial dimen negative-effects at home that result from covert operations sion and assimilate it to the undifferentiated terrorism of overseas," particularly from (what were called) "black" opera can German fascism. From the clouded perspective of the Third tions of assassination and government. 6verthrow.31 A case World, the question in Arno Mayer's title Why Did the Heav be made for seeing the "blowback" ho.m,the overseas ("white") co ens Not Darken! betrays a climatic Eurocentrism, which fails operations of European conquest, settlement, slave�y, and a to recognize that the blue skies were only smiling on Europe. lonialism as consolidating in the modern European mind anti The influential view he cites (not his own) is typical: "Prima racialized ethic; that, in combination with traditional itself facie the catastrophe which befell the Jews during the Second Semitism, eventually boomeranged, returning to E�rope clas World War was unique in its own time and unprecedented in to facilitate the Jewish Holo�aust. Forty years ago, in his history. There are strong reasons to believe that the victimiza sic polemic Discourse on Colonialism; Aime Cesaire pointed at tion of the Jews was so enormous and atrocious as to be com out the implicit double standard in European "outrage" were pletely outside the bounds of all other human experience. If Nazism: "It is Nazism, yes, but ... before [Europeans] that that is the case, what the Jews were subjected to will forever its victims, they were its accomplices; that they.tolerated it, defy historical reconstruction and interpretation, let alone Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved had comprehension."30 But this represents an astonishing white shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it amnesia about the actual historical record. Likewise, the de been applied only to non-European peoples ....[Hitler's crime spairing question of how there can be poetry after Auschwitz is] the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures Arabs evokes the puzzled nonwhite reply of how there could have which until then had been reserved exclusively for the 102 103 "NATURALIZED" MERITS THE RACIAL CONTRACT Ho of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa. 1132 and falsifiedthe record accordingly. Holocaust denial and The Racial Contract continues, with a truly grisly irony, to locaust apologia thus long precede the post-I 945 period, going manifest itself even in the condemnation of the consequences back all the way to the original response to the revelations of the Racial Contract, since the racial mass murdd of Europe of Las Casas's Devastation of the Indies in 1542.35 Yet, with ans is placed on a different moral plane than the racial mass few exceptions, only recently has revisionist white historiogra murder of non-Europeans. Similarly, Kiernan argues that King phy belatedly begun to catch up with this nonwhite Leopold's Congo "cast before it the shadow that was to turn conceptualization-hence the title of David StannaId's book into Hitler's empire inside Europe.... Attitudes acquired dur on the Columbian conquest, American Holocaust; the related ing the subjugation of the other continents now reproduced title of an anthology (cited by Noam Chomsky in his Ye ar 501) themselves at home."33 So in this explanatory framework, put out in Germany in anticipation of the quincentenaIY, Das unlike the subsumption of the death camps under a der�ced Fiinfhundert-jiihrige Reich (Five-hundred year reich); and the fascism, the racial dimension and the establishment of Jewi�h Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist's recently translateti "Extermi nonwhite subpersonhood are explanatorily crucial. If, as ear nate All the Brutes, " which explicitly links the famous injunc lier argued, the Jews were by this time basically "off-white". tion of Conrad's Kurtz to Nazi pr�ctice: "A uschwitz was the rather than "nonwhite," assimilated into the population of modern industrial application of a policy of extermination on persons, the Nazis could be said to be in local violation of the which European world domination had long since rested.. / . global Racial Contract by excluding from the club of White And when what had been done in the heart of darkness was ness groups already grudgingly admitted, by doing to Europe repeated in the heart of Europe, no one recognized it. No one ans (even borderline ones) what (by then) was only supposed wished to admit what everyone kn�w.... ·I t is not knowledge to be done to non-Europeans. ' t we lack. What is missing is the'c�urage o understand what Postwar writings on this subject by Europeans, both in Eu " we know and draw conclusions."36 rope and in North America, have generally sought to block The debate will doubtless continue for many decades to these conceptual connections, representing Nazi policy as come. But on a closing note, it does not seem inappropriate more deviant than it actually was/ for example, in the Historik to get the opinion �f that well-known moral and political erstreit, the German debate over the uniqueness of the Jewish theorist Adolf Hitler (surely a man with so�ething worthwhile Holocaust. The dark historical record of European imperialism to say on the subject), who, looking ahead in a 1932 speech, has been forgotten. Robert Harris's chilling 1992 novel Father "explicitly located his Lebensraum project within the long land, a classic in the alternative-worlds science fiction genre, trajectory of European racial conquest."37 As he explained to depicts a future in which the Nazis have won World WaI II his presumably attentive audience, you cannot understand and have eradicated from the record their killing of the Jews, so that only scattered evidence survives.34 But in certain re "the economically privileged supremacy of the white race over spects we live in an actual, nonalternative world where the the rest of the world" except by relating it to II a political victors of racial killing really did win and have reconstructed concept of supremacy which has been peculiar to the white 105 104 THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS race as a natural phenomenon for many centuries and which who hadn't signed it. There have been various attempts by it has upheld as such to the outer world": contractarians to get around this problem, the best-known being Locke's notion of "tacit consent."39 The idea is that if Take for example India: England did not acquire India i� a you choose as an adult to stay in your country of birth and d lawful and legitimate manner, but rather without regar to make use of its benefits, then you have "tacitly" consented the natives' wishes, views, or declarations of rights.... Just to obey the government and thus to be bound by the contract. as Cortes or Pizarro demanded for themselves Central But David Hume is famously scathing about this claim, saying America and the northern states of South America not on that the notion of tacit consent is vacuous where there is no the basis of any legal claim, but from the absolute, inborn real possibility of opting out by moving to a no-longer-existent feeling of superiority of the white race. The settlement of , state of nature or of being able to emigrate when you have the North American continent was similarly a consequence no particular skills and no other language but your mother not of any higher claim in a democratic or international tongue.40 You stay because you have no real choice. sense, but rather of a consciousness of what is right which But for the Racial Contract, it is different. There is a real had its sole roots in the conviction of the superiority 'and choice for whites, though admittedly a difficultone. The rejec thus the right of the white race. tion of the Racial Contract and the normed inequities of the white polity does not require one to leave the country but to So his plan was just to uphold this inspiring Western tradition, speak out and struggle against the terms of the Contract. So (Herrenrecht)," this racial "right to dominate this "frame of in this case, moral/political judgments about one's "consent" mind ... which has conquered the world" for the white race, to the legitimacy of the politicaL system and conclusions about since "from this political view there evolved the basis for the one's effectively havin� become a.signatory to the "contract," "38 economic takeover of the rest of the world. In other words, are apropos�and so are judgments .of one's culpability. By he saw himself as simply doing at home what his fellow Euro unquestioningly "going along with things," by accepting all peans had long been doing abroad. the privileges of whiteness with concomitant complicity in Finally, the theory of the Racial Contract; by separating the system of white supremacy, one can be said to have con whiteness as phenotype/racial classification from Whiteness sented to Whiteness. as a politico economic system committed to white supremacy, And in fact there have always been praiseworthy whites repudiation opens a theoretical space for white of the Con anticolonialists, abolitionists, opponents of imperialism, civil tract. (One could then distinguish "being white" from "be rights activists, resisters of apartheid-who have recognized ing White.") the existence and immorality of Whiteness as a political sys There is an interesting point of contrast here with the social tem, challenged its legitimacy, and insofar as possible, refused contract. One obvious early objection to the notion of society's the Contract. (Inasmuch as mere skin color will automatically being based on a "contract" was that even if an original found continue to privilege them, of course, this identification with ing contract had existed, it wouldn't bind later generations, the oppressed can usually be only partial.) Thus the interesting 1 06 107 THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS moral/political phenomenon of the white renegade, the race their lives for the struggle-the white American antislavery traitor in the language of the Klan (accurate enough insofar revolutionary John Brown; the white members of the African as "race" here denotes Whiteness),4l the colonial explorer who National Congress who died trying to abolish apartheid. But "goes native," the soldier in French Indochina who contracts the mere fact of their existence shows what was possible, '.' Ie mal iaune, the yellow disorder (the perilous illness of "at- throwing into contrast and rendering open for moral judgment tachment , , . to Indochina's landscape, people , , . and cul the behavior of their fellow whites, who chose to accept White ture"),42 the nigger-, Injun-, or Jew-lover. These individuals ness instead. betray the white polity in the name of a broader definition of the polis-"Treason to whiteness is loyalty to humanity"43- thus becoming "renegades from the States, traitors to ,their The Racial Contract has always been recognized by nonwhites as the . country and to civilization," "a white Injun, and there's noth real determinant of (most) white moral/politi�al practice and thus as ing more despicable."44 For as the term signifies, where moral the real moral/political agreement to be challenged. ity has been racialized, the practice of a genuinely color-blind , ethic requires the repudiation of one's Herrenvolk standing If the epistemology of the signatorie;l, the agents, of the and its accompanying moral epistemology, thus eliciting the Racial Contract requires evasion and denial of the realities of appropriate moral condemnation from the race loyalists and race, the epistemology of the victims, the objects, of the Racial white signatories who have not repudiated either. Contract is, unsurprisingly, focused on these realities them The level of commitment and sacrificewill, of course, vary. selves. (So there is a reciprocal relationship, the Racial Con Some have written exposes of the hidden truth of the Racial tract tracking white moral/political consciousness, the Contract-Las Casas's Devastation of the In dies; abolitionist reaction to the Racial Contract tracking nonwhite moral/po literature; the French writer Abbe Raynal's call for black slave litical consciousness and stimuiating a puzzled investigation revolution; Mark Tw ain's writings for the Anti-Imperialist of that white moral/political consciousness.) The term " stand League (usually suppressed as an embarrassment by his biogra point theory" is now routinely used to signify the notion that phers, as Chomsky notes);45 Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's in understanding the workings of a system of oppression, a principled oppositional journalism against their countryis co perspective from the bottom up is more likely to be accurate lonial war. Some have tried to save some of its victims-the than one from the top down. Whatis involved here, then, is Underground Railroad; Aborigines Protection Societies; Oskar a "racial" version of standpoint theory, a perspectival cognitive Schindler's Jewish charges; Don Macleod, the Australian white advantage that is grounded in the phenomenological experi man " accepted as an honorary Aborigine, who helped organize ence of the disjuncture between official (white) reality and the first Aboriginal strike in the Pilbara in 1946";46 Hugh actual (nonwhite) experience, the "double-consciousness" of Thompson, the American helicopter pilot who threatened to which W. E. B. Du Bois spoke.48 This differential racial experi fire on his fellow soldiers unless they stopped massacring ence generates an alternative moral and political perception Vietnamese civilians at My Lai. 47 Some have actually given of social reality which is encapsulated in the insight from the 108 109 THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS black American folk tradition I have used as the epigraph cated on colorless atomic individuals and a white Marxism of this book: the central realization, summing up the Racial predicated on colorless classes in struggle, thus becomes read Contract, that "when white people say 'Justice,' they mean ily explicable once the reality of the Racial Contract has been 'Just Us.' " conceded. What is involved is neither a simple variant of tradi assimi Nonwhites have always (at least in first encounter�') 'been tional European nationalism (to which it is sometimes bemused or astonished by the invisibility of the Racial Con lated) nor a mysterious political project unfolding in some tract to whites, the fact that whites have routinely talked in alien theoretical space (as in the mutually opaque language universalist terms even when it has been quite clear that the games postulated by postmodernism). The unifying concep scope has really been limited to themselves. Correspondingly, tual space within which both orthodox white moral/political nonwhites, with no vested material or psychic interest in the philosophy and unorthodox nonwhite moral/political philoso ' Racial Contract-objects rather than subjects of it, vie�ing it phy are developing is the space that locates the (mythical) from outside rather than inside, subpersons rather than social contract on the same plane as the (real) Racial Contract, persons-are (at least before ideological conditioning) able to being predicated on the translation of "race" into the mutually see its terms quite clearly. Thus the hypocrisy of the racial commensurable and mutually intelligible language of per polity is most transparent to its victims. The corollary is that sonhood, and thereby demonstrating that these are contiguous, nonwhite interest in white moral and political theory has indeed identical, spaces-not so much a different conceptual necessarily been focused less on the details of the particular universe as a recognition of the dark matter of the existing competing moral and political candidates (utilitarianism ver one. Personhood can be taken for �ranted by some, while it sus deontology versus natural rights theory; liberalism versus (and all that accompanies it) has to be fought for by. others, so � conservatism versus socialism) than in the unacknowledged that the general human p'aliti l project of struggling for a i Racial Contract that has usually framed their functioning. better society involves a diffe ent trajectory for nonwhites. n' The variable that makes the most difference to the fate of It is no accident, then, that l:�e moral a d political theory nonwhites is not the fine- or even coarse-grained conceptual and practical struggles of nonwhites have so often centered on divergences of the different theories themselves (all have their race, the marker of personhood and subpersonhood, inclusion Herrenvolk variants), but wh ether or not the subclause invok within or exclusion from the racial polity. The formal con ing the Racial Contract, thus putting the theory into Herren tractarian apparatus I have tried to develop will not be articu volk mode, has been activated. The details of the moral lated as such. But the crucial notions of the person/subperson theories thus become less important than the metatheory, the differentiation, the correspondIngly racially structured moral Racial Contract, in which they are. embedded. The crucial code (Herrenvolk ethics), and the white-supremacist character question is whether nonwhites are counted as full persons, of the polity can be found in one form or another everywhere part of the population covered by the moral operator, or not. in Native American, black American, and Third and Fourth The preoccupation of nonwhite moral and political thought World anticolonial thought. with issues of race, puzzling alike to a white liberalism predi- Sitting Bull asks: "What treaty that the whites have kept 110 111 THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS has the red man broken? Not one. What treaty that the white ity is being degraded and our history distorted by strangers .... man ever made with us have they kept? Not one. When I was Before the World, we accuse White Australia (and her Mother, a boy the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their England) of crimes against humanity and the planet. The past land .... Where are our lands? Who owns them? What .white two centuries of colonisation is proof of our accusation. We ' man can say I ever stole his land or a penny of his m�n'!.ey? hereby demand yet again recognition of our humanity and Yet, they say I am a thief .... What law have I broken?' Is it our land rights. "49 The central moral commonality uniting wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because all their experiences is the reality of racial subordination, my skin is red?" Ward Churchill, another Native American, necessarily generating a different moral topography from the characterizes European settlers as a self-conceived "master one standardly examined in white ethical discourse. race." David Walker complains that whites consider blacks Correspondingly, the polity was usually thought of in racial "not of the human family," forcing blacks "to prove to ·them terms, as white ruled, and this perspective would become " ourselves, that we are MEN. W. E. B. Du Bois represents blacks global in the period of formal colonial administration. Political as a "tertium quid," "somewhere between men and cattle," theory is in part about who the main actors are, and for this comments that "Liberty, Justice, and Right" are marked '''For unacknowledged polity they are neither the atomic individuals White People Only,'" and suggests that "the statement 'I am of classic liberal thought nor the classes of Marxist theory white'" is becoming "the one fundamental tenet of our practi but races. The various native and colonial peoples' attempts cal morality." Richard Wright analyzes "the ethics of living (usually unsuccessful, too little and too late) to forge a racial Jim Crow." Marcus Garvey concludes that blacks are "a race unity-Pan-Indianism, Pan-Africanism, Pan·Arabism, Pan without respect." Jawaharlal Nehru claims that British policy Asianism, Pan-Islamism-arose in response to an already in India is "that of the herrenvolk and the master race." Martin achieved white unity, a Pan-Europeanism formalized andcin Luther King Jr. describes the feeling of "forever fighting a corporated by the terms of the Racial Contract. degenerating sense of 'nobodiness.'" Malcolm X asserts that In the period of de jure global white supremacy, of colonial America "has not only deprived us of the right to be a citizen, ism and slavery, this solidarity w:as clearly perceived by whites she has deprived us of the right to be human beings, the right also. "That race is everything, is-sitp.ply a fact�" writes Scots to be recognized and respected as men and women.... We are man Robert Knox in The Races of Men (I850),50 and theories fightingfor recognition as human beings." Frantz Fanon maps of the necessity of racial struggle, race war, against the subordi a colonial world divided between "two different species," a nate races are put forward as obvious. Darwin's work raised "governing race" and "zoological" natives. Aime Cesaire ar hopes in some quarters that natural selection (perhaps with a gues that "the colonizer ... in order to ease his conscience little help from its friends) would sweep aw ay the remaining gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal. ... inferior races, as it had already clone so providentially in the colonization = 'thingification.'" Australian Aborigines in a Americas and Tasmania, so that .the planet as a whole could I982 protest statement at the Commonwealth Games in Bris be cleared for white settlementY And after that only the sky bane point out that "since the White invasion ...[o]ur human- would be the limit . In fact, even the sky would not be the 112 113 THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS limit, for there was always the solar system. Cecil Rhodes the Great Race and The Rising Ti de of Color against White dreamed that perhaps he could "annex the planets" for Britain: World-Supremacy.55 Intra-European differences and conflicts ,, "Where there is space, there is hope. 52 were real enough but would be quickly put aside in the face of But alas, this noble dream was not to be realized. Even with the nonwhite threat: "In the course of their rivalries Europeans encouragement, nonwhites did not die fast enough. So whites exchanged many hard words, and sometimes abused each other had to settle for colonial rule over stubbornly growing �ative in order to please a non-European people ....But when it came populations, while of course keeping a watchful eye out for to any serious colonial upheaval, white men felt their kinship, both rebellion and subversive notions of self-government. Wit and Europe drew together ....Above all, and very remarkably, ness the various colored perils-red (Native American, that despite innumerable crises over rival claims the European is), black, and yellow-that have haunted the European and countries managed from the War of American Independence Euro-implanted imagination. "Europe, fJ Kiernan comments, onward to avoid a single colonial war among themselves."56 "thought of its identity in terms of race or color and plagued This unity ended in the twentieth century with the outbreak itself with fears of the Yellow Peril or a Black Peril-boomer of World War I, which was in part an interimperialist war over ang effects, as they might be called, of a White Peril from competing colonial claims. But despite nonwhite agitation and which the other continents were more tangibly suffering."53 military participation (largely as cannon fodder) in the armies The political framework is quite explicitly predicated on the of their respective mother countries, the postwar settlement notion that whites everywhere have a common interest in led not to decolonization but to a territorial redistribution maintaining global white supremacy against insurrections among the colonial powers themselves. ("OK, I'll take this conceived of in racial terms. At the turn of the century, Europe one, and you can take that one.") In the interwar years Japan's ans were worried about the . "vast ant-heap" filled with Pan-Asiatic Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was seen "soldier-ants" of China, while "similar fears were in the air by most white Western leaders as a threat to global white about a huge black army," threatening a race war of revenge supremacy. Indeed, as late as World War II, the popular Ameri led by "dusky Napoleons. "54 can writer Pearl Buck had to wain her readers that colonized Though there were occasional breaches for strategic national peoples would not continue to p�t up with global white domi advantage, international white racial solidarity was generally nation, and that unless there -was change their discontent demonstrated in the joint actions to suppress and isolate slave would lead to "the �ongest of human,wars ...the war between rebellions and colonial uprisings: the boycott of Haiti, the only the white man and his world and the colored man and his successful slave revolution in history (and, noncoincidentally, world."57 today the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere), the Corresponding to this global white solidarity transcending common intervention against the 1899-1900 Boxer. rebellion national boundaries, the virtual white polity, nonwhites' com in China, the concern raised by the 1905 Japanese victory over mon interest in abolishing the Racial Contract manifested Russia. As late as the early twentieth century, books were still itself in patterns of partisan emotional identification which being published with such warning titles as Th e Passing of from a modern, more nationalistic perspective now seem quite 114 115 "NATURALIZED" MERITS THE RACIAL CONTRACT "trans bizarre. In 1879, for example, when the King of Burma learned economic and political world-system," thus generating this world of the Zulu defeat of a British army at Isandhlwana, he immedi national identities of white and nonwhite."62 It is Du Bois was ately announced his intention of marching on Rangoon.58 In this moral and political reality-that W. E. B. "To 1905 Indians cheered the Japanese victory over the czar's describing in his famous 1900 Pan-Africanist statement twentieth (white) armies in the Russo-Japanese war. 59 In the Sp�nish the Nations of the World": "The problem of the as he would American War, black Americans raised doubts about the point century is the problem of the color line," since, tacit but clear of being "a black man in the army of the white man sent to later point out, too many have accepted "that race alone the kill the brown man," and a few blacks actually went over to modern philosophy which assigns to the white races ... will the side of Emilio Aguinaldo's Filipino forces.6o After Pearl hegemony of the world and assumes that other whites or die Harbor, the ominous joke circulated in the American press of either be content to serve the interests of the this world that a black sharecropper who comments to his white boss, "By out before their all-conquering march."63 It is Conference, a the way, Captain, I hear the Japs done declared war on you later produced the 1 9 5 5 Bandung (Indonesia) the "under white folks"; black civil rights militants demanded the meeting of twenty-nine Asian and African nations, . phrase, whose lid oubl e-VIC t ory, " "V'lctory H W at ome as e 11 as A broa d "; Japa- dogs of the human race" in Richard Wright's caused such nese intelligence considered the possibility of an alliance with decision to discuss "racialism and colonialism" even black Americans in a domestic colored front against white consternation in the West at the time,64 the meeting that Movement. supremacy; and white Americans worried about black loy tually led to the formation of the Non-Aligned 1975, creation of alty.61 The 1954 Vietnamese victory over the French at Dien And it is this world that stimulated, in the Australian Bien Phu (like the Japanese capture of Singapore in World War the World Council" of Indigenous Peoples, uniting Indians.65 II) was in part seen as a racial triumph, the defeat of a white Aborigines, New Zealand Maoris, and American a century by a brown people, a blow against the arrogapce of global If to white readers this intellectual world, only half it is a white supremacy. distant, now seems like a universe of alien concepts, Contract in So on the level of the popular consciousness of nonwhites tribute to the success of the r.ewritten Racial white domi particularly in the firstphase of the Racial Contract, but linger transforming the terms of public discol,ll�e so that points ing on into the second phase-racial self-identification was nation is now conceptually invisible. A.s Leon Poliakov soil, deeply embedded, with the notion that nonwhites everywhere out , the embarrassment of the death camps (on European to a sanitiza were engaged in some kind of common political struggle, so anyway) led the postwar European intelligentsia the aberrant that a victory for one was a victory for all. The different battles tion of the past record, in which racism became Gobi around the world against slavery, colonialism, jim crow, the invention of scapegoat figures such as Joseph-Arthur thus made to "color bar," European imperialism, apartheid were in a sense neau: "A vast chapter of western' thought is trick corre all part of a common struggle against the Racial Contract. As disappear by sleight of hand, anq this conjuring level, to the Gary Okihiro points out, what came into existence was "a sponds, on the psychological or psycho�historical and embar- global racial formation that complemented and buttressed the collective suppression of troubling memories 117 116 RITS THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" ME is denied to subp rassing truths. "66 That the revival of Anglo-American political privileged by the Racial Contract, but which ves, the importance of philosophy takes place in this period, the present epoch of the ersons. Particularly for blacks, ex-sla respect from whites is de facto Racial Contract, partially explains its otherworldly developing self-respect and demanding "how a man was made race insensitivity. The history of imperialism, colonialism, crucial. Frederick Douglass recounts J how a slave was made and genocide, the reality of systemic racial exclusion, are ob� a slave " ana promises "you shall see this struggle is still in fuscated in seemingly abstract and general categories that a man>67 But a hundred years later ated like men," wrote James originally were restricted to white citizens. progress. "Negroes want to be tre statement, But the overtly political battles-for emancipation, decolo Baldwin in the I950S, "a perfectly straightforward have mastered Kant, nization, civil rights, land rights-were only part of this strug containing only seven words. People who Bible findthis state gle. The terms of the Racial Contract norm nonwhite persons Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the � themselves, establishing morally, epistemically, and aestheti ment utterly impenetrable."6B be an epistemic di cally their ontological inferiority. To the extent that nonwhites. Linked with this personal struggle will racially mystificatory accept this, to the extent that they also were signatories to mension, cognitive resistance to the reconstruction of past the Contract, there is a corollary personal dimension to this aspects of white theory, the painstaking gaps and erase the struggle which is accommodated with difficulty, if at all, in and present necessary to fill in the crucial worldview. One the categories of mainstream political philosophy. Operating slanders of the globally dominant European powers, to develop on the terrain of the social contract and thus taking personhood has to learn to trust one's own cognitive explanation, overarch for granted, failing to recognize the reality of the Racial Con one's own concepts, insights, modes of hegemony of concep tract, orthodox political theory has difficultymaking sense of ing theories, and to oppose the epistemic and suppress the the multidimensionality of oppositional nonwhite political tual frameworks designed in part to thwart � think against the gra n. thought. exploration of such matters; one has to concealed by the RaCIal What does it require for a subperson to assert himself or There are excavations of the histories African and herself politically? To begin with, it means simply, or not so Contract: Native American, black American, tion of their pasts, simply, claiming the moral status of personhood. So it means Asian and Pacificinvestigation and valoriza .. vagery" and state-of- challenging the white-constructed ontology that has deemed the description nf.- "sa g1Vmg the lie to . ,, one a "body impolitic," an entity not entitled to assert per "peoples without.history. 69 The exposure nature existence of · not-so-innocent sonl:'lOodin the firstplace. In a sense one has to fightan internal of the misrepresentations of Eurocentrism, is thus part of the battle before even advancing onto the ground of external com "white lies" and "white mythologies," The long hi��ory bat. One has to overcome the internalization of subpersonhood political project of reclaiming personhood.7° oppositional tradltlon, prescribed by the Racial Contract and recognize one's own of what has been called, in the black political response humanity, resisting the officialcategory of despised aboriginal, "vindicationist" scholarship,71 is a necessary , which has no corre natural slave, colonial ward. One has to learn the basic self to the fabrications of the Racial Contract .contract because Euro- respect that can casually be assumed by Kantian persons, those late in the political theory of the social 118 119 THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS peans were in cultural control of their own past and , so, could, being hypothetical, subjunctive exercises in ideal theory. So be confidentit would not be misrepresented (or, perhaps better, the fact that actual societies were not based on these norms, that the misrepresentations would be their own). even if true, and unfortunate, is simply irrelevant. These are Finally, the somatic aspect of the Racial Contract-the nec just two different kinds of projects. essary reference it makes to the body-explains the body poli The discussion at the beginning should have made clear why tics that nonwhites have often incorporated into their struggle. I think this answer misses the point. Insofar as the moral Global white supremacy denies subpersons not merely moral theory and political philosophy of present-day contractarian and cognitive but also aesthetic parity. Particularly for the ism are trying to prescribe ideals for a just society, which are black body, phenotypically most distant from the Caucasoid presumably intended to help transform our present nonideal somatic norm, the implications often are the attempt to trans society, it is obviously important to get clear what the facts form oneself as far as possible into an imitation of the whit� are. Moral and political prescription will depend in part on body.72 Thus the assertion of full black personhood has also empirical claims and theoretical generalizations, accounts of sometimes manifested itself in the self-conscious repudiation what happened in the past and what is happening now, as well of somatic transformation and the proclamation "Black is as more abstract views about how society and the state work beautiful!" For mainstream political philosophy this is merely and where political power is located. If the facts are radically a fashion statement; for a theory informed by the Racial Con different from those that are conventionally represented, the tract, it is part of the political project of reclaiming personhood. prescriptions are also likely to be radically different. Now as I pointed out at the start, and indeed throughout, the absence from most white moral/political philosophy of The "Racial Contract" as a theory is explanatorily superior to the discussions of race and white supremacy would lead one to raceless social contract in accounting for the political and moral think that race and racism have been marginal to the history realities of the world and in helping to guide normative theory. of the West. And this belief is reinforced by the mainstream conceptualizations of the polity themselves, which portray it The "Racial Contract" as a naturalized account (henceforth as essentially raceless, whether in the dominant view of an simply the "Racial Contract") is theoretically superior to the individualist liberal democracy, o� in the minority radical raceless social contract as a model of the actual world and, Marxist view of a class society. So it is not that mainstream correspondingly, of what needs to be done to reform it. I there- con tractarians have no picture. (Indeed it is impossible to theo fore advocate the supplementation of standard social contract rize without some picture.) Rather, they have an actual (tacit) discussions with an account of the "Racial Contract." picture, which, in its exclusion or marginalization of race and It might be replied that I am making a kind of II category its typically sanitized, whitewashed, and amnesiac account mistake," since even if my claims about the centrality of of European imperialism and settlement, is deeply flawed and racism to recent global history are true, modern contractarian misleading. So the powerful image of the idealized contract, ism has long since given p u real-world explanatory pretensions, in the absence of an explicit counterimage, continues to shape 120 121 THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS in which it theorizes about itself and later theorists critique our descriptive as well as normative theorizations. By provid the blindnesses of earlier ones. The classic texts of the central ing no history, contemporary contractarianism encourages its thinkers of the Western political tradition-for example, Plato, audience to fillin a mystified history, which turns out to look Hobbes, Locke, Burke, Marx-typically provide not merely oddly like the (ostensibly) repudiated history in the original n�rmative judgments but mappings of social ontologies and contract itself ! No one actually believes nowadays, of course, politi al epistemologies which explain why the normative that people formally came out of the wilderness and signed a � judgments of others have gone astray. These theorists recog contract. But there is the impression that the modern European nized that to bring about the ideal polity, one needs to under nation-states were not centrally affected by their imperial stand how the structure and workings of the actual polity history and that societies such as the United States were founded on noble moral may interfere with our perception of the social truth. Our principles meant to include everyone, , characteristic patterns of understanding and misunder but unfortunately, there were some deviations.73 The "Racial Contract" explodes this picture as mythical, identifying it as standing of the world are themselves influenced by the way itself an artifact of the Racial Contract in the second, de facto the world is and by the way we ourselves are; whether naturally or as shaped and molded by that world. phase of white supremacy. ThUS-in the standard array of for political knowing, whether through metaphors of perceptual/conceptual revolution-it effects a So one needs criteria of this empirical world gestalt shift, reversing figureand ground, switching paradigms, penetrating the illusory appearances to discern natural law (Hobbes, inverting "norm" and "deviation," to emphasize that non (Plato), through learning wis white racial exclusion from personhood was the actual norm. Locke), through rejecting abstraction for the accumulated or through demystifying oneself Racism, racial self-identification, and race thinking are then dom of "prejudice" (Burke), ideology (Marxism, feminism). not in the least "surprisin g," "anomalous," "puzzling," incon of bourgeois and patriarchal (as with the gruent with Enlightenment European humanism, but required Particularly for alternative, oppositionai theory that an oppressive polity character by the Racial Contract as part of the terms for the European last two), the claim will be our cognizing in ways that appropria tion of the world. So in a sense s tandatd con tractarian ized by group domination distorts about . We are blinded to discussions are fundamentally misleading, because they have themselves need to be theorized taking for granted as natural what things backward to begin with: what has usually been taken realities that we should see, structures. So we need to see differ (when it has been noticed at all) as the radst "exception" has are in fact human-created of class and ·. gender bias, coming to really been the rule; what has been taken as the "rule' " the ently, ridding ourselves ideal norm, has really been the exception. recognize as political what we ha'd previously thought of as innovation, reconceiv The second, related reason that the "Racial Contract" apolitical or personal, doing conceptual at the old world should be part of the necessary foundation for contemporary ing the familiar, looking with new . eyes political theory is that our theorizing and moralizing about around us. Now if the "Racial Contract",is right, existing conceptions the sociopolitical facts are affected in characteristic ways by social structure. There is a reflexiveness to political theory, of the polity are foundationally deficient. There is obviously 122 123 THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS all the difference in the world between saying the system is tual space from the one inhabited by mainstream political . basically sound despite some unfortunate racist deviations, theory. One will. search in vain for them in most standard and saying that the polity is racially structured, the state histories and contemporary surveys of Western political white-supremacist, and races themselves significantexistents thought. The recent advent of discussions of "multicul that an adequate political ontology needs to accommodate. So turaY-sm" is welcome, but what needs to be appreciated is that the dispute would be not merely about the facts but about these are issues of political power, not just mutual misconcep why these facts have gone so long unapprehended and untheo tions resulting from the clash of cultures. To the extent that rized in white moral/political theory. Could it be that member "race" is assimilated to " ethnicity," white supremacy remains ship in the Herrenvolk, the race privileged by this political unmentioned, and the historic Racial Contract-prescribed system, tends to prevent recognition of it as a political system? connection between race and personhood is ignored, these ' Indeed, it could. So not only would meeting this political discussions, in my opinion, fail to make the necessary drastic challenge imply a radically different "metanarrative" of the theoretical correction. Thus they still take place within a history that has brought us to this point, but it would also conventional, if expanded, framework. If I am right, what require, as I have sketched, a rethinking and reconceptualiza needs to be recognized is that side by side with the existing tion of the existing conventional moral/political apparatus and political structures familiar to all of us, the standard subject a self-consciously reflexive epistemic.examination of how this matter of political theory-absolutism and constitutionalism, deficient apparatushas affected the moral psychology of whites dictatorship and democracy, capitalism and socialism-there and directed their attention aw ay from certain realities. By has also been an unnamed global political structure-global its crucial silence on race and the corresponding opacities of white supremacy-and these struggles are in part struggles its conventional conceptual array, the raceless social contract against this system. Until the system is named and seen as and the raceless world of contemporary moral and political such, no serious theoretical appr!!ciation of the significance theory render mysterious the actual political issues and con of these phenomena is possible. cerns that have historically preoccupied a large section of the Another virtue of the i'Racial Contract" is that it simultane world's population. ously recognizes the reality of race (causal power, theoretical Think of the rich colorful tapestry over the last two centu centrality) and demystifies race (positing race as con ries of abolitionism, racial vindicationism, aboriginal land structed),74 Historically, the most influential theories of race claims, antiimperial and anticolonial movements, antiapart have themselves been racist, varieties of more or less sophisti heid struggle, searches to reclaim racial and cultural heritages, cated biological determiniSm, �rom naive pre-Darwinian and ask yourself what thread of it ever appears within the speculations to the later more elaborated views of nineteenth bleached weave of the standard First World political philosophy century Social Darwinism and twentieth-century Nazi Ras text. It is undeniable (one would think) that these struggles senkunde, race ,science. To speak of "race theory" in the offi are political, but dominant categories obscure our understand cially nonracist climate of t,Oday is thus likely to trigger alarm ing of them. They seem to be taking place in a different concep- bells: hasn't it been proven that race is unreal? But it is a false 124 125 THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS dichotomization to assume that the only alternatives are race white supremacy, thus making conceptual room for "white as nonexistent and race as biological essence. Contemporary renegades" and "race traitors." Anfiits aim is not to replace "critical race theorY"-of which this book could be seen as one Racial Contract with another of a different color but ulti an example-adds the adjective specifically to differentiate mately to eliminate race (not as innocent human variety but itself from the essentialist views of the past.75 Race is sociopo as ontological superiority and inferiority, as differential enti litical rather than biological, but it is nonetheless real. tlementl and privilege) altogether. Thus, on the one hand, unlike mainstream white theory, Corresponslingly, the "Racial Contract" demystifies the liberal and radical, the "Racial Contract" sees that "race" and uniqueness of -white racism (for those who, understandably, "white supremacy" are themselves critical theoretical terms see Europeans as intrinsically White) by locating it as the that must be incorporated into the vocabulary of an adequate contingent outcome of a particular set of circumstances. It is sociopolitical theory, that society is neither just a collection proper, given both the historical record and the denial of it of atomic individuals nor just a structure of workers and capi until recently, that white racism and white Whiteness should talists. On the other hand, the "Racial Contract" demystifies be the polemical focus of critique. But it is important not to race, distancing itself from the " oppositional" biological deter lose sight of the fact that other subordinate Racial Contracts minisms (melanin theory, "sun people" and "ice people") and exist which do not involve white/nonwhite relations. In a occasional deplorable anti-Semitism of some recent elements sense, the "Racial Contract" decolorizes Whiteness by de of the black tradition, as the 1960s promise of integration fails taching it from whiteness, thereby demonstrating that in a and intransigent social structures and growing white recalci parallel universe it could have been Ye llowness, Redness, trance are increasingly conceptualized in naturalistic terms. Brownness, or Blackness. Or, alternatively phrased, we could The "Racial Contract" thus places itself within the sensible have had a yellow, red, brown, or black Whiteness: Whiteness mainstream of moral theory by not holding people responsible is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations. for what they cannot help. Even liberal whites of good will That it is, is illustrated by the only serious twentieth are sometimes made uneasy by racial politics,. because an un century challenger to European domination: Japan. As I have sophisticatedly undifferentiated denunciatory vocabulary mentioned throughout, their unique history has put the Japa ("white") does not seem to allow for standard political/moral nese in the peculiar position of being, at different times, or distinctions between a politics of choice-absolutist and even simultaneously by different systems, nonwhite by the democrat, fascist and liberal-for which it is rational that we global White Racial Contract, white by the local (Nazi) Racial should be held responsible, and a skin color and phenotype Contract, and a (W hite) yelJow by their own Ye llow Racial , that, after all, we cannot help. By recognizing it as a political Contract. In Asia the Japanese ' have long considered them- system, the "Racial Contract" voluntarizes race in the same selves the superior race, oppressing the Ainu in their own way that the social contract voluntarizes the creation of soci country and proclaiming during the 1930S a Pan-Asiatic mis ety and the state. It distinguishes between whiteness as pheno sion to "unite the yellow races" under their leadership against type/genealogy and Whiteness as a political commitment to white Western domination, The ruthlessness displayed on 126 127 THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS both sides during the Pacific War, a "war without mercy, " can fall into Whiteness under the appropriate circumstances, arose in part because on both sides it was a race war, a war as shown by the ("White") black Hutus' 1994 massacre of half between conflicting systems of racial superiority, competing I a million to a million inferior black Tutsis in a few bloody claims to the real Whiteness, pink or yellow. The headline weeks in Rwanda. of one Hearst paper summed it up: "The war in the Pacific is Though it may appear to be such, the "Racial Contract" is the World War, the War of Oriental Races against Occidental not a "deconstruction" of the social contract . I am in some Races for the Domination of the World.1I76 As written during sympathy with postmodernism politically-the iconoclastic the Japanese occupation of China, from the 1937 Rape of Nan challenge to orthodox theory, the tipping over of the white king on, the Yellow Racial Contract produced a death toll marble busts in the museum of Great Western Thinkers-but estimated by some to be as high as 10-13 million people.77 ultimately, I see it ,as an epistemological and theoretical dead What Axis triumph might have meant for the world is re end, itself symptomatic rather than diagnostic of the problems vealed in a remarkable document that survived the desperate of the globe as We enter the new millennium/9 The "Racial burning of files in the last weeks before the arrival in Tokyo Contract" is really in the spirit of a racially informed Ideo of the occupying U.S. army: An In vestigation of Global Policy logiekritik and thus pro-Enlightenment (Jiirgen Habermas's with the Ya mato Race as Nucleus. Not exactly an equivalent radical and to-be-completed Enlightenment, that is-though to the infamous 1942 Nazi Wannsee Protocol that put the Habermas's Eurocentric, deraced, and deimperialized vision details of the Final Solution into place, it does nonetheless of modernity itself stands in need of critique)80 and antipost describe the "natural hierarchy based on inherent qualities modernist. It criticizes the social contract from a normative and capabilities" of the various races of the world, envisages a base that does not see the ideals of contractarianism them global order in which the "Yamato race" would be the "leading selves as necessarily problematic but shows how they have race" (which would have to avoid intermarriage to maintain been betrayed by white contractarians. So it assumes inter its purity), and prescribes a postwar mission of expansion and translatability, the conceptual commensurability of degraded colonization based on an ominously revised global cartography norm and critique, and brings them together in an epistemic in which, for example, America emerges as "A sia's eastern union that repudiates the postmodernist picture of isolated, wing. "78 The Yamatos and the Aryans would, postvictory, have mutually unintelligible language games. Moreover, it is explic had to fight it out to decide who the real global master race itly predicated on the truth of a particular metanarrative, the was. So there is no reason to think that other nonwhites (non historical account of the European conquest of the world, yellows?) would have fared much better under this version of which has made the world what it is today. Thus it lays claims the Racial Contract. The point, then, is that while the White to truth, objectivity, realism, the description of .the world as Racial Contract has historically been the most devastating it actually is, the prescription f�>r a transformation of that and the most important one in shaping the contours of the world to achieve racial justice-and invites criticism on those world, it is not unique, and there should be no essentialist same terms. illusions about anyone's intrinsic "racial" virtue. All peoples In the best tradition of oppositional materialist critique of 128 129 THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS hegemonic idealist social theory, the "Racial Contract" recog citizens but by white, black, brown, yellow, red beings, inter nizes the actuality of the world we live in, relates the construc acting with, pretending not to see, categorizing, judging, nego tion of ideals, and the nonrealization of these ideals, to the tiating, allying, exploiting, struggling with each other in large character of this world, to group interests and institutionalized measure according to race-the world, in short, in which we structures, and points to what would be necessary for achiev all actually live. ing them . Thus it unites description and prescription, fact Finally, the "Racial Contract" locates itself proudly in the and norm. long, honorable · tradition of oppositional black theory, the Unlike the social contract, which is necessarily embarrassed theory of those who were denied the capacity to theorize, the by the actual histories of the polities in which it is propagated, cognitions of persons rejecting their official subpersonhood. the "Racial Contract" starts from these uncomfortable reali The peculiar -terms of the slavery contract meant that, of all ties. Thus it is not, like the social contract, continually forced the different varieties of subpersons, blacks were the ones to retreat into illusory idealizing abstraction, the never-never most directly confronted over a period of hundreds of years land of pure theory, but can move readily between the hypc> with the contradictions of white theory, being both a part thetical and the actual, the subjunctive and the indicative, and not a part of the white polity, and as such epistemically having no need to pretend things happened which did not, to privileged. The "Racial Contract" pays tribute to the insights evade and to elide and to skim over. The "Racial Contract" of generations of anonymous "race men" (and "race women") is intimate with the world and so is not continually "aston who, under the most difficult circumstances, often self ished" by revelations about it; it does not find it remarkable educated, denied access to formal training and the resources that racism has been the norm and that people think of them of the academy, the object of scorn and contempt from hege selves as raced rather than abstract citizens, which any objec monic white theory, nevertheless managed to forge the con tive history will in fact show. The "Racial Contract" is an cepts necessary to trace the contours of the system oppressing abstraction that is this-worldly, showing that the problem with them, defying the massive weight of a white scholarship that mainstream political philosophy is not abstraction in itself either morally justifiedthis oppression or denied its existence. (all theory definitionally requires abstraction), but abstraction Black activists have always recognized white domination, that, as Onora O'Neill has pointed out, characteristically ab white power (what one writer in 1919 called the "white stracts away from the things that matter, the actual causal ocracy, " rule by whites),82 as a political system of exclusion determinants and their requisite theoretical correlates, guided and differential privilege, problematically conceptualized by by the terms of the Racial Contract which has now written the categories of either white liberalism or white Marxism. itself out of existence but continues to affect theory and theo The "Racial Contract" can thus be regarded as a black vernacu rizing by its invisible presence.8! The "Racial Contract" lar (literally: "the language of the slave") "Signifyin(g)" on throws open the doors of orthodox political philosophy's her the social contract, a "double-voiced, " "two-toned," "formal metically sealed, stuffy little universe and lets the world rush revision" that "critique[s] the nature of (white) meaning it into its sterile white halls, a world populated not by abstract self, " by demonstratin.g that "a Simultaneous, but negated, 130 131 THE RACIAL CONTRACT "NATURALIZED" MERITS parallel discursive (ontological, political) universe exists, honestly addressed. Those who pretend not to see them, who within the larger white discursive universe."83 It is a black claim not to recognize the picture I have sketched, are only demystification of the lies of white theory, an uncovering of continuing the epistemology of ignorance required by the origi the Klan robes beneath the white politician's three-piece suit. nal Racial Contract. As long as this studied ignorance persists, Ironic, cool, hip, above all knowing, the "Racial Contract" the Racial Contract will only be rewritten, rather than being speaks from the perspective of the cognizers whose mere pres torn up altogether, and justice will continue to be restricted ence in the halls of white theory is a cognitive threat, to "just us." because-in the inverted epistemic logic of the racial polity the "ideal speech situation" requires our absence, since we are, literally, the men and women who know too much, who in that wonderful American expression-know wh ere the bod ies are buried (after all, so many of them are our own). It does what black critique has always had to do to be effective: it situates itself in the same space as its adversary and then shows what follows from "writing 'race' and [seeing] the ·difference it makes."84 As such, it makes it possible for us to connect the two rather than, as at present, have them isolated in two ghettoized spaces, black political theory'S ghettoization from mainstream discussion, white mainstream theory's ghettoiza tion from reality. The struggle to close the gap between the ideal of the social contract and the reality of the Racial Contract has been the unacknowledged political history of the past few hundred years, the "battle of the color line, " in the words of W. E. B. Du Bois, and is likely to continue being so for the near future, as racial division continues to fester, the United States moves demographically from a white-majority to a nonwhite majority society, the chasm between a largely white First World and a largely nonwhite Third World continues to deepen, desperate illegal immigration from the latter to the former escalates, and demands for global justice in a new world order of "global apartheid" grow louder.85 Naming this reality brings it into the necessary theoretical focus for these issues to be 132 133 NOTES INTRODUCTION I. A 1994 report on American philosophy, "Status and Future of the Profession, " revealed that "only one department in 20 (28 of the 456 departments reporting) has any [tenure-track] African American faculty, with slightly fewer having either Hispanic American or Asian-American [tenure-track] faculty (I? depart ments in both cases). A mere seven departments have any [tenure-track] Native American faculty. " Proceedings and Ad dresses of Th e American Philosophical Association 70, no. 2 (1996): 137· 2. For an overview, see, for example, Ernest Barker, Introduction to Social Contract: Essays by Locke, Hume, and Rousseau, ed. Barker (1947; rpt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960); Mi chael Lessnoff, Social Contract (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Hu manities Press, 1986); will Kymlicka, "The Social Contract Tradition," in A Companion to Ethics, ed. Peter Singer (Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1991), pp. 186-96; Jean Hampton, "Con tract and Consent," in A Companion to Contemporary Political Philosophy, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Philip Pettit ·(Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1993), pp. 379-93. 3. Indigenous peoples as a global group are sometimes referred to as the "Fourth World." See Roger Moody, ed., Th e Indigenous Voice: Visions and Realities, 2d ed., rev. (1988; rpt. Utrecht: International Books, 1993). 135 NOTES TO PAGES NOTES TO PAGES 4-6 7-1 1 4· For a praiseworthy exception, see Iris Marion Young, Justice and whereas I see domination within contract theory as more contin R the Politics of Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, gent. For me, in other words, it is not the case that a acial I990). Young focuses explicitly on the implications for standard Contract had to underpin the social contract. Rather, this con conceptions of justice of group subordination, including racial tract is a result of the particular conjunction of circumstances groups. in global history which led to European imperialism. And as a S· Credit for the revival of social contract theory, and indeed post corollary, I believe contract theory can be put to positive use war political philosophy in general, is usually given to John once this hidden history is acknowledged, though I do not follow Rawls, A Th eory of Justice (Cambridge: Harvard University up such a program in this book. For an example of feminist Press, I97I). contractarianism that contrasts with Pateman's negative assess 6. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cam ment, see Susan Moller Okin, Ju stice, Gender, and the Family bridge University Press, I99I); John Locke, Two Treatises of (New York: Basic .Books, 1989). Government, ed. Peter Laslett (I960; rpt. Cambridge: Cambridge ro. See, for example, Paul Thagard, Conceptual Revolutions (Prince University Press, I988); Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on ton: Princeton University Press, I992), p. 22. the Origins and Foundations of Inequality among Men, trans. I I. See Hampton, "Contract and Consent" and "Contractarian Ex planation." Hampton's own focus is the liberal-democratic state, Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin, I984); Rousseau, Th e So but obviously her strategy of employing "contract" to conceptu cial Contract, trans. Maurice Cranston (London: Penguin, I968); alize conventiona�ly generated norms and practices is open to Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor be adapted to the understanding of the non-liberal-democratic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, I99I). racial state, the diffetence being that "the people" now become 7· In "Contract and Consent," p. 382, Jean Hampton reminds us the white population. that for the classic theorists, contract is intended "simultane ously to describe the nature of political societies, and to prescribe a new and more defensible form for such societies." In this essay, and also in "The Contractarian Explanation of the State," in CHAPTER 1. OVERVIEW The Philosophy of the Human Sciences, Midwest Studies in Philosophy, IS, ed. Peter A. French, Theodore E. Uehling Jr., and I. Otto Gierke termed these respectively the Gesellschaftsvertrag Howard K. Wettstein (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre and the Herrschaftsvertrag. For a discussion, see, for example, Dame Press, I990), pp. 344-7I, she argues explicitly for a revival Barker, Introduction, Social Contract; and Lessnoff, Social Con of the old-fashioned, seemingly discredited " contractarian expla tract, chap. 3. nation of the state." Hampton points out that the imagery of 2. Rawls, Th eory of Justice, pt. I. "contract" captures the essential point that "authoritative po 3. In speaking generally of "whites," I am not, of course, denying litical societies are human creations" (not divinely ordained or that there are gender relations of domination and subordination naturally determined) and "conventionally generated." or, for that matter, class relations of domination and subordina 8. Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, pt. 2. tion within the white population. I am not claiming that race 9· Carole Pateman, Th e Sexual Contract (Stanford: Stanford Uni is the only axis of social oppression. But race is what I want to versity Press, I988). One difference between our approaches is focus on; so in the absence of that chimerical entity, a unifying that Pateman thinks contractarianism is necessarily theory of race, class, and gender oppression, it seems to me that oppressive-"Contract always generates political .right in the one has to make generalizations that it would be stylistically i form of relations of domination and subordination" (p. 8)- cumbersome to qual fy at every point. So these should just be 136 137 NOTES TO PAGES 12-15 NOTES TO PAGES 15-1 9 taken as read. Nevertheless, I do want to insist that my overall 6. Hobbes's judgment that "INJUSTICE, is no other than the not picture is roughly accurate, i.e., that whites do in general benefit Performance of Covenant," Leviathan, p. 100, has standardly from white supremacy (though gender and class differentiation been taken as a statement of moral conventionalism. Hobbes's mean, of course, that they do not benefitequally ) and that histori egalitarian social morality is based not on the moral equality of cally white racial solidarity has overridden class and gender humans, but on the fact of a rough parity of physical power and solidarity. Women, subordinate classes, and nonwhites may be mental ability in the state of nature (chap. 13). Within this oppressed in common, but it is not a common oppression: the framework, the Racial Contract would then be the natural out structuring is so different that it has not led to any common come of a systematic disparity in power-of weaponry rather front between them. Neither white women nor white workers than individual strength-between expansionist Europe and the have as a group (as against principled individuals) historically rest of the world. This could be said to be neatly summed up in made common cause with nonwhites against colonialism, white Hilaire Belloc's famous little ditty: "Whatever happens, we have settlement, slavery, imperialism, jim crow, apartheid. We all got / The Maxim Gun,- and they have not." Hilaire Belloc, "The have multiple identities, and, to this extent, most of us are both Modern Traveller, " quoted in John Ellis, The Social History of the privileged and disadvantaged by different systems of domination. Machine Gun (1975; rpt. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Paperbacks, But white racial identity has generally triumphed over all others; 1986), p. 94. Or at an earlier stage, in the conquest of the Ameri it is race that (transgender, transclass) has generally determined cas, the musket and the steel sword. the social world and loyalties, the lifeworld, of whites-whether 7. See, for example, A. P. d'Entreves, Natural Law: An In troduction · as citizens of the colonizing mother country, settlers, nonslaves, to Legal Philosophy, 2d rev. ed. (1951; rpL London: Hutchin or beneficiaries of the "color bar" and the "color line." There son, 1970). has been no comparable, spontaneously crystallizing transracial 8. Locke, Second Tr eatise of Two Tr eatises of Government, p. 269. "workers'" world or transracial "female" world: race is the iden 9. Kant, Metaphysics of Morals, pp. 230-32. tity around which whites have usually closed ranks. Neverthe 10. See Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the less, as a concession, a semantic signal of this admitted gender History of an Idea (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948). privileging within the white population, by which white wom I I. For the notion of "epistemological communities," see recent en's personhood is originally virtual, dependent on their having work in feminist theory-for example, Linda Alcoff and Eliza the appropriate relation (daughter, sister, wife) to the white male, beth Potter, eds., Feminist Epistemologies (New York: I will sometimes deliberately use the non-gender;neutral "men." Routledge, 1993). For some recent literature on these problematic intersections of 12. Thus Ward Churchill, a Native American, speaks sardonically identity, see, for example, Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, of "fantasies of the master race." Ward Churchill, Fantasies of Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapo the Master Race: Literature, Cinema, and the Colonization of lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993); Nupur Chaudhuri and American Indians, ed. M. Annette Jaimes (Monroe, Maine: Com Margaret Strobel, eds., Western Women and Imperialism: Com mon Courage Press, 1992); William Gibson, Neuromancer (New plicity and Resistance (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Yo rk: Ace Science Fiction Books, 1984). 1992); David Roediger, Th e Wa ges of Whiteness: Race and the 13. Robert Young, White Mythologies: Writing History and the West Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991). (London: Routledge, 1990); Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; 4. Rousseau, Social Contract; Hobbes, ieviathan. rpt. New York: Vintage Books, 1979); V. Y. Mutlimbe, Th e Inven 5. For a discussion of the two versions, see Kymlicka, "The Social tion of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge Contract Tradition." (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988); Enrique Dussel, 138 139 NOTES TO PAGES 19-23 NOTES TO PAGES 23-28 Th e Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of "the Other" and the and Nation in Lope de Vega's El Nuevo mundo descubierto par Myth of Modernity, trans. Michael D. Barber (1992; rpt. New Cristobal Colon, " in Amerin dian Images and the Legacy of York: Continuum, 1995); Robert Berkhofer Jr., The White Man 's Columbus, ed. Rene Jara and Nicholas Spadaccini, Hispanic Is Indian: Images of the American Indian fr om Columbus to the sues, 9 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), Present (New York: Knopf, 1978); Gretchen M. Bataille and PP·433-34· Charles 1. P. Silet, eds., Th e Pretend Indians: Images of Na tive 22. Philip D. Curtin, Introduction, to Imperi alism, ed. Curti:Q. (New Americans in the Movies (Ames: Iowa State University Press, York: Walker, 1971), p. xiii. 1980); George M. Fredrickson, Th e Black Image in the White 23. Pierre 1. van den Berghe, Race and Racism: A Comparative Mind: Th e Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, Perspective, 2d ed. (New York: Wiley, 1978). I817-I914 (1971; rpt. Hanover, N.H.: Wesleyan University 24. Pagden, Lords, chap. I. Press, 1987); Roberto Fernandez Retamar, Caliban and Other 25. Williams, "Algebra," p. 253· Essays, trans. Edward Baker (Minneapolis: University of Minne 26.-rustice Joseph Story, quoted in Williams, "Algebra, " p. 256. sota Press, 1989); Peter Hulme, Colonial Encounters: Europe 27. Dred Scott v. Sanford, 1857, in Race, Class, and Gender in the and the Native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (1986; rpt. London: United States: An In tegrated Study, ed. Paula S. Rothenberg, 3d Routledge, 1992). ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1995), p. 323· 14. Frederick Engels, Th e Origin of the Family, Private Property, 28. Excerpt from Jules Harmand, Domination et colonisation (19 I 0), and the State (New York: International, 1972), p. 120. in Curtin, Imperialism, pp. 294-98. 15. Jean-Paul Sartre, Preface to Frantz Fanon, Th e Wr etched of the 29. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imp erialism (New York: Knopf, Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (1961; rpt. New York: Grove 1993), pp. xiv, xiii. Weidenfeld, 1991). 30. Harold R. Isaacs, "Color in World Affairs," Foreign Affairs 47 16. V. G. Kiernan, Th e Lords of Human Kind: Black Man, Ye llow (1969): 235, 246. See also Benjamin P. Bowser, ed., Racism and Man, and White Man in an Age of Empire (1969; rpt. New York: Anti-Racism in World Perspective (Thousand Oaks, Calif: Columbia University Press, 1986); Anthony Pagden, Lords of Sage, 1995). All the World: Ideologies of Empire inSpain, Britain, and France, 3 I. Helen Jackson, A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United c. ISOO-C. 1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995). States Government's Dealings with Some of the Indian Tri bes 17. Pagden, Lords, pp. 1-2. (1881; rpt. New York: Indian Head Books, 1993)· In her classic 18. Robert A. Williams Jr., "The Algebra of Federal Indian Law: The expose, Jackson concludes (pp. 337-38): "It makes little differ Hard Trail of Decolonizing and Americanizing the White Man's ence ...where one opens the record of the history of the Indians; Indian Jurisprudence," Wisconsin Law Review 1986 (1986): 229. every page and every year has its dark stain. The story of one See also Robert A. Williams Jr., Th e American Indian in Western tribe is the story of all, varied only by differences of time and Legal Th ought: The Discourses of Conquest (New York: Oxford place ....[T]he United States Government breaks promises now University Press, 1990). [1880] as deftly as then [1795], and with an added ingenuity from 19. Williams, "Algebra," pp. 230-31, 233. See also Lewis Hanke, long practice." Jackson herself, it should be noted, saw Native Aristotle and the American Indians: A Study in Race Prejudice Americans as having a "lesser right," since there was no question in the Modern World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, about the " fairness of holding that ultimate sovereignty belonged 1959), p. 19· to the civilized discoverer, 'as against the savage barbarian." To 20. Williams, "Algebra"; Hanke, Aristotle. think otherwise would merely be "feeble sentimentalism" 2 I. Allen Carey-Webb, "Other-Fashioning: The Discourse of Empire (pp. IO-I I ). But she did at least want this le�ser right recognized. 140 141 NOTES TO PAGES 29-33 NOTES TO PAGE 28 American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Under 32. See, for example, David E. Stannard, American Holocaust: Co class (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993)· lumbus and the Conquest of the New World (New York: Oxford 38. See, for example, Kiernan, Lords; V. G. Kiernan, Imperalism and University Press, 1992). its Contradictions, ed. Harvey J. Kaye (New York: Routledge, 33. Richard Drinnon, Facing West: Th e Metaphysics of Indian 1995); D. K. Fieldhouse, Th e Colonial Empires: A Comparative Hating and Empire-Building (New York: Meridian, 1980), p. 332. Survey from the Eighteenth Century (1966; rpt. London: Macmil 34. Ibid., p. 102. See also Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: Th e Origins ofAmerican RacialAnglo-Saxonism (Cam lan, 1982); Pagden, Lords; Chinweizu, Th e West and the Rest of bridge: Harvard University Press, 198 I); and Ronald Takaki, Iron Us : White Predators, Black Slavers, and the African Elite (New Cages: Race and Culture in I9th-Century America (1979; rpt. York: Vintage Books, 1975); Henri Brunschwig, French Colonial New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). ism, 1871-1914: Myths and Realities, trans. William Granville 35. A. Grenfell Price, White Settlers and Na tive Peoples: An Histori Brown (1964; rpt. New York: Praeger, 1966); David Healy, U. S. cal Study of Racial Contacts between English-Speaking Whites Expansionism: Th e Imperialist Urge in the I 890S (Madison: Uni and Aboriginal Peoples in the United States, Canada, Australia, versity of Wisconsin Press, 1970). and New Zealand (1950; rpt. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 39. Said, Culture, p. 8. 1972); A. Grenfell Price, Th e Western In vasions of the Pacific 40. Kiernan, Lords, p. 24· and Its Continents (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963); van den 41. Linda Alcoff outlines an attractive, distinctively Latin American Berghe, Race; Louis Hartz, Th e Founding of New Societies: Stud ideal of hybrid racial identity in her "Mestizo Identity," in ies in the History of the United States, Latin America, South American Mixed Race: Th e Culture of Microdiversity, ed. Naomi Africa, Canada, and Australia (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Zack (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1995), pp. 257-78. World, 1964); F. S. Stevens, ed., Racism: Th e Australian Experi Unfortunately, however, this ideal has yet to be realized. For an ence, 3 vols. (New York: Taplinger, 1972); Henry Reynolds, Th e exposure of the Latin American myths of "racial democracy" Other Side of the Frontier: Aboriginal Resistance to the Euro and a race-transcendent mestizaje, and an account of the reality pean Invasion of Australia (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Pen of the ideal of blanqueamiento (whitening) and the continuing guin, 1982). Price's books are valuable sources in comparative subordination of blacks and the darker-skinned throughout the history, but-though progressive by the standards of the time region, see, for example, Minority Rights Group, ed., No Longer they need to be treated with caution, since their figures and Invisible: Afro-Latin Americans To day (London: Minority attitudes are both now somewhat dated. In White Settlers, for Rights, 1995); and Bowser, Racism and Anti-Racism. example, the Indian population north of the Rio Grande is esti 42. Locke, Second Treatise, pp. 350-51. Since Locke also uses "prop mated at fewer than 850,000, whereas estimates today are ten erty" to mean rights, this is not quite as one-dimensional a to twenty times higher, and Price speculates that the Indians vision of government as it sounds. were "less advanced than their white conquerors" because they 43. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 89· had smaller brains (pp. 6-7). 44. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 36. Van den Berghe, Race, p. 18. (1 935; rpt. New Yo rk: Atheneum, 1992). 37. C. Vann Woodward, Th e Strange Career of Tim Crow, 3d ed. 45. See Eric Jones, Th e European Miracle (Cambridge: Cambridge (1955; rpt. New York: Oxford University Press, 1974); George University Press, 1981). My discussion here follows J. M. Blaut M. Fredrickson, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in et al., 1492: Th e Debate on Colonialism, Eurocentrism, and American and South African History (New York: Oxford Univer History (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1992); and J. M. Blaut, sity Press, 1981); Douglas S. Massey and Nancy A. Denton, 143 142 NOTES TO PAGES 39-45 NOTES TO PAGES 34-39 Th e Colonizer's Model of the World: Geographical Diffusionism of Benefits fr om Past Injustices (New York: Greenwood Press, and EUIocentric History (New York: Guilford Press, 1993). 1990). For another ironic tribute, whose subject is the interna 46. Blaut, I492; Blaut, Colonizer's Model. tional distribution of wealth, see Malcolm Caldwell, Th e Wealth 47· Sandra Harding, Introduction, to Harding, ed., Th e "Racial" of Some Nations (London: Zed Press, 1977). Economy of Science: To ward a Democratic Future (Bloomington: 57. David H. Swinton, "Racial Inequality and Reparations," in Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 2. America, Wealth of Races, p. 156. 48. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (1944; rpt. New York: 58. James Marketti, "Estimated Present Value of Income Diverted Capricorn Books, 1966). during Slavery, " in America, Wealth of Races, p. 107. 49· Walter Rodney, How Europe Un derdeveloped Africa (1972; rpt. 59. Robert S. Browne, "A chieving Parity through Reparations, " in Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1974); Samir Amin, America, Wealth of Races, p. 204; Swinton, "Racial Inequal Eurocentrism, trans. Russell Moore (1988: rpt. New York: ity, " p. 156. Monthly Review Press, 1989); Andre Gunder Frank, World Accu mulation, I492-1789 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978); Immanuel Wallerstein, Th e Modern World System, 3 vols. (New CHAPTER 2. DETAILS York: Academic Press, 1974-1988). 50. Blaut, I492, p. 3. I. I will later discuss the taxonomic problems posed by "border 51. Kiernan, Imperialism, pp. 98, 149. line" I"semi-" Europeans. 52. Quoted in Noam Chomsky, Ye ar 50I: Th e Conquest Continues 2. See, for example, Jan Nederveen Pieterse, White on Black: Im (Boston: South End Press, 1993), p. 61. ages of Africa and Blacks in Western Popular Culture (1990; rpt. 53· But see Richard J. Herrnstein and Charles Murray's bestseller New Haven: Yale Univ�rsity Press, 1992), pp. 30-31; Ronald Th e Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Structure in American Sanders, Lost Tri bes and Promised Lands: Th e Origins of Ameri Life (New York: Free Press, 1994), as a sign that the older, can Racism (Boston: Little, .Brown, 1978), p. 202. straightforwardly racist theories may be making a comeback. 3. Edward Dudley and Maximillian E. Novak, eds., Th e Wi ld Man 54· See, for example: Andrew Hacker, Two Nations: Black and Wi thin: An Image in Western Th ought fr om the Renaissance to White, Separate, Hostile, Un equal (New York: Scribner's, 1992); Romanticism (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972). Derrick Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: Th e Permanence 4. Hayden White, "The Forms of Wildness: Archaeology of an of Racism (New York: BasicBooks, 1992); Massey and Denton, Idea," in Dudley and Novak, Wild Man, p. 5. American Apartheid; Stephen Steinberg, Turning Back: Th e Re 5. Roy Harvey Pearce, Savagism and Civilization: A Study of the treat from Racial Justice in American Th ought and Policy (Bos Indian and the American Mind, rev. ed. (1953; rpt. Baltimore: ton: Beacon Press, 1995); Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders, Johns Hopkins Press, 1965) (original title: Th e Savages of Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (Chi America), p. 3. cago: University of Chicago Press, 1996); Tom Wicker, Tr agic 6. Mary Louise Pratt, "Humboldt and the Reinvention of America," FailUIe: Racial Integration in America (New, York: William Mor in Jara and Spadaccini, Amerindian Im ages, p. 589. row, 1996). 7. Mudimbe, Invention of Africa, pp. 15, 13. 55· Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White 8. Martin Bernal, Th e Fabrication of Ancient Greece, 1785-I985, Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: vol. I of Black Athena.]h eAfr oasiatic Roots ofClassical Civili Routledge 1995), pp. 86, 7. zation (New Brunswick,' N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1987). 56. Richard F. America, ed., Th e Wealth of Races: Th e Present Va lue This claim has a long history in the international black commu- 144 145 NOTES TO PAGES 45-50 NOTES TO PAGES 50-56 nity (African, African Americanl. See, for example, Cheikh Anta 23. Quoted from an officialdocument by A. Barrie Pittock, "Aborigi Diop, Th e African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality, trans. nal Land Rights," in Stevens, Racism 2:192. Mercer Cook (1955, 1967; rpt. We stport, Conn.: .Lawrence 24. Leonard Thompson, Th e Political Mythology ofApartheid (New Hill, 19741· Haven: Yale University Press, 19851, p. 75. 9. Harding, "Racial" Economy, p. 27. 25. Drinnon, FaCing West, p. 213. 10. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul O'Prey (1902; rpt. 26. Russel Ward, "An Australian Legend, " Royal Australian Histori London: Penguin Books, 19831, p. 33. cal Society Journal and Proceedings 47, no. 6 (19611: 344, quoted 11. Scott B. Cook, Colonial Encounters in the Age of High Imperial by M. C. Hartwig, "Aborigines and Racism: An Historical Per ism (New York: HarperCollins World History Series, 19961, spective," in Stevens, Racism 2:9. p. I04· 27. For a classic analysis, see Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 12. Mudimbe, In vention of Africa, p. 71. trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; rpt. New Yo rk: Grove 13. Sanders, Lost Tri bes, pp. 9-12. Weidenfeld, 1968 Ii and for a recent exploration, Lewis R. Gordon, 14. Drinnon, Facing West, pp. 122-23, lOS, 66. Bad Faith and Antiblack Racism (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Hu IS. For an analysis of the film, see, for example, Michael Ryan and manities Press, 19951, esp. chaps. 7, 14, and IS, pp. 29-44. Douglas Kellner, Camera Politica: Th e Politics and Ideology of 97-I03, 104-16. Contemporary Hollywood Film (Bloomington: Indiana Univer 28. Gordon, Bad Faith pp. 99, 105. sity Press, 19881. 29. Frankenberg, White Women, chap. 3. 16. David Theo Goldberg, Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Poli 30. Fanon, Black Skin; Charles Herbert Stember, Sexual Racism: tics of Meaning (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 19931, p. 185, and Th e Emotional Barrier to an In tegrated Society (New York: more generally, chap. 8, "'Polluting the Body Politic': Race and Elsevier, 19761; Johv.D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Urban Location," pp. 185-205. Matters: A History of Sexuality in America (New Yo rk: Harper 17. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, pp. 38-40. and Row, 19881, chap. 5, "Race and Sexuality," pp. 85-108. 18. Franke Wilmer, Th e Indigenous Voice in World Politics: Since 31. Susan Mendus, "Kant: 'An .}Ionest but Narrow-Minded Bour Time Immemorial (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 19931. geois'?" in Women in Western Political Philosophy, ed. Ellen 19. Locke, Second Treatise, p. 301. Kennedy and Susan Mendus (New York: St. Martin's Press, 20. Francis Jennings, Th e Invasion of America: In dians, Colonial 19871, pp. 21-43· ism, and the Cant of Conquest (1975; rpt. NeW York: Norton, 32. Aristotle, Th e Politics, trans. T. A. Sinclair (1962; rev. ed. 19761, pt. 1. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1981), pp. 63-73. 21. Ibid, p. 16. See also Stannard, American Holocaust, chaps. I and 33. White, "Forms of Wildness," p. 17. 2, for an account of the exponential upward revision in recent 34. Jennings, In vasion of America, p. 6. years of estimates of the pre-Columbian population of the Ameri 35. See Cornel West's description of the emergence in the modern cas and the politics of its previous undercounting. Half a century period of the "normative gaze" of white supremacy: "A Geneal ago, standard figures were 8 million total for North and South ogy of Modern Racism," chap. 2 of Prophesy Deliverance!: An America and fewer than I million for the region north of Mexico; Afro-American Revolutionary Christianity (Phildelphia: We st today some estimates would put these numbers as high as 145 minster Press, 1982), pp. 47-65. million and 18 million, respectively. Stannard, American Holo 36. M. 1. Finley, Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (New York: caust, p. I I. Viking Press, 1980), p. 144. 22. Drinnon, Facing West, pp. 49, 212, 232. 37. Lucius Outlaw Jr., "Life-Worlds, Modernity, and Philosophical 146 147 NOTES TO PAGES 57-64 NOTES TO PAGES 64-68 Praxis: Race, Ethnicity, and Critical Social Theory," in Outlaw, 52. Hugo Grotius, Th e Law of War and Peace, trans. Francis W. On Race and Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 165. Kelsey (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1925), chap. 20, "On Punish 38. Quoted in Drinnon, Facing West, p. 75. ments," of bk. 2, p. 506, quoted in Williams, "A lgebra," p. 250. 39. Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. 52, 59. 53. For the following, compare Tames Tully, Strange Multiplicity: 40. Orlando Patterson, Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity (Cambridge: Cam vol. I of Freedom (New York: Basic Books, 1991). bridge University Press, 1995), esp. chap. 3, "The Historical 41. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Formation of Modern Constitutionalism: The Empire of Unifor Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992). mity, " pp. 58-98. I thank Anthony Laden for bringing this book 42. Quoted in Pearce, Savagism, pp. 7-8. to my attention, which I only learned about when my own 43. For a discussion, see, for example, Stephen Tay Gould, Th e Mis manuscript was on the verge of completion. measure of Man (New York and London: Norton, 1981); and 54. Hobbes, Leviathan, p. 89· William H. Tucker, Th e Science and Politics of Racial Research 55. Richard Ashcraft, "Leviathan Triumphant: Thomas Hobbes and (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1994). Tucker asserts flatly the Politics of Wild Men, " in Dudley and Novak, Wild Man, (p. 5): "The truth is that though waged with scientific weapons, PP· 146-47. the goal in this controversy has always been political." 56. Hobbes, Leviathan, pp. 89-90. 44. Harmannus Hoetink, Caribbean Race Relations: A Study of 57. Two hundred years later, by contrast, the British colonial enter Two Va riants, trans. Eva M. Hooykaas (1962; rpt. London: Oxford prise, with the accompanying ontological dichotomization, was University Press, 1967). so well entrenched that Tohn Stuart Mill experienced not the 45. George 1. Mosse, To ward the Final Solution: A History of Euro slightest qualm in asserting (in an essay now seen as a classic pean Racism (1978; rpt. Madison: Univer,sityof Wisconsin Press, humanist defense of individualism and freedom) that the liberal 1985), Pp. xii, II. harm principle "is meant to apply only to human beings in the 46. Winthrop D. Tordan, White over Black: American Attitudes to maturity of their faculties," not to those "backward states of ward the Negro, IS 50-I8I2 (1968; rpt. New York: Norton, 1977). 47. Franklin, Observations Concerning the In crease of Mankind society in which the race itself may be considered as in its (1751), quoted in Tordan, White over Black, pp. 270, 143. nonage": "Despotism is ' a legitimate mode of government in 48. See, for example, Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall, dealing with barbarians, provided the end be their improve Th e Color Complex: Th e Politics of Skin Color among African ment." Tohn Stuart Mill, On Liberty and Other Wri tings, ed. Americans (New York: Harcourt Brace Tovanovich, 1992). Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 49. Frank M. Snowden Tr., Blacks in Antiquity.' Ethiopians in the 1989), p. 13· Greco-Roman Experience (Cambridge: Harvard University 58. Locke, Second Treatise, chap. 5, "Of Property." Press, 1970); Frank M. Snowden Tr., Before Color Prejudice: Th e 59. Robert A. Williams Tr., "Documents of Barbarism: The Contem Ancient Vi ew of Blacks (Cambridge: Harvard University porary Legacy of European Racism and Colonialism in the Narra Press, 1983). tive Traditions of Federal Indian Law, " Arizona Law Review 2 3 7 50. Theodore W. Allen, Racial Oppression and Social Control, vol. (1989), excerpted in Critical Race Th eory.' Th e Cutting Edge, ed. I of Th e Invention of the White Race (New York: Verso, 1994); Richard Delgado . (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, Ian F. Haney L6pez, White by Law: Th e Legal Construction of 1995), p. 103. Race (New York: New York University Press, 1996). 60. Locke, Second Treatise, chap. 16, "On Conquest." 5 I. Tennings, In vasion of America, p. 60. 61. See, for example, 'Tennifer Welchman, "Locke on Slavery and 148 149 NOTES TO PAGES 68-76 NOTES TO PAGES 77-85 Inalienable Rights," Canadian Jo urnal of Philosophy 25 "Justice, Gender, and International Boundaries, " in Th e Quality ( 1995): 67-81. of Life, ed. Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (Oxford: 62. Rousseau, Discourse on In equality, pp. 83, 87, 90, 136, 140, 145 Clarendon Press, 1993), pp. 303-23. (nonwhite savages), 140 (European savages). 77. Patricia J. Williams, Th e Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cam 63. Ibid., p. II6. bridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), pp. II6, 49· 64. Rousseau, Social Contract, bk. I, chap. 8. 78. Bill E. Lawson, "Moral Discourse and Slavery, " in Howard 65. Emmanuel Eze, "The Color of Reason: The Idea of 'Race' in McGary and Bill E. Lawson, Between Slavery and Freedom: Kant's Anthropology, " in Anthropology and the German En Philosophy and American Slavery (Bloomington: Indiana Uni ligh tenment, ed. Katherine Faull (Lewisburg, Pa.: Bucknell Uni versity Press, 1992), pp. 71-89. versity Press, 1995), pp. 196-237. 79. Anita L. Allen, "Legal Rights for Poor Blacks," in Th e Underc1ass 66. Eze cites the 1950 judgment of Earl Count that scholars often Question, ed. Bill E. Lawson (Philadelphia: Temple University forget that "Immanuel Kant produced the most profound racio Press, 1992), pp. 117-39· logical thought of the eighteenth century." Earl W. Count, ed., 80. Rawls, Theory of Ju stice; Robert Nozick, Anarchy, State, and This Is Race: An Anthology Selected from the In ternational Utopia (New York: Basic Books, 1974)· Literature on the Races of Man (New York: Henry Schuman, 81. Isaacs, "Color, " p. 235· 1950), p. 704, quoted in Eze, "Color of Reason, " p. 196. Compare 82. Earl Miner, "The Wild Man through the Looking Glass," in the 1967 verdict of the German anthropologist Wilhelm Muhl Dudley and Novak, Wi ld Man, pp. 89-90. mann that Kant is "the founder of the modern concept of race," 83. Jordan, White over Black, p. 254· quoted in Leon Poliakov, "Racism from the Enlightenment to 84. Drinnon, Facing West, p. xvii. But see Allen, Invention of the the Age of Imperialism," in Racism and Colonialism, ed. Robert White Race, for the contrasting position that the Irish were Ross (The Hague: Leiden University Press, 1982), p. 59. indeed made nonwhite. 67. Mosse, Fin al Solution, pp. 30-3 I. 85. Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: 68. Immanuel Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful Routledge, 1995)· and Sublime, trans. John T. Goldthwait (Berkeley: University of 86. See John W. Dower, Wa r without Mercy: Race and Power in the California Press, 1960), pp. III-I3. Pacific Wa r (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986). 69. Eze, "Color of Reason, " pp. 214-15, 209-15, 217. 87. Gary Y. Okihiro, "Is Yellow Black or White?" in Margins and 70. See David Lehman, Signs of the Tim es: Deconstruction and the Mainstreams: Asians in American History and Culture (Seattle: Fall of Paul de Man (New York: Poseidon Press, 1991). University of Washington Press, 1994), pp. 31-63. 71. Janet L Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: Th e World System, A.D. 1250-1350 (New York: Oxford University Press, 88. Sir Robert Filmer, Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. 1989). Sommerville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991). 72. Fredric Jameson, "Modernism and Imperialism," in National 89. Again, it could be argued that a better formulation is to say that ism, Colonialism, and Literature, ed. Seamus Deane (Minneapo actually, by the terms of the Racial Contract, they are not the lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990), pp. 50-5 1. same crime, that the identity conditions change with the perpe 73. Steinberg, Turning Back, p. 152. trator, so that there is really no inconsistency. The judgment of 74. Massey and Denton, American Apartheid, pp. 84, 97-98. inconsistency presupposes the background of the social contract. 75. Morrison, Playing, p. 46. 90. According to the NAAcp Legal Defense and Educational Fund in 76. See the discussion of "idealizing" abstractions in Onora O'Neill, New York, of the 380 people executed since the reinstatement of 150 151 NOTES TO PAGES 86-94 NOTES TO PAGES 94-95 capital punishment, only 5 were whites convicted of killing 2. For Hume, see the 1753-S4 edition of his essay, "Of National blacks. Characters," quoted, for example, in Jordan, White over Black, 9 I. William Brandon, The American Heritage Book of Indians (New p. 253; Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introduction to Th e · York: Dell, 1964), p. 327, quoted in Jan P. Nederveen Pieterse, Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (New York: Dover, Empire and Emancipation: Power and Liberation on a World 1956), pp. 91-99. For a detailed critique of Locke and Mill in Scale (New York: Praeger, 1989), p. 313. particular, and their "colonial liberalism," see Bhikhu Parekh, 92. Kiernan, Lords, pp. 198, 47. "Decolonizing Liberalism," in Th e End of "Isms"l Reflections 93· Locke, Second Treatise, p. 274. on the Fate of Ideological Politics after Communism's Collapse, 94· Ralph Gi=burg, ed., roo Ye ars of Lynchings (1962; rpt. Balti ed. Aleksandras Shtromas (Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1994), more: Black Classic Press, 1988). pp. 8S-103; and Bhikhu Parekh, "Liberalism and Colonialism: 9S· C. J. Dashwood, quoted in Price, White Settlers, p. lI4. One A Critique of Locke and Mill," in Th e Decolonization of Im agi white settler, "in revenge for having been speared, had shot on nation: Culture, Knowledge and Power, ed. Jan P. Nederveen sight 37 natives." Ibid., p. lIS. Pieterse and Bhikhu Parekh (London: Zed Books, 1995), 96. Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, pp. 81-98. an American Slave (New York: Viking Penguin, 1982), p. 13S. 3. To be fair to Mill, he does have a famous exchange with Thomas 97· Carter G. Woodson, Th e Mis-Education of the Negro (1933; rpt. Carlyle on the treatment of blacks in the British West Indies, Nashville, Tenn.: Winston-Derek, 1990). in which he comes out for "progressive" (relatively, of course) 98. James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Na social policies. See Th omas Carlyle: Th e Nigger Question; John tive Son (1961; rpt. New York: Vintage International, 1993), p. 96. Stuart Mill: Th e Negro Question, ed. Eugene R. August (New 99· Pieterse, Empire and Emancipation, p. 317. York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, Crofts Classics, 1971). But the 100. Quoted from Survival International Review 4, no. 2 (1979), in difference is basically between less and more humane colonial Moody, Indigenous Voice, p. 248. policies; colonialism itself as a politico-economic system of ex roI. Jerry Gambill, "Twenty-one Ways to 'Scalp' an Indian, " 1968 ploitation is not being challenged. speech, in Moody, Indigenous Voice, pp. 293-95, quoted from 4. Alvin 1. Goldman, "Ethics and Cognitive Science," Ethics 103 Akwesasne Notes I, no. 7 (1979). (1993): 337-60. For further reading on the developing dialogue M 102. Fanon, Black Skin. between the two, see ind and Morals: Essays on Ethics and 103· Blackisms, quoted from Mureena, Aboriginal Student News Cognitive Science, ed. Larry May, Marilyn Friedman, and Andy paper, 2, no. 2 (1972), in Moody, Indigenous Voice, pp. 290-92. Clark (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996). 104· Ngiigiwa Thiong'o, Decolonising the Mind: Th e Politics of Lan S. Cf. Frankenberg, White Women, who distinguishes between the older discourse of essentialist racism, "with its emphasis on guage in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1986), race difference understood in hierarchical terms of essential, pp. 3, 12. biological inequality," and the current discourse of essential "sameness," "color-blindness," "a color-evasive and power evasive" language that asserts that "we are all the same under CHAPTER 3. "NATURALIZED" MERITS the skin," which in ignoring the "structural and institutional dimensions of racism" implies that "materially, we have the I. Susan Moller Okin, Women in Western Political Th ought (1979; same chances in U.S. society," so that "any failure to achieve rpt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). is therefore the fault of people of color themselves" (pp. 14, 139). 152 153 NOTES TO PAGES 95-97 NOTES TO PAGES 98-99 6. For examp le, Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders conclude in their 1968), p. 25, quoted in Hartwig, "Aborigines and Racism" in analysis of American attitudes on race that on many issues of Stevens, Racism 2:ro. public policy, " [individual] self-interest turns out to be quite 15. Gordon, Bad Faith, pp. 8, 75, 87. unimportant ." What matter are group interests, "interests that 16. David Stannard, American Holocaust. The standard response to are collective rather than personal," involving perceptions of this accusation is to claim that the vast majority of Native deprivation as relative, "based less in objective condition and Americans were actually killed by disease rather than warfare or more in social comparison," i.e., the notion of "group relative general mistreatment. Stannard replies that: no factual evidence disadvantage ." And races, it turns out, are the most important has been presented to back up this standard claim, and even if social group, it were true, culpability would still remain, along the same lines since race "creates divisions more notable than any other that we hold the Nazis morally responsible for Jewish deaths in American life": "Insofar as interests figure promi nently from disease, malnutrition, and overwork in the ghettos and the in white opinion on race, it is through the threats blacks appear camps. It is estimated by some scholars that more than two to pose to whites' collective well-being,not their personal million Jews actually died from these causes rather than from welfare." Divided by Color, pp. 262-64, 252, 85. 7· Susan V. gassing or shooting. See, for example, Raul Hilberg, Th e Destruc Opotow, ed., "Moral Exclusion and Injustice," TournaI of tion of the European Te ws, rev. and definitive ed., 3 vols. (New Social Issues, 46, special issue (1990): I, quoted in Wilmer, Indigenous Voice. York: Holmes and Meier, 1985); and Arno Mayer, Why Did the 8. See, for a discussion, Cheryl Heavens Not Darken! The "Final Solution " in History, with a 1. Harris, "Whiteness as Property," Harvard new foreword (1988; rpt. New Yo rk: Pantheon, 1990). Nonethe Law Review ro6 (1993): 1709-9 1; and Welchman, less we do of course-as' we should-assign blame for these "Locke on Slavery. " ' 9· Consider deaths to �azi policy, as ultimately causally responsible. For the "racial etiquette" of the Old South, as documented in John Dollard's rival positions in this often angry debate, see David E. Stannard, Caste and Class in a Southern To wn, 3d ed. (1937; "Uniqueness as Denial: The Politics of Genocide Scholarship" rpt. New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1957), and explored, (where these points are made and these sources cited), and Steven say, in William Faulkner's novels and Richard Wright, "The T. Katz, "The Uniqueness of the Holocaust: The Historical Di Ethics of Living Jim Crow" (1937), in Bearing Wi tness: Selections mension," both in Is the Holocaust Unique! Perspectives on from African-American Autobiography in the Twentieth Cen Comparative Genocide, ed. Alan S. Rosenbaum (Boulder, Colo.: tury, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Pantheon Books, Westview Press, 1996): 163-208 and 19-3 8. See also Tzvetan 1991), pp. 39-5 1. Todorov, The Conquest of America: Th e Question of the Other, ro. Kiernan cites the view held by many whites about slavery that trans. Richard Howard (1982; rpt. New Yo rk: Harper and Row, "Negroes have far duller nerves and are less susceptible to pain 1984), esp. chap. 3, "Love," pp. 127-82. than Europeans." Lords, p. 199. 17. Drinnon, Facing West, p. 199· II. Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (1952; rpt. New York: Vintage 18. See Stannard, American Holocaust, pp. 317-18. Books, 1972), pp. 3, 14. 19. E. D. Morel, The Black Man's Burden (1920; rpt. New York: 12. Baldwin, Nobody Knows, p. 172; James Baldwin, The Fire Next Monthly Review Press, 1969). The same estimate is given by Tim e (1963; rpt. New York: Vintage International, 1993), Jan Vansina, professor emeritus of history and anthropology at PP·53-54· the University of Wisconsin. 13· Drinnon, Facing West, pp. 138-39. 20. Stannard, American Holocaust, p. 121. Jonathan Swift in Gulli 14· W. E. H. Stanner, After the Dreaming (Sydney: Boyer Lectures, ver's Travels (1]26) has his protagonist make shoes and a canoe 154 155 NOTES TO PAGES 99-101 NOTES TO PAGES 102-106 out of the skins of thesubhuman/human Yahoos of part 4 (them a hit song in his honor: "The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley." Four selves based on the "Hottentots," the Khoi-khoi people of South Hours, pp. 338-40. For Algeria, see Fanon, Wr etched of the Earth; Africa). The sail of the canoe was "likewise composed of the and Rita Maran, Torture: Th e Role of Ideology in the French Skins of the same Animal; but I made use of the youngest I Algerian Wa r (New York: Praeger, 1989). Maran's conclusion is could get, the older being too tough and thick." Jonathan Swift, that the widespread use of tortUIe by the French troops (in viola Gulliver's Tr avels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), tion of French law) was made possible by the mission civilisa P·284. trice, since, after all, We stern civilization was at stake. In 21. Clive TUInbull, "Tasmania: The Ultimate Solution," in Stevens, Vietnam, by contrast, American troops committing atrocities Racism 2:228-34. simply appealed to the well-established moral principle of the 22. Dower, Wa r without Mercy, chap. 3, "War Hates and War M.G.R.-the "mere gook rule." See Drinnon, Facing West, Crimes," pp. 33-7 3. PP· 454-59· 23. C. 1. R. James, Th e Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and 30. Mayer, Why Did the Heavens! pp. 15-16. Mayer is reporting the San Domingo Revolution, 2d ed. (1938; rpt. New York: Vin rather than endorsing this view, since his own account seeks to tage Books, 1963), pp. 12-13. locate the "Judeocide" in the context of Hitler's anticommunism 24. Ida Wells-Barnett, On Lynchings (New York: Arno Press, 1969); and the extreme violence in EUIope dUIing and after the Great GinzbUIg, roo Ye ars. War. His explanation is a pUIely internalist one, jumping three 25. Daniel R. Headrick, Th e To ols of Empire: Te chnology and Euro centUIies from the Thirty Ye ars' War (1618-48) to the aftermath pean Imperialism in the Nineteenth Century (New Yo rk: Oxford of the Great War, with no attention paid to the racial violence University Press, 1981), pp. 102-3 . The bullet was so named inflicted by Europe on non-EUIope in the interim. But in our because it was manufactured at a British factory at Dum-Dum, own centUIY, just before World War I, there were the examples outside Calcutta. of the Belgian-made holocau�t in the Congo and the Germans' 26. Sven Lindqvist, "Exterminate All the Brutes, " trans. Joan Tate own genocide of the Hereros after the 1904 uprising. (1992; rpt. New York: New Press, 1996), pp. 36-69; and see also 3 I. Simpson, Blowback, p. 5 · Ellis, Machine Gun, chap. 4, "Making the Map Red," pp. 79-109. 32. Aime Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham Lindqvist points out (p. 46) that an additional sixteen thousand (1955; rpt. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 14· Sudanese were wounded in the "battle," and few or none of them 33. Kiernan, Imperialism, p. 101. survived either; being summarily executed in its' aftermath. 34. Robert Harris, Fatherland (1992; rpt. New York: Harper Paper 27. Dower, War without Mercy, pp. 37-38. backs, 1993). 28. Hilberg, Destruction of the European Jews; Ian Hancock, "Re 35. Bartolome de Las Casas, Th e Devastation of the In dies: A Brief sponses to the Porrajmos: The Romani Holocaust," in Rosen Account, trans. Herma Briffault (New York: Seabury Press, baum, Holocaust, pp. 39-64; Christopher Simpson, Blowback: 1974). America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold Wa r 36. Stannard, American Holocaust; Bruni Hofer, Heinz Dieterich, (New York: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1988), chap. 2, "Slaughter and Klaus Meyer, eds., Das Fiinfhundert-iiihrige Reich (Medico on the Eastern Front," pp. 12-26. International, 1990); Lindqvist, "Exterminate All the Brutes, " 29. Quoted in Michael Bilton and Kevin Sim, Four Hours in My Lai pp. 160, 172. (New York: Penguin, 1992), p. 336. One popular Saigon graffito 37. Norman G. Finkelstein, Im age and Reality of the Israel of the time was "Kill a Gook for Calley," and telegrams to the Palestine Conflict (London: Verso, 1995), p. 93· White House ran a hundred to one in his favor. There was also 38. Adolf Hitler, 1932 speech, in Th e Ye ars I932 to I934, vol. I of 156 157 NOTES TO PAGES 113-1 7 NOTES TO PAGES 107-1 13 Hitler: Speeches and Proclamations, r932-r945, ed. Max Do losophy, ed. Fred Lee Hord (Mzee Lasana Okpara) and Jonathan marus, trans. Mary Fran Gilbert (1962; rpt. Wauconda, Ill.: Scott Lee (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995), Bolchazy-Carducci, 1990), p. 96. For this reference, I am indebted pp. 277-78; Fanon, Wr etched, pp. 40-42; Cesaire, Discourse, to Finkelstein, Im age and Reality, pp. 93-94. Finkelstein points pp. 20-�I; "Statement of Protest," in Moody, In digenous out that many of Hitler's biographers emphasizehow frequently Voice, p. 360. he invoked as a praiseworthy model to be emulated the success 50. "Knox was an influential figure in the development of British ful North American extermination of the "red savages." 'race science'-perhaps the most influential at mid-century 39· Locke, Second Tr eatise, pp. 346-49. whom Darwin cites with respect if not absolute approval." Pat 40. David Hume, "Of the Original Contract" (1748), anthologized, rick Brantlinger, "'Dying Races': Rationalizing Genocide in the e.g., in Barker, Social Contract, pp. 147-66. Nineteenth Century, " in Pieterse and Parekh; Th e Decoloniza 41. There is now an American journal with the title Race Traitor: tion of Im agination, p. 47· 4; and Brantlinger, '''Dy A TournaI of the New Abolitionism. For a collection of articles 51. Lindqvist, "Exterminate, " pts. 2 and from it, see Race Traitor, ed. Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey ing Races.'" (New York: Routledge, 1996). 52. Quoted in Cook, Colonial Encounters, p. 1. 42. Maran, Torture, p. 125 n. 30. 53. Kiernan, Imperialism, p. 146. See also Okihiro, chap. 5, "Perils 43· The slogan of Race Traitor. of the Body and Mind, " in Margins and Mainstreams, pp. I I 8-47· 44· Quoted in Drinnon, Facing West, p. I63� from the nineteenth 54. Kiernan, Lords, pp. 171, 237. or, Th e Racial century American novelist Robert Montgomery Bird. 55. Madison Grant, Th e Passing of the Great Race; 1916); Lothrop 45· Chomsky, Ye ar SOl, p. 31. Basis of European History (New York: Scribner's, t White World 46. Roger Moody, Introduction (to the first edition), Indigenous Stoddard, Th e Rising Ti de of Color agains 1920). For a discussion, see Voice, p. xxix. Supremacy (New York: Scribner's, an Idea in America 47· Bilton and Sim, Four Hours, pp. 135-41, 176-77, 204-5 . Thomas F. Gossett, Race: The History of , . IS. Gossett points 48. W. E. B. Du Bois, Th e Souls of Black Folk ( 1903; rpt. New Yo rk: (1963; rpt. New York: Schocken, 1965) chap Great New American Library, 1982). out that Stoddard's book turns up in F. Scott Fitzgerald's Empires. 49· Sitting Bull, quoted in Moody, Indigenous Voice, p. 355; Church Gatsby, disguised as Th e Rise of the Colored ill, Fantasies; David Walker, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of 56. Kiernan, Lords, p. 27. the World (Baltimore, Md.: Black Classic Press, 1993), pp. 33, 57. Quoted in Dower, Wa r without Mercy, p. 160. 48; Du Bois, Souls, pp. 122, 225; W. E. B. Du Bois, "The Souls 58. Kiernan, Lords, pp. 319-20. of White Folk," in W. E. B. Du Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering 59. Ibid., p. 69· Lewis (New York: Henry Holt, 1995), p. 456; Richard Wright, 60. Drinnon, Facing West, pp. 313-14. "The Ethics of Living Jim Crow"; Marcus Garvey, Th e Philoso 61. Dower, Wa r without Mercy, pp. 173-78. phy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, vols. I and 2, ed. Amy 62. Okihiro, "Perils, " pp. 133, 129. Jacques-Garvey ( 1923, 1925; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1992); 63. W. E. B. Du Bois, "To the Nations of the World, " and "The Negro Jawaharlal Nehru, Th e Discovery of In dia (1946; rpt. New York: Problems" ( 1915), both in Lewis, Du Bois, pp. 639, 48. Anchor Books, 1959), quoted in Chomsky, Ye ar SOl, p. 20; Martin 64. Richard Wright, Th e Color Curtain: A Report on the Bandung Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wa it (1963; rpt. New York: Men Conference ( 1956; rpt. Jackson: University Press of Missis tor, 1964), p. 82; Malcolm X, 8 April 1964 speech on "Black sippi, 1994). Revolution," in I Am Because We Are: Readings in Black Phi- 65. See Moody, Indigenous Voice, pp. 498-505. 158 159 NOTES TO PAGES 128-32 NOTES TO PAGES 118-28 chap. !O, "'Global Policy with the 66. Leon Poliakov, The Aryan Myth: A History of Racist and Na tion 78. Dower, War without Mercy, us," pp. 262-90. alist Ideas in Europe, trans. Edmund Howard (1971j rpt. New Yamato Race as Nucle the Left, see, for example, David Harvey, York: Basic Books, 1974), p. 5. 79. For a critique from Origins Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the 67. Douglass, Narrative, p. !O7. The 90). of Cultural Change (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 19 68. Baldwin, Nobody Kn ows, pp. 67-68. of Modernity: 80. Jiirgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse 69. See Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People withoutHi story (Berke MIT Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: ley: University of California Press, 1982). Invention Press, 1987). For critiques, see, for example, Dussel, 70. Young, White Mythologies. and of the Americas; and Outlaw, "Life-Worlds, Modernity, 71. See, for example, Edward Blyden's A Vin dication of the African Philosophical Praxis." Race (1857). 81. O'Neill, "Justice." 72. See Russell et al., The Color Complex. Negro 82. Richard R. Wright Jr. (not the novelist), "What Does the 73. For the long history of the systematic evasion of race by the ce Want in our Democracy?" in 1910-1932: From the Emergen 3 of A most famous theorists of American political culture, see Rogers of the NA.A.C.P. to the Beginning of the New Deal, vol. ited States, M. Smith, "Beyond Tocqueville, Myrdal, and Hartz: The Multi Documentary His tory of the Negro People in the Un 1973), ple Traditions in America," American Political Science Review ed. Herbert Aptheker (Secaucus, N.J.: Citadel Press, 87 (19931: 549-66. 557-58) Smith points out (pp. that "the cumu PP· 285-93· Theory of lative effect of these persistent failures to lay out the full pattern 83. Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Uni of civic exclusion has been to make it all too easy for scholars African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford to conclude that egalitarian inclusiveness has been the norm," versity Press, 1988), pp. xxi, xxiii, 47, 49· Difference It whereas "the exceptions obviously have great claim to be ranked 84. Henry Louis Gates Jr., "Writing 'Race' and the (Chicago: as rival norms." Makes," in Gates, ed., "Race, " Writing, and Difference 1-20. 74. Or at least my preferred version does. As earlier mentioned, University of Chicago Press, 1986), pp. ( Refugees, Racism, racist versions of the "Racial Contract" are possiblej these would 85. Anthony H. Richmond,· Global Apartheid: Oxford University Pre�s, take whites to be intrinsically exploitative beings who are bio and the New World Order (Toronto: logically motivated to set up the contract. 1994). 75. For representative works in legal theory, the original home of the. term, see Delgado, Critical Race Th eory; and Kimberle Cren shaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, eds., Critical Race Th eory: Th e Key Wri tings Th at Formed the Move ment (New York: New Press, 1995). The term, however, is now beginning to be used more widely. 76. Quoted in Dower, War withoutMercy, p. 161. 77. Boston Globe article by the Japan historian Herbert Bix, 19 April 1992, quoted by Chomsky, Ye ar 501, p. 239. See also James Yin and Shi Y�mng, Th e Rape of Nanking: An Undeniable History in Photographs, ed. Ron Dorfman and Shi Young (Chicago: Inno vative Publishing Group, 1996). 161 160 INDEX Abu-Lughod, Janet 1., 72 Barbarians: Grotius on, 64; and Adams, John, 57 Mill's harm principle, 94, Africa. See Dark Continent I49n57; and Roman precedent, Africans. See Blacks; Slavery 23; status of, compared to Alcoff, Linda, I39nII, I43n4I savages, 13, 57, 79. See also Algerian war, 101, I56-57n29 Subpersons Allen, Anita L., 77 Barker, Ernest, I35n2, I37nI Allen, Theodore W., I48n50, Bataille, Gretchen M., I5rn84 I39-40nI3 America, Richard F., I44-45n56 Beccaria, Cesare, 99-100 Amin, Samir, 34 Belgian Congo, 99, 104, I55nI9, Apartheid, 28, 48, 86, ro9 157n30 Aristotle, 53-54, 59, 93 Bell, Derrick, I44n54 Ashcraft, Richard, I49n55 Association, French colonial, Belloc, Hilaire, I39n6 doctrine of, 25-26 Berkhofer, Robert, Jr., I39-40nI3 Atomic bomb, use of, 100 Berlin Conference, 30 Augustine, 54 Bernal, Martin, 44-45 Australian Aborigines: aesthetic Bilton, Michael, I56-57n29, status of, 61; epistemic status I58n47 of, 60; honorary, 108; killing Bird, Robert Montgomery, of, 28-29, 83, 87, 99, I Pn95; I58n44 moral status of, 79-80; Bix, Herbert, I60n77 nonexistence of, 50, 97; protest Black Peril, II4 statement of, 112-1 3; in white Blacks: aesthetic status of, schools, 89 61-62; bodies of, 5 I-53; Baldwin, James, 88, 97, II9 ideological conditioning of, 88; Bandung Conference, II7 as ignorant, 44-46; as 163 INDEX INDEX contract theory, 6, 136-37n9 Blacks (cont.) Herrenvolk ethics); and social Dollard, John, 154n9 (see also Sexual Contract); and invisible, 96-97; Kant on, 71; structure, 123-24; and white Dorfman, Ron, 160nn male political philosophy, killing of, 99, 155nI9, 156n26; cognitive dysfunction, 18-19, Douglass, Frederick, 88, Il9 93-94; and state-of-nature and Locke, 67-68; moral status 94-98 (see also Epistemology: Dower, John W., 151n86, gender equality, 32. See also of, 21, 24-25, 26, 28, 30, 57; of ignorance, prescribed by 156nn22, 27, 159nn57, 61, Women, subordination of oppositional theory of, 131-32; Racial Contract); and whites as 160n76, 161n7 8 Fieldhouse, D. K., 143n38 struggle for respect of, Il9-20 real cognizers, 44-46 Dred Scott v. Sanford, 24-25 Filmer, Robert, 81 Blaut, James M., 34, 143-44n45, Colonialism, European: 13, Drinnon, Richard, 28, 49-50, 80, Finkelstein, Norman G., 144n50 20-21, 29-30, 73; and colonial 97, 146n14, 148n38, 155nI7, 157-58nn37, 38 Blyden, Edward, 160n7 1 contract, 25-26, 83-84; and 156-57n29, 158n44, 159n60 Finley, Moses I., 55 Body, nonwhite: aesthetic education, 89; and Jewish Du Bois, W. E. B., 33, 109, 112, , Frank, Andre Gunder, 34 norming of, 61-62; Holocaust, 103-6; and rise of Il7, 132 Frankenberg, Ruth, 52, 137-38n3, appropriation of, 99, Europe, 34-3 5; and silence of Dudley, Edward, 145n3 153n5 155-56n2o; and body politics, most European ethicists, 94; Dussel, Enrique, 139-40n13, Franklin, Benjamin, 62 120; microspace of, 51-5 3 wars of, against nonwhites, 161n80 Fredrickson, George M., Body, white, 61 85-86, 98-100 139-40nI3, 142-43n37 Bowser, Benjamin P., 141n30, Conrad, Joseph, 45, 47, 105 Ellis, John, 139n6, 156n26 Freedman, Estelle B., 147n30 143n41 Consent: in ideal contract, 3, Ellison, Ralph, 96-97 Friedman, Marilyn, 153n4 Boxer rebellion, 85, Il4 106-7, 136n7; in Racial Engels, Frederick, 19, 94 Brandon, William, 152n9 1 Contract, II, 14, 106-7, Enlightenment, 23, 61, 64, 122, Gambill, Jerry, 88-89 Brantlinger, Patrick, 159nn50, 51 137nI l 129 Garvey, John, 158n41 Brown, John, 109 Contract. See Racial Contract; Epistemology: and cognitive Garvey, Marcus, II2 Browne, Robert S., 145n59 Sexual Contract; Social resistance, Il9-20, 131-32; Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., '161nn83, Brunschwig, Henri, 143n38 contract and epistemological 84 Buck, Pearl, Il5 Cook, Scott B., 146nI l, 159n52 communities, 139nI I; of Genocide. See Holocaust; Bull, Sitting, Ill-12 Coppola, Francis Ford, 47 ignorance, prescribed by Racial Rwanda genocide -Burke, Edmund, 123 Count, Earl, 150n66 Contract, 18-19, 93, 96-98; Gibson, William, 18 Crenshaw, Kimberle, 160n75 and norming of individual, Gierke, Otto, 137nl Cabixi, Daniel, 88 Curtin, Philip D., 23 59-6 1; and norming of space, Ginzburg, Ralph, 152n94, 156n24 Caldwell, Malcolm, 144-45n56 44-46; political, 122-24; and Gobineau, Joseph-Arthur, II7 Calley, William, 101, 156-57n29 Dark Continent, 44-46 standpoint theory, 109-II Goldberg, David Theo, 47-48 Carey-Webb, Allen, 140-4In21 Darwinism, and Social Europe: and atrocities against Goldman, Alvin 1., 95 Carlyle, Thomas, 153n3 Darwinism, 33, 60, Il3, 125, nonwhites, 98-101 (see also Gordon, Lewis R., 51, 97-98 Cesaire, Aime, 103-4, Il2 159n50 Holocaustl; and borderline Gossett, Thomas F., 159n5 5 Chaudhuri, Nupur, 137-38n3 Dashwood, C. J., 152n9 5 Europeans, 78-80, 104; and Gotanda, Neil, 160n75 China, and Chinese, 79, 81, 85, de Beauvoir, Simone, 108 European colonialism (see Gould, Stephen Jay, 148n43 114, 128 Delgado, Richard, 149n59, Colonialism, European); and Grant, Madison, 159n5 5 Chinweizu, 143n38 160n75 European miracle, 33-34, Great Chain of Being, 16 Chomsky, Noam, 105, 108, de Man, Paul, 71-72 74-75 Grotius, Hugo, 64, 94 144n52, 160nn D'Emilio, John, 147n30 Eze, Emmanuel, 70-71 Habermas, Jl1rgen, 70, 129 Christiani ty, colonial role of, Denton, Nancy A., 142-43n37, Hacker, Andrew, 81, 144n54 22-23, 46, 54-5 5 144n54, 150n74 Fanon, Frantz, 48, II2, 140n15, Haitian revolution, 85-86, II4 Churchill, Ward, 112, 139n12 d'Entreves, A. P., 139n7 147nn27, 30, 152nl02, Hall, Ronald, 148n48, 160n72 Clark, Andy, 153n4 . Dieterich, Heinz, 157n36 156-57n29 Hampton, Jean, 135n2, 136n7, Cognition: and concepts, 6-7; Diop, Cheikh Anta, 145-46n8 Feminist theory, 2-3; and and ethics, 94-96 (see also Discovery, Doctrine of, 24 cognition, 123, 139nII; and 137nII 164 165 INDEX INDEX Moral psychology: origins of, in Hancock, Ian, 156n28 Innocent IV, 22 Knox, Robert, II3 ideal contract, 5, IO; origins of, Hanke, Lewis, 140nn I9, 20 Irish, 78-80, 15In84 Kymlicka, Will, 135n2, I38n5 in Racial Contract, IO-I I, 23, Harding, Sandra, 34, 146n9 Isaacs, Harold R., 14In30, Las Casas, Bartolome de, 23, I05, 40, 57, 72, I02; racialized �s Harmand, Jules, 25-26 15In81 : 108 subject for study by cogmuve Harris, Cheryl 1., 154n8 Lawson, Bill E., 77 science, 92-96. See also Harris, Robert, I04 Jackson, Helen, 14In31 Lehman, David, 150n70 Herrenvolk ethics; specific Hartwig, M. C., 147n26, Jamaican Morant Bay uprising, Lessnoff, Michael, 135n2, 137nI contracts 154-5 5n14 85 Lindqvist, Sven, 105, 156n26, Morel, E. D., 155nI9 Hartz, Louis, 142n3 5 James, C. 1. R., 156n23 159n51 Morrison, Toni, 58, 76 Harvey, David, 16In79 Jameson, Fredric, 74 Locke, John, 5; and cognition, Mosse, George 1., 61, 70 Headrick, Daniel R., 156n25 Japan, and Japanese, 31, 36; as 123; and expropriation and Mudimbe, Va lentin Y. , 44, 46, Healy, David, 143n38 honorary whites, 80-8 1; and slavery contracts, 67-68; I 39-4011I 3 Hegel, G. W. F., and postwar victory plans of, 128; Herrenvolk Lockeanism, 96; Miihlmann, Wilhelm, 150n66 Hegelianism, 58, 82, 94 as threat to global white and natural law, 17, 86-87; Murray, Charles, 144n53 Heidegger, Martin, 71-72 supremacy, II5-16, 127-28; objectivist and egalitarian My Lai, 47, 101, I08, 156-57n29 Hereros, 85-86, 157n30 victory over Russia, 114, II6; . morality in, 14-16; and pnvate Herrenvolk democracies, 28 war crimes against, 99-IOO; property, 31-32; and ta�it Herrenvolk ethics, 16-17, 23, 27, war crimes of, 127-28; and consent, 72, 107; unwntten NAACP (National Association 96, 108, IIO-I I Ye llow Racial Contract, books of, 94; voluntary for the Advancement of Herrnstein, Richard J., 144n53 127-28 consent in, 81-82 Colored People), 15 1-5 2n90 Hilberg, Raul, 15511I6, 156n28 Jefferson, Thomas, 28, 62 L6pez, Ian F. Haney, 148n50 Native Americans: education of, Hitler, Adolf, I05-6, 157-58n3 8 Jennings, Francis, 49, 54-5 5, 64 Lovejoy, Arthur 0., 139nlo 88-89; epistemic status of, 59; Hobbes, Thomas, 5, 12; and Jews: as borderline Europeans, Lynching, 52, 86-87, 100 genocide of, 28, 83, 98-99, cognition, 123; and 78-80, I04; genocide of, 15511I6, 157-58n38; Hitler on, conventionalist morality, IOO-IOI, 155nI6 (see also Macleod, Don, 108 157-58n38; Hobbes on, 65-66; 14-1 5, 139n6; and natural law, Holocaust: debate over Malcolm X, I I 2 Jefferson on, 28; Kant on, 71; 17; racialized state of nature uniqueness of Jewish) Maran, Rita, 156-57n29, 158n42 Locke on, 67; moral status of, in, 47, 64-67; unsafe state of Jones, Eric, 143-44n45 Marketti, James, 145n58 21-24, 28, 30, 46, 57, 71, nature in, 32 Jordan, Winthrop D., 61-62, 80 Marx, Karl, and Marxism, 33, 82, 14In3I; nonexistence of, Hoetink, Harmannus, 61 94, 121, 123, 131 49-50, 97; numbers of, 142n3 5, Hofer, Bruni, 157n36 Kant, Immanuel, 5; as father of Massey, Douglas S., 142-43n37, 146n21 Holocaust: African (see Slavery: the modern concept of race, 144n54, 150n74 Naturalized account, 5-7, 91-92, death toll of African); 69-72, 150n66; and Herrenvolk May, Larry, 15 3n4 1:1.0-24 American (see Native Kantianism, 96; objectivist and Mayer, Arno, I02-3, 155nI6, Natural law, 15-17, 46 Americans: genocide of); egalitarian morality in, 14-16; 157n30 Nazi policy: and borderline debate over uniqueness of. unwritten books of, 94; and Mendus, Susan, 147n31 Europeans, 78-80, 100-101; Jewish, 102-6, 155nI6, 157n30; women, 53. See also Persons Mestizaje, Latin American, 30, and debate over uniqueness of Jewish, 100-101, I I? Katz, Steven T., 155nI6 143n41 Jewish Holocaust, 102-6, Horsman, Reginald, 142n34 Kellner, Douglas, 146nI5 Meyer, Klaus, 157n36 155nI6, 157n30; and Kantian Hulme, Peter, 139-40nI3 Kiernan, Victor G., 35, 86, I04, Mill, John Stuart, 60, 94, 149n57, theory, 72; and race science, Hume, David, 59, 94, 107 II4-15, 14onI6, 143nn38, 40, 153n3 125 144n5 I, 154nlo, 159nn58, 59 Miner, Earl, 15 In82 Nehru, Jawaharlal, II2 Ignatiev, Noel, 15In85, 158n41 Kinder, Donald R., 144n54, Minority Rights Group, 143n41 Nonwhites. See Subpersons Imperialism. See Colonialism, 154n6 Montesquieu, 97 Novak, Maximillian E., 145n3 European King, Martin Luther, Jr., II2 Moody, Roger, 135n3, 158n46, Nozick, Robert, 77 Indian Mutiny, 85-86 Kipling, Rudyard, 57 159n65 167 166 INDEX INDEX Shapiro, Thomas M., 37-38 Off-whites. See Europe: and Price, A. Grenfell, 142n35, Rape of Nanking, 128 Signifyin/g), 131-32 borderline Europeans 152n95 Rawls, John, 4-5, 10, 19, 70, 77, Okihiro, Gary Y., II6-17, 136n5 Silet, Charles 1. P., 139-40nI3 Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas, 108 Sim, Kevin, 156-57n29, 158n47 151n87, I59n53 Race: centrality of, to moral and Reparations, 37-40 Simpson, Christopher, 156n28, Okin, Susan Moller, 136-37n9, political theorizing of Requerimiento, 22-23 152nl subpersons, IIO-13; as 157n3 1 Retamar, Roberto Fernandez, Slavery: contract, 24-25, 67-68, Oliver, Melvin 1., 37-38 constructed, II, 63, 125-27; 139-40nI3 Omdurman, battle of, 100, and critical race theory, 83-84, 131; contribution of Reynolds, Henry, 142n35 156n26 125-27; and disparities in African, to industrial Rhodes, Cecil, II4 O'Neill, Onora, 130, 150-5 1n76 wealth, 36-40; evasion of, in revolution, 34; death toll of Richmond, Anthony H., 16m85 Opotow, Susan v.,96 political theory, 160n73; and African, 83, 99; and education Rodney, Wa lter, 34 Outlaw, Lucius, Jr., 56, 161n80 group interests, 154n6; as of slaves, 88; Locke on, 67-68; Roediger, David, 137-38n3 normative rather than deviant, Montesquieu on, 97; moral Romani, 101 14, 26-27, 56-57, 93, 122; and improvement of Africans PacificWar, 127-28 Roosevelt, Theodore, 50 origins of racial oppression, 2 I, through, 94; as natural, 53-54; Pagden, Anthony, 21, 140nl 6, Rousseau, Jean-Jacques: as cited 62-63; and racial etiquette, punishments of, 100; 141n24, 143n38 by Harmand, 26; and ideal 52-53, 154n9; and racism as relationship to freedom of, 58; Pal, Radhabinod, 100 contract, 69; and naturalized bad faith, 98; as replacing and seasoning of slaves, 84 bogus contract, s; Parekh, Bhikhu, 153n2 religious exclusion, 23, 54-5 5; transformation of human Slavs, 78, 101 Pateman, Carole, 6, 19, and subject races, 16-17, 57; population in, 12; white and Smith, Adam, 35, 38 136-37ll9 traitors, 107-9, 126-27. See nonwhite savages in, 68-69 Smith, Rogers M., 160n73 Patterson, Orlando, 58 also Persons; Racial Contract; Russell, Kathy, 148n48, 160n72 Snowden, Frank M., Jr., 63 Paul III, 22 Space in Racial Contract; Rwanda genocide, 129 Social contract: economic, 31-32; Pearce, Roy Harvey, 43, 148n42 Subpersons; Transformation of Ryan, Michael, 146n15 epistemological, 9, 17-18; Peller, Gary, 160n75 humans; Whites; White golden age of, s, 63-64; Persons: centrality of, in modern supremacy hyp othetical, normative, and moral theory, 15-16, 55-56; Racial Contract /actual): as Said, Edward W., 27, 58, ideal, s, 10, 76, 81-82, 120-22, created as white, by Racial colonial contract, 25-26, 57, 139-401ll 3, 143n39 Contract, II, 63-64; relation 83-84; constructivist and Sanders, Lynn M., 144n54, 154n6 129-30; moral, 9-10, 14-16; of, to subpersons, 16-17, essentialist versions of, 63, 78, Sanders, Ronald, 145n2, 146n13 naturalized, descriptive, and 56-59. See also Subpersons; 125-27, 160n74; different Sartre, Jean-Paul, 20, 98, 108 nonideal, 5-7; political, 9-10; Transformation of humans; colors of, 127-29; exploitation Savages: and Doctrine of relation to Racial Contract, Whites as motivation fo!, I I; as Discovery, 24; Hobbes on, 63-72; as theory, 3-7; updated Philosophy, whiteness of, 1-2, 4, expropriation contract, 24, 57, 65-66; Irish as, 79; Native use qf, to explain the state, 92-93, 121-22, 124, 135nl 83, 141n31; repudiation of, Americans as, 24, 28, 65, 89; 136n7, 137nII Pieterse, Jan P. Nederveen, 106-9; as slavery contract, as outside moral and legal South Africa, 28-29, 48, 50, 86, sanctions, 64; relationship of, 145n2, 152nn9 1, 99 24-25, 83-84; statement of, II 109 to wild space, 42-43; Rousseau Pittock, A. Barrie, 147n23 Racial Contract, theory of: Space, in ideal contract, 41-42. Plato, IS, 93, 123 on, 68-69; status of, compared motivation for, 3-7; and See also State of nature Poliakov, Leon, 117-18, 150n66 to barbarians, 13, 57, 79; as postmodernism, 129; relation Space, in Racial Contract, 41-43; Popes, and papal of, to oppositional black taking the jungle with them, epistemological norming of, pronouncements, 20, 22-23, political theory, 131-32; as 47-48, 86-87; and white settler 44-46; local norming of, 100 this-worldly, 129-3 I state, 13. See also Subpersons 47-49, 50-5 1; macrolevel Postmodernism, III, 129 Racial polity. See White Schindler, Oskar, 108 norming of, 43-47, 49-50, Potter, Elizabeth, 139nII supremacy Sexual Contract, 6, 19, 62, 74-75; micro level Pratt, Mary Louise, 43 Raleigh, Walter, 65 136-37n9 168 169 INDEX INDEX political theory 128 mainstream Space (cont.) Thagard, Paul, 137nIO Wannsee Protocol, of (see also Epistemology: . norming of, 5 I-53, 87; moral Thiong'o, Ngiigi wa, 89 Ward, Russel, 147n26 nce, prescribed by RacIal 28 ignora norming of, 46-53. See also Thomas, Kendall, 160n7 5 Washington, George, 25; Contract), 1-2, 31, 77, 121- Savages; State of nature Thompson, Hugh, 108 Welchman, Jennifer, 149-50n6I, as political, 1-3, 7, 12-14, Spain, and Spanish, 22-23, Thompson, Leonard, 147n24 154n8 76-77, 82-83; as writing itself 29-30, 35, 44, 98 Todorov, Tzvetan, 155nI6 Wells-Barnett, Ida, 156n24 out of existence, 73-7 7, Stannard, David E., 105, 142n32, Transformation of humans: by West, Cornel, 147n3 5 Il7-18, 153n5 I46n2I, 155nnI6, 18, aesthetic norming, 61-62j by White, Hayden, 43, 54 White wealth. See Race: and 155-56n20 cognitive norming, 59-6 1; in White life, greater value of, disparities in wealth Stanner, W. E. H., 154-5 5nI4 ideal contract, 9-10, 12; 85-86, 10 1-2 See Wicker, Tom, 144n54 State of nature: and through ideological White moral psychology. Wild Man, 42-43, 54 appropriation, 31-32j conditioning, 87-89; by moral! Moral psychology See State of nature 126-27 Wildness. Hobbesian, 64-67; in ideal legal norming, 55-59; in Racial White renegades, 107-9, Williams, Eric, 34 contract, 3, 10, 12, 42, 46-47; Contract, II-I3, 53-62, 63, 78; and changing definitions Whites: Patricia J., 76-77 and Williams, as incarnated in (wildfjungled) through violence, 83-84. See of whiteness, 78; class -22, Williams, Robert A., Jr., 21 bodies of subpersons, 42-43, also Persons; Subpersons gender differentiation among, 24, 64, 67 47-48, 5 I-5 3, 83, 87j Lockean, Treaty of Tordesillas, 30 137-38n3; Hobbes on, 66-67; Wilmer, Franke, 49 67j in Racial Contract, 13, 43, Tucker, William H., I48n43 as invented by Racial 0n72 Wilson, Midge, I48n48, 16 on, 46-47, 86-87j Rousseauean, Tully, James, 149n5 3 Contract, II, 13, 63; Kant Wolf, Eric R., 160n69 68-69 Turnbull, Clive, 156n2 1 71; Locke on, 67; and of, 19-20, . Women, subordination Steinberg, Stephen, 144n54, Twain, Mark, 108 to oppositional relationshIp 62-63, 93-94, 137-38n3 150n73 20-21, 23, nonwhites, 16-17, Carter G., 88 United States: and Americanness Woodson, Stember, Charles Herbert, as the people who 43n37 55-5 9; woodward, C. Vann, 142- 147n30 as whiteness, 58-5 9, 62; 3, 27, 49-50; really are people, , Richard, 112, II7, 154n9 discrimination in, 37-39, Wright Stevens, F. S., 142n35 of, 32-33, 36-40, n82 p�ivileging Wright, Richard R., Jr., 16r Stoddard, Lothrop, 159n5 5 48-49, 52, 75; immigration to, 73-74; as rulers (see White Story, Joseph, 24 79, 8Ij and violence against race. See Japan, and supremacy). See also Persons; Yamato Strobel, Margaret, 137-38n3 nonwhites, 84-85, 86-87, Japanese Transformation of humans 99-100, II6j as white settler 114 Sublimis Deus, 22 states, 12-1 3, Yellow Peril, state, 28-29, 30, 46, 49-50 97, White settler Subpersons: aesthetic status of, , Yin, James, 160n77 28-29 See also 6n4 61-62j created by Racial 14In31. Native de Young, Iris Marion, 13 White supremacy: as global, Contract, II, 16-I7, 20j Americans; Slavery Young, Robert, 139-40nI3, facto, 36-37, 73-74; as global, epistemic status of, 59-6 Ij Utilitarianism, 55; Herrenvolk, 160n70 de jure, 20-21, 27, 29-3 1, 73, ideological conditioning of, 96 Young, Shi, 160n77 113-15; as invisible in 87-89j and Kantian theory, Valladolid Conference, 30 69-72j moral status of, 56-59; Van den Berghe, Pierre 1., 23, 28 personal struggles of, I 18-20j Vansina, Jan, 155nI9 political struggles of, II5 - 16 j Vietnam, and Vietnam war, 47, violence against, 83-87j voices 101, II6, 156-57n29 of, I II-I3. See also Persons; Violence, to enforce Racial Transformation of humans Contract, 28-30, 83-87, Swift, Jonathan, 155-56n20 98-101. See also Holocaust Swinton, David H., 145nn5 7, 59 Vo ltaire, 60 Takaki, Ronald, 142n34 Walker, David, 112 Taney, Roger, 24-25 Wallerstein, Immanuel, 34 171 1 70