3

“NATURALIZED” MERITS

Finally, I want to point out the merits of this model as a “naturalized” account of the actual historical record, one which has explanatory as well as normative aspirations. Arguably, we are in a better position to bring about the (supposedly) desired political ideals if we can identify and explain the obstacles to their realization. In tracking the actual moral consciousness of most white agents, in depicting the actual political realities nonwhites have always recognized, the theory of the “Racial Contract” shows its superiority to the ostensibly abstract and general, but actually “white,” social contract.

The Racial Contract 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 with ideals also. But in the first two chapters of this book, I have spent a great deal of time talking about the actual historical record and the actual norms and ideals that have prevailed in recent global history. I have been giving what, in the current jargon of philosophers, would be called a “naturalized” account, rather than an idealized account. And that is why I said from the beginning that I preferred the classic use of contract, which is seeking to describe and explain as well as to prescribe. But if ethics and political philosophy are focused on norms we want to endorse (ideal ideals, so to speak), what really was the point of this exercise? What would be the point of “naturalizing” ethics, which is explicitly the realm of the ideal?

My suggestion is that by looking at the actual historically dominant moral/political consciousness and the actual historically dominant moral/political ideals, we are better enabled to prescribe for society than by starting from ahistorical abstractions. In other words, the point is not to endorse this deficient consciousness and these repugnant ideals but, by recognizing their past and current influence and power and identifying their sources, to correct for them. Realizing a better future requires not merely admitting the ugly truth of the past—and present—but understanding the ways in which these realities were made invisible, acceptable to the white population. We want to know—both to describe and to explain—the circumstances that actually blocked achievement of the ideal raceless ideals and promoted instead the naturalized nonideal racial ideals. We want to know what went wrong in the past, is going wrong now, and is likely to continue to go wrong in the future if we do not guard against it.

Now by its relative silence on the question of race, conventional moral theory would lead the unwary student with no experience of the world—the visiting anthropologist from Galactic Central, say—to think that deviations from the ideal have been contingent, random, theoretically opaque, or not worth the trouble to theorize. Such a visitor might conclude that all people have generally tried to live up to the norm but, given inevitable human frailty, have sometimes fallen short. But this conclusion is, in fact, simply false. Racism and racially structured discrimination have not been deviations from the norm; they have been the norm, not merely in the sense of de facto statistical distribution patterns but, as I emphasized at the start, in the sense of being formally codified, written down and proclaimed as such. From this perspective, the Racial Contract has underwritten the social contract, so that duties, rights, and liberties have routinely been assigned on a racially differentiated basis. To understand the actual moral practice of past and present, one needs not merely the standard abstract discussions of, say, the conflicts in people’s consciences between self-interest and empathy with others but a frank appreciation of how the Racial Contract creates a racialized moral psychology. Whites will then act in racist ways while thinking of themselves as acting morally. In other words, they will experience genuine cognitive difficulties in recognizing certain behavior patterns as racist, so that quite apart from questions of motivation and bad faith they will be morally handicapped simply from the conceptual point of view in seeing and doing the right thing. As I emphasized at the start, the Racial Contract prescribes, as a condition for membership in the polity, an epistemology of ignorance.

Feminist political philosophers have documented the striking uniformity of opinion among the classic male theorists on the subordination of women, so that as polar as their positions may be on other political or theoretical questions, there is common agreement on this. Plato the idealist and Aristotle the materialist agree that women should be subordinate, as do Hobbes the absolutist and Rousseau the radical democrat.1 With the Racial Contract, as we have seen, there is a similar pattern, among the contractarians Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, and their theoretical adversaries—the anticontractarian Hume, who denies that any race other than the white one has produced a civilization; the utilitarian Mill, who denies the applicability of his antipaternalist “harm principle” to “barbarians” and maintains that they need European colonial despotism; the historicist G. W. F. Hegel, who denies that Africa has any history and suggests that blacks were morally improved through being enslaved.2 So the Racial Contract is “orthogonal” to the varying directions of their thought, the common assumption they can all take for granted, no matter what their theoretical divergences on other questions. There is also the evidence of silence. Where is Grotius’s magisterial On Natural Law and the Wrongness of the Conquest of the Indies, Locke’s stirring Letter concerning the Treatment of the Indians, Kant’s moving On the Personhood of Negroes, Mill’s famous condemnatory Implications of Utilitarianism for English Colonialism, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels’s outraged Political Economy of Slavery?3 Intellectuals write about what interests them, what they find important, and—especially if the writer is prolific—silence constitutes good prima facie evidence that the subject was not of particular interest. By their failure to denounce the great crimes inseparable from the European conquest, or by the halfheartedness of their condemnation, or by their actual endorsement of it in some cases, most of the leading European ethical theorists reveal their complicity in the Racial Contract.

What we need to do, then, is to identify and learn to understand the workings of a racialized ethic. How were people able consistently to do the wrong thing while thinking that they were doing the right thing? In part, it is a problem of cognition and of white moral cognitive dysfunction. As such, it can potentially be studied by the new research program of cognitive science. For example, a useful recent survey article on “naturalizing” ethics by Alvin Goldman suggests three areas in which cognitive science may have implications for moral theory: (a) the “cognitive materials” used in moral thinking, such as the logic of concept application, and their possible determination by the cultural environment of the agent; (b) judgments about subjective welfare and how they may be affected by comparing oneself with others; and (c) the role of empathy in influencing moral feeling.4

Now it should be obvious that if racism is as central to the polity as I have argued, then it will have a major shaping effect on white cognizers in all these areas. (a) Because of the intellectual atmosphere produced by the Racial Contract, whites will (in phase one) take for granted the appropriateness of concepts legitimizing the racial order, privileging them as the master race and relegating nonwhites to subpersonhood, and later (in phase two) the appropriateness of concepts that derace the polity, denying its actual racial structuring.5 (b) Because of the reciprocally dependent definitions of superior whiteness and inferior nonwhiteness, whites may consciously or unconsciously assess how they’re doing by a scale that depends in part on how nonwhites are doing, since the essence of whiteness is entitlement to differential privilege vis-à-vis nonwhites as a whole.6 (c) Because the Racial Contract requires the exploitation of nonwhites, it requires in whites the cultivation of patterns of affect and empathy that are only weakly, if at all, influenced by nonwhite suffering. In all three cases, then, there are interesting structures of moral cognitive distortion that could be linked to race, and one hopes that this new research program will be exploring some of them (though the past record of neglect does not give any great reason for optimism).

This partitioned moral concern can usefully be thought of as a kind of “Herrenvolk ethics,” with the principles applicable to the white subset (the humans) mutating suitably as they cross the color line to the nonwhite subset (the less-than­humans). (Susan Opotow has done a detailed study of moralities of exclusion, in which certain “individuals or groups are perceived as outside the boundary in which moral values, rules, and considerations of fairness apply”; so this would be a racial version of such a morality.)7 One could then generate, variously, a Herrenvolk Lockeanism, where whiteness itself becomes property, nonwhites do not fully, or at all, own themselves, and nonwhite labor does not appropriate nature;8 a Herrenvolk Kantianism, where nonwhites count as subpersons of considerably less than infinite value, required to give racial deference rather than equal respect to white persons, and white self-respect, correspondingly, is conceptually tied to this nonwhite deference;9 and a Herrenvolk utilitarianism, where nonwhites count distributively for less than one and are deemed to suffer less acutely than whites.10 The actual details of the basic values of the particular normative theory (property rights, personhood and respect, welfare) are not important, since all theories can be appropriately adjusted internally to bring about the desired outcome: what is crucial is the theorist’s adherence to the Racial Contract.

Being its primary victims, nonwhites have, of course, always been aware of this peculiar schism running through the white psyche. Many years ago, in his classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison had his nameless black narrator point out that whites must have a peculiar reciprocal “construction of [their] inner eyes” which renders black Americans invisible, since they “refuse to see me.” The Racial Contract includes an epistemological contract, an epistemology of ignorance. “Recognition is a form of agreement,” and by the terms of the Racial Contract, whites have agreed not to recognize blacks as equal persons. Thus the white pedestrian who bumps into the black narrator at the start is a representative figure, somebody “lost in a dream world.” “But didn’t he control that dream world—which, alas, is only too real!—and didn’t he rule me out of it? And if he had yelled for a policeman, wouldn’t I have been taken for the offending one? Yes, yes, yes!”11 Similarly, James Baldwin argues that white supremacy “forced [white] Americans into rationalizations so fantastic that they approached the pathological,” generating a tortured ignorance so structured that one cannot raise certain issues with whites “because even if I should speak, no one would believe me,” and paradoxically, “they would not believe me precisely because they would know that what I said was true.”12

Evasion and self-deception thus become the epistemic norm. Describing America’s “national web of self-deceptions” on race, Richard Drinnon cites as an explanation Montesquieu’s wry observation about African enslavement: “It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians.” The founding ideology of the white settler state required the conceptual erasure of those societies that had been there before: “For [a writer of the time] to have consistently regarded Indians as persons with a psychology of their own would have upended his world. It would have meant recognizing that ‘the state of nature’ really had full-fledged people in it and that both it and the cherished ‘civil society’ had started out as lethal figments of the European imagination.”13 An Australian historian comments likewise on the existence of “something like a cult of forgetfulness practised on a national scale” with respect to Aborigines.14 Lewis Gordon, working in the existential phenomenological tradition, draws on Sartrean notions to argue that in a world structured around race, bad faith necessarily becomes pervasive: “In bad faith, I flee a displeasing truth for a pleasing falsehood. I must convince myself that a falsehood is in fact true.... Under the model of bad faith, the stubborn racist has made a choice not to admit certain uncomfortable truths about his group and chooses not to challenge certain comfortable falsehoods about other people.... Since he has made this choice, he will resist whatever threatens it.... The more the racist plays the game of evasion, the more estranged he will make himself from his ‘inferiors’ and the more he will sink into the world that is required to maintain this evasion.”15 In the ideal polity one seeks to know oneself and to know the world; here such knowledge may be dangerous.

Correspondingly, the Racial Contract also explains the actual astonishing historical record of European atrocity against nonwhites, which quantitatively and qualitatively, in numbers and horrific detail, cumulatively dwarfs all other kinds of ethnically/racially motivated massacres put together: la leyenda negra—the black legend—of Spanish colonialism, defamatory only in its invidious singling out of the Spanish, since it would later be emulated by Spain’s envious competitors, the Dutch, French, and English, seeking to create legends of their own; the killing through mass murder and disease of 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Americas, with recent revisionist scholarship, as mentioned, having dramatically increased the estimates of the preconquest population, so that—at roughly 100 million victims—this would easily rank as the single greatest act of genocide in human history;16 the infamous slogans, now somewhat embarrassing to a generation living under a different phase of the Contract—“Kill the nits, and you’ll have no lice!” as American cavalryman John House advised when he shot a Sauk infant at the Wisconsin Bad Axe massacre,17 and “The only good injun is a dead injun”; the slow-motion Holocaust of African slavery, which is now estimated by some to have claimed thirty to sixty million lives in Africa, the Middle Passage, and the “seasoning” process, even before the degradation and destruction of slave life in the Americas;18 the casual acceptance as no crime, just the necessary clearing of the territory of pestilential “varmints” and “critters,” of the random killing of stray Indians in America or Aborigines in Australia or Bushmen in South Africa; the massively punitive European colonial retaliations after native uprisings; the death toll from the direct and indirect consequences of the forced labor of the colonial economies, such as the millions (original estimates as high as ten million) who died in the Belgian Congo as a result of Leopold II’s quest for rubber, though strangely it is to Congolese rather than European savagery that a “heart of darkness” is attributed;19 the appropriation of the nonwhite body, not merely metaphorically (as the black body can be said to have been consumed on the slave plantations to produce European capital), but literally, whether as utilitarian tool or as war trophy. As utilitarian tools, Native Americans were occasionally skinned and made into bridle reins (for example by U.S. President Andrew Jackson),20 Tasmanians were killed and used as dog meat,21 and in World War II Jewish hair was made into cushions, and (not as well known) Japanese bones were made by some Americans into letter openers. As war trophies, Indian scalps, Vietnamese ears, and Japanese ears, gold teeth, and skulls were all collected (Life magazine carried a photograph of a Japanese skull being used as a hood ornament on a U.S. military vehicle, and some soldiers sent skulls home as presents for their girlfriends).22 To these we can add the fact that because of the penal reforms advocated by Cesare Beccaria and others, torture was more or less eliminated in Europe by the end of the eighteenth century, while it continued to be routinely practiced in the colonies and on the slave plantations—whippings, castrations, dismemberments, roastings over slow fires, being smeared with sugar, buried up to the neck, and then left for the insects to devour, being filled with gunpowder and then blown up, and so on;23 the fact that in America the medieval tradition of the auto-da-fé, the public burning, survived well into the twentieth century, with thousands of spectators sometimes gathering for the festive occasion of the southern barbecue, bringing children, picnic baskets, etc., and subsequently fighting over the remains to see who could get the toes or the knucklebones before adjourning to a celebratory dance in the evening;24 the fact that the rules of war at least theoretically regulating intra-European combat were abandoned or suspended for non-Europeans, so that by papal edict the use of the crossbow was initially forbidden against Christians but permitted against Islam, the dumdum (hollow-point) bullet was originally prohibited within Europe but used in the colonial wars,25 the machine gun was brought to perfection in the late nineteenth century in subjugating Africans armed usually only with spears or a few obsolete firearms, so that in the glorious 1898 British victory over the Sudanese at Omdurman, for example, eleven thousand black warriors were killed at the cost of forty-eight British soldiers, a long-distance massacre in which no Sudanese “got closer than three hundred yards from the British positions,”26 the atomic bomb was used not once but twice against the civilian population of a yellow people at a time when military necessity could only questionably be cited (causing Justice Radhabinod Pal, in his dissenting opinion in the Tokyo War Crimes Trials, to argue that Allied leaders should have been put on trial with the Japanese).27 We can mention the six million Jews killed in the camps and ghettos of Europe and the millions of members of other “inferior” races (Romani, Slavs) killed there and by the Einsatzgruppen on the Eastern Front by the Nazi rewriting of the Racial Contract to make them too nonwhites;28 the pattern of unpunished rape, torture, and massacre in the twentieth-century colonial/neocolonial and in part racial wars of Algeria (during the course of which about one million Algerians, or one-tenth of the country’s population, perished) and Vietnam, illustrated by the fact that Lieutenant William Calley was the only American convicted of war crimes in Vietnam and, for his role in directing the mass murder of five hundred women, children, and old men (or, more cautiously and qualifiedly, “Oriental human beings,” as the deposition put it), was sentenced to life at hard labor but had his sentence quickly commuted by presidential intervention to “house arrest” at his Fort Benning bachelor apartment, where he remained for three years before being freed on parole, then and now doubtless a bit puzzled by the fuss, since, as he told the military psychiatrists examining him, “he did not feel as if he were killing humans but rather that they were animals with whom one could not speak or reason.”29

For these and many other horrors too numerous to list, the ideal Kantian (social contract) norm of the infinite value of all human life thus has to be rewritten to reflect the actual (Racial Contract) norm of the far greater value of white life, and the corresponding crystallization of feelings of vastly differential outrage over white and nonwhite death, white and nonwhite suffering. If looking back (or sometimes just looking across), one wants to ask “But how could they?” the answer is that it is easy once a certain social ontology has been created. Bewilderment and puzzlement show that one is taking for granted the morality of the literal social contract as a norm; once one begins from the Racial Contract, the mystery evaporates. The Racial Contract thus makes White moral psychology transparent; one is not continually being “surprised” when one examines the historical record, because this is the psychology the contract prescribes. (The theory of the Racial Contract is not cynical, because cynicism really implies theoretical breakdown, a despairing throwing up of the hands and a renunciation of the project of understanding the world and human evil for a mystified yearning for a prelapsarian man. The “Racial Contract” is simply realist—willing to look at the facts without flinching, to explain that if you start with this, then you will end up with that.)

Similarly, the “Racial Contract” makes the Jewish Holocaust—misleadingly designated as the Holocaust—comprehensible, distancing itself theoretically both from positions that would render it cognitively opaque, inexplicably sui generis, and from positions that would downplay the racial dimension and assimilate it to the undifferentiated terrorism of German fascism. From the clouded perspective of the Third World, the question in Arno Mayer’s title Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? betrays a climatic Eurocentrism, which fails to recognize that the blue skies were only smiling on Europe. The influential view he cites (not his own) is typical: “Prima facie the catastrophe which befell the Jews during the Second World War was unique in its own time and unprecedented in history. There are strong reasons to believe that the victimization of the Jews was so enormous and atrocious as to be completely outside the bounds of all other human experience. If that is the case, what the Jews were subjected to will forever defy historical reconstruction and interpretation, let alone comprehension.”30 But this represents an astonishing white amnesia about the actual historical record. Likewise, the despairing question of how there can be poetry after Auschwitz evokes the puzzled nonwhite reply of how there could have been poetry before Auschwitz, and after the killing fields in America, Africa, Asia. The standpoint of Native America, black Africa, colonial Asia, has always been aware that European civilization rests on extra-European barbarism, so that the Jewish Holocaust, the “Judeocide” (Mayer), is by no means a bolt from the blue, an unfathomable anomaly in the development of the West, but unique only in that it represents use of the Racial Contract against Europeans. I say this in no way to diminish its horror, of course, but rather to deny its singularity, to establish its conceptual identity with other policies carried out by Europe in non-Europe for hundreds of years, but using methods less efficient than those made possible by advanced mid-twentieth-century industrial society.

In the twilight world of the Cold War, the term “blowback” was used in American spy jargon to refer to “unexpected—and negative—effects at home that result from covert operations overseas,” particularly from (what were called) “black” operations of assassination and government overthrow.31 A case can be made for seeing the “blowback” from the overseas (“white”) operations of European conquest, settlement, slavery, and colonialism as consolidating in the modern European mind a racialized ethic that, in combination with traditional anti­Semitism, eventually boomeranged, returning to Europe itself to facilitate the Jewish Holocaust. Forty years ago, in his classic polemic Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire pointed out the implicit double standard in European “outrage” at Nazism: “It is Nazism, yes, but . . . before [Europeans] were its victims, they were its accomplices; that they tolerated that Nazism before it was inflicted on them, that they absolved it, shut their eyes to it, legitimized it, because, until then, it had been applied only to non-European peoples.... [Hitler’s crime is] the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the blacks of Africa.”32 The Racial Contract continues, with a truly grisly irony, to manifest itself even in the condemnation of the consequences of the Racial Contract, since the racial mass murder of Europeans is placed on a different moral plane than the racial mass murder of non-Europeans. Similarly, Kiernan argues that King Leopold’s Congo “cast before it the shadow that was to turn into Hitler’s empire inside Europe.... Attitudes acquired during the subjugation of the other continents now reproduced themselves at home.”33 So in this explanatory framework, unlike the subsumption of the death camps under a deraced fascism, the racial dimension and the establishment of Jewish nonwhite subpersonhood are explanatorily crucial. If, as earlier argued, the Jews were by this time basically “off-white” rather than “nonwhite,” assimilated into the population of persons, the Nazis could be said to be in local violation of the global Racial Contract by excluding from the club of Whiteness groups already grudgingly admitted, by doing to Europeans (even borderline ones) what (by then) was only supposed to be done to non-Europeans.

Postwar writings on this subject by Europeans, both in Europe and in North America, have generally sought to block these conceptual connections, representing Nazi policy as more deviant than it actually was, for example, in the Historikerstreit, the German debate over the uniqueness of the Jewish Holocaust. The dark historical record of European imperialism has been forgotten. Robert Harris’s chilling 1992 novel Fatherland, a classic in the alternative-worlds science fiction genre, depicts a future in which the Nazis have won World War II and have eradicated from the record their killing of the Jews, so that only scattered evidence survives.34 But in certain respects we live in an actual, nonalternative world where the victors of racial killing really did win and have reconstructed and falsified the record accordingly. Holocaust denial and Holocaust apologia thus long precede the post-1945 period, going back all the way to the original response to the revelations of Las Casas’s Devastation of the Indies in 1542.35 Yet, with few exceptions, only recently has revisionist white historiography belatedly begun to catch up with this nonwhite conceptualization—hence the title of David Stannard’s book on the Columbian conquest, American Holocaust; the related title of an anthology (cited by Noam Chomsky in his Year 501) put out in Germany in anticipation of the quincentenary, Das Fünfhundert-jährige Reich (Five-hundred year reich); and the Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist’s recently translated “Exterminate All the Brutes,” which explicitly links the famous injunction of Conrad’s Kurtz to Nazi practice: “Auschwitz was the modern industrial application of a policy of extermination on which European world domination had long since rested.... And when what had been done in the heart of darkness was repeated in the heart of Europe, no one recognized it. No one wished to admit what everyone knew.... It is not knowledge we lack. What is missing is the courage to understand what we know and draw conclusions.”36

The debate will doubtless continue for many decades to come. But on a closing note, it does not seem inappropriate to get the opinion of that well-known moral and political theorist Adolf Hitler (surely a man with something worthwhile to say on the subject), who, looking ahead in a 1932 speech, “explicitly located his Lebensraum project within the long trajectory of European racial conquest.”37 As he explained to his presumably attentive audience, you cannot understand “the economically privileged supremacy of the white race over the rest of the world” except by relating it to “a political concept of supremacy which has been peculiar to the white race as a natural phenomenon for many centuries and which it has upheld as such to the outer world”:

Take for example India: England did not acquire India in a lawful and legitimate manner, but rather without regard to the natives’ wishes, views, or declarations of rights.... Just as Cortes or Pizarro demanded for themselves Central America and the northern states of South America not on the basis of any legal claim, but from the absolute, inborn feeling of superiority of the white race. The settlement of the North American continent was similarly a consequence not of any higher claim in a democratic or international sense, but rather of a consciousness of what is right which had its sole roots in the conviction of the superiority and thus the right of the white race.

So his plan was just to uphold this inspiring Western tradition, this racial “right to dominate (Herrenrecht),” this “frame of mind . . . which has conquered the world” for the white race, since “from this political view there evolved the basis for the economic takeover of the rest of the world.”38 In other words, he saw himself as simply doing at home what his fellow Europeans had long been doing abroad.

Finally, the theory of the Racial Contract, by separating whiteness as phenotype/racial classification from Whiteness as a politicoeconomic system committed to white supremacy, opens a theoretical space for white repudiation of the Contract. (One could then distinguish “being white” from “being White.”)

There is an interesting point of contrast here with the social contract. One obvious early objection to the notion of society’s being based on a “contract” was that even if an original founding contract had existed, it wouldn’t bind later generations, who hadn’t signed it. There have been various attempts by contractarians to get around this problem, the best-known being Locke’s notion of “tacit consent.”39 The idea is that if you choose as an adult to stay in your country of birth and make use of its benefits, then you have “tacitly” consented to obey the government and thus to be bound by the contract. But David Hume is famously scathing about this claim, saying that the notion of tacit consent is vacuous where there is no real possibility of opting out by moving to a no-longer-existent state of nature or of being able to emigrate when you have no particular skills and no other language but your mother tongue.40 You stay because you have no real choice.

But for the Racial Contract, it is different. There is a real choice for whites, though admittedly a difficult one. The rejection of the Racial Contract and the normed inequities of the white polity does not require one to leave the country but to speak out and struggle against the terms of the Contract. So in this case, moral/political judgments about one’s “consent” to the legitimacy of the political system and conclusions about one’s effectively havin become a signatory to the “contract,” are apropos—and so are judgments of one’s culpability. By unquestioningly “going along with things,” by accepting all the privileges of whiteness with concomitant complicity in the system of white supremacy, one can be said to have consented to Whiteness.

And in fact there have always been praiseworthy whites—anticolonialists, abolitionists, opponents of imperialism, civil rights activists, resisters of apartheid—who have recognized the existence and immorality of Whiteness as a political system, challenged its legitimacy, and insofar as possible, refused the Contract. (Inasmuch as mere skin color will automatically continue to privilege them, of course, this identification with the oppressed can usually be only partial.) Thus the interesting moral/political phenomenon of the white renegade, the race traitor in the language of the Klan (accurate enough insofar as “race” here denotes Whiteness),41 the colonial explorer who “goes native,” the soldier in French Indochina who contracts le mal jaune, the yellow disorder (the perilous illness of “attachment . . . to Indochina’s landscape, people . . . and culture”),42 the nigger-, Injun-, or Jew-lover. These individuals 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 country and to civilization,” “a white Injun, and there’s nothing more despicable.”44 For as the term signifies, where morality has been racialized, the practice of a genuinely color-blind ethic requires the repudiation of one’s Herrenvolk standing and its accompanying moral epistemology, thus eliciting the appropriate moral condemnation from the race loyalists and white signatories who have not repudiated either.

The level of commitment and sacrifice will, of course, vary. Some have written exposés of the hidden truth of the Racial Contract—Las Casas’s Devastation of the Indies; abolitionist literature; the French writer Abbé Raynal’s call for black slave revolution; Mark Twain’s writings for the Anti–Imperialist League (usually suppressed as an embarrassment by his biographers, as Chomsky notes);45 Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir’s principled oppositional journalism against their country’s colonial war. Some have tried to save some of its victims—the Underground Railroad; Aborigines Protection Societies; Oskar Schindler’s Jewish charges; Don Macleod, the Australian white man “accepted as an honorary Aborigine, who helped organize the first Aboriginal strike in the Pilbara in 1946”;46 Hugh Thompson, the American helicopter pilot who threatened to fire on his fellow soldiers unless they stopped massacring Vietnamese civilians at My Lai.47 Some have actually given their lives for the struggle—the white American antislavery revolutionary John Brown; the white members of the African National Congress who died trying to abolish apartheid. But the mere fact of their existence shows what was possible, throwing into contrast and rendering open for moral judgment the behavior of their fellow whites, who chose to accept Whiteness instead.

The Racial Contract has always been recognized by nonwhites as the real determinant of (most) white moral/political practice and thus as the real moral/political agreement to be challenged.

If the epistemology of the signatories, the agents, of the Racial Contract requires evasion and denial of the realities of race, the epistemology of the victims, the objects, of the Racial Contract is, unsurprisingly, focused on these realities themselves. (So there is a reciprocal relationship, the Racial Contract tracking white moral/political consciousness, the reaction to the Racial Contract tracking nonwhite moral/political consciousness and stimulating a puzzled investigation of that white moral/political consciousness.) The term “standpoint theory” is now routinely used to signify the notion that in understanding the workings of a system of oppression, a perspective from the bottom up is more likely to be accurate than one from the top down. What is involved here, then, is a “racial” version of standpoint theory, a perspectival cognitive advantage that is grounded in the phenomenological experience of the disjuncture between official (white) reality and actual (nonwhite) experience, the “double-consciousness” of which W. E. B. Du Bois spoke.48 This differential racial experience generates an alternative moral and political perception of social reality which is encapsulated in the insight from the black American folk tradition I have used as the epigraph of this book: the central realization, summing up the Racial Contract, that “when white people say ‘Justice,’ they mean ‘Just Us.’”

Nonwhites have always (at least in first encounters) been bemused or astonished by the invisibility of the Racial Contract to whites, the fact that whites have routinely talked in universalist terms even when it has been quite clear that the scope has really been limited to themselves. Correspondingly, nonwhites, with no vested material or psychic interest in the Racial Contract—objects rather than subjects of it, viewing it from outside rather than inside, subpersons rather than persons—are (at least before ideological conditioning) able to see its terms quite clearly. Thus the hypocrisy of the racial polity is most transparent to its victims. The corollary is that nonwhite interest in white moral and political theory has necessarily been focused less on the details of the particular competing moral and political candidates (utilitarianism versus deontology versus natural rights theory; liberalism versus conservatism versus socialism) than in the unacknowledged Racial Contract that has usually framed their functioning. The variable that makes the most difference to the fate of nonwhites is not the fine- or even coarse-grained conceptual divergences of the different theories themselves (all have their Herrenvolk variants), but whether or not the subclause invoking the Racial Contract, thus putting the theory into Herrenvolk mode, has been activated. The details of the moral theories thus become less important than the metatheory, the Racial Contract, in which they are embedded. The crucial question is whether nonwhites are counted as full persons, part of the population covered by the moral operator, or not.

The preoccupation of nonwhite moral and political thought with issues of race, puzzling alike to a white liberalism predicated on colorless atomic individuals and a white Marxism predicated on colorless classes in struggle, thus becomes readily explicable once the reality of the Racial Contract has been conceded. What is involved is neither a simple variant of traditional European nationalism (to which it is sometimes assimilated) nor a mysterious political project unfolding in some alien theoretical space (as in the mutually opaque language games postulated by postmodernism). The unifying conceptual space within which both orthodox white moral/political philosophy and unorthodox nonwhite moral/political philosophy are developing is the space that locates the (mythical) social contract on the same plane as the (real) Racial Contract, being predicated on the translation of “race” into the mutually commensurable and mutually intelligible language of personhood, and thereby demonstrating that these are contiguous, indeed identical, spaces—not so much a different conceptual universe as a recognition of the dark matter of the existing one. Personhood can be taken for granted by some, while it (and all that accompanies it) has to be fought for by others, so that the general human political project of struggling for a better society involves a different trajectory for nonwhites.

It is no accident, then, that the moral and political theory and practical struggles of nonwhites have so often centered on race, the marker of personhood and subpersonhood, inclusion within or exclusion from the racial polity. The formal contractarian apparatus I have tried to develop will not be articulated as such. But the crucial notions of the person/subperson differentiation, the correspondingly racially structured moral code (Herrenvolk ethics), and the white-supremacist character of the polity can be found in one form or another everywhere in Native American, black American, and Third and Fourth World anticolonial thought.

Sitting Bull asks: “What treaty that the whites have kept has the red man broken? Not one. What treaty that the white man ever made with us have they kept? Not one. When I was a boy the Sioux owned the world; the sun rose and set on their land.... Where are our lands? Who owns them? What white man can say I ever stole his land or a penny of his money? Yet, they say I am a thief.... What law have I broken? Is it wrong for me to love my own? Is it wicked for me because my skin is red?” Ward Churchill, another Native American, characterizes European settlers as a self-conceived “master race.” David Walker complains that whites consider blacks “not of the human family,” forcing blacks “to prove to them ourselves, that we are MEN.” W. E. B. Du Bois represents blacks as a “tertium quid,” “somewhere between men and cattle,” comments that “Liberty, Justice, and Right” are marked “‘For White People Only,’” and suggests that “the statement ‘I am white’” is becoming “the one fundamental tenet of our practical morality.” Richard Wright analyzes “the ethics of living Jim Crow.” Marcus Garvey concludes that blacks are “a race without respect.” Jawaharlal Nehru claims that British policy in India is “that of the herrenvolk and the master race.” Martin Luther King Jr. describes the feeling of “forever fighting a degenerating sense of ‘nobodiness.’” Malcolm X asserts that America “has not only deprived us of the right to be a citizen, she has deprived us of the right to be human beings, the right to be recognized and respected as men and women.... We are fighting for recognition as human beings.” Frantz Fanon maps a colonial world divided between “two different species,” a “governing race” and “zoological” natives. Aimé Césaire argues that “the colonizer . . . in order to ease his conscience gets into the habit of seeing the other man as an animal.... colonization = ‘thingification.’” Australian Aborigines in a 1982 protest statement at the Commonwealth Games in Brisbane point out that “since the White invasion . . . [o]ur humanity is being degraded and our history distorted by strangers.... Before the World, we accuse White Australia (and her Mother, England) of crimes against humanity and the planet. The past two centuries of colonisation is proof of our accusation. We hereby demand yet again recognition of our humanity and our land rights.”49 The central moral commonality uniting all their experiences is the reality of racial subordination, necessarily generating a different moral topography from the one standardly examined in white ethical discourse.

Correspondingly, the polity was usually thought of in racial terms, as white ruled, and this perspective would become global in the period of formal colonial administration. Political theory is in part about who the main actors are, and for this unacknowledged polity they are neither the atomic individuals of classic liberal thought nor the classes of Marxist theory but races. The various native and colonial peoples’ attempts (usually unsuccessful, too little and too late) to forge a racial unity—Pan-Indianism, Pan-Africanism, Pan-Arabism, Pan­Asianism, Pan-Islamism—arose in response to an already achieved white unity, a Pan-Europeanism formalized and incorporated by the terms of the Racial Contract.

In the period of de jure global white supremacy, of colonialism and slavery, this solidarity was clearly perceived by whites also. “That race is everything, is simply a fact,” writes Scotsman Robert Knox in The Races of Men (1850),50 and theories of the necessity of racial struggle, race war, against the subordinate races are put forward as obvious. Darwin’s work raised hopes in some quarters that natural selection (perhaps with a little help from its friends) would sweep away the remaining inferior races, as it had already done so providentially in the Americas and Tasmania, so that the planet as a whole could be cleared for white settlement.51 And after that only the sky would be the limit. In fact, even the sky would not be the limit, for there was always the solar system. Cecil Rhodes dreamed that perhaps he could “annex the planets” for Britain: “Where there is space, there is hope.”52

But alas, this noble dream was not to be realized. Even with encouragement, nonwhites did not die fast enough. So whites had to settle for colonial rule over stubbornly growing native populations, while of course keeping a watchful eye out for both rebellion and subversive notions of self-government. Witness the various colored perils—red (Native American, that is), black, and yellow—that have haunted the European and Euro-implanted imagination. “Europe,” Kiernan comments, “thought of its identity in terms of race or color and plagued itself with fears of the Yellow Peril or a Black Peril—boomerang effects, as they might be called, of a White Peril from which the other continents were more tangibly suffering.”53 The political framework is quite explicitly predicated on the notion that whites everywhere have a common interest in maintaining global white supremacy against insurrections conceived of in racial terms. At the turn of the century, Europeans were worried about the “vast ant-heap” filled with “soldier-ants” of China, while “similar fears were in the air about a huge black army,” threatening a race war of revenge led by “dusky Napoleons.”54

Though there were occasional breaches for strategic national advantage, international white racial solidarity was generally demonstrated in the joint actions to suppress and isolate slave rebellions and colonial uprisings: the boycott of Haiti, the only successful slave revolution in history (and, noncoincidentally, today the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere), the common intervention against the 1899-1900 Boxer rebellion in China, the concern raised by the 1905 Japanese victory over Russia. As late as the early twentieth century, books were still being published with such warning titles as The Passing of the Great Race and The Rising Tide of Color against White World-Supremacy.55 Intra-European differences and conflicts were real enough but would be quickly put aside in the face of the nonwhite threat: “In the course of their rivalries Europeans exchanged many hard words, and sometimes abused each other in order to please a non-European people.... But when it came to any serious colonial upheaval, white men felt their kinship, and Europe drew together.... Above all, and very remarkably, despite innumerable crises over rival claims the European countries managed from the War of American Independence onward to avoid a single colonial war among themselves.”56

This unity ended in the twentieth century with the outbreak of World War I, which was in part an interimperialist war over competing colonial claims. But despite nonwhite agitation and military participation (largely as cannon fodder) in the armies of their respective mother countries, the postwar settlement led not to decolonization but to a territorial redistribution among the colonial powers themselves. (–OK, I’ll take this one, and you can take that one.”) In the interwar years Japan’s Pan-Asiatic Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere was seen by most white Western leaders as a threat to global white supremacy. Indeed, as late as World War II, the popular American writer Pearl Buck had to warn her readers that colonized peoples would not continue to put up with global white domination, and that unless there was change their discontent would lead to “the longest of human wars . . . the war between the white man and his world and the colored man and his world.”57

Corresponding to this global white solidarity transcending national boundaries, the virtual white polity, nonwhites’ common interest in abolishing the Racial Contract manifested itself in patterns of partisan emotional identification which from a modern, more nationalistic perspective now seem quite bizarre. In 1879, for example, when the King of Burma learned of the Zulu defeat of a British army at Isandhlwana, he immediately announced his intention of marching on Rangoon.58 In 1905 Indians cheered the Japanese victory over the czar’s (white) armies in the Russo-Japanese war.59 In the Spanish­American War, black Americans raised doubts about the point of being “a black man in the army of the white man sent to kill the brown man,” and a few blacks actually went over to the side of Emilio Aguinaldo’s Filipino forces.60 After Pearl Harbor, the ominous joke circulated in the American press of a black sharecropper who comments to his white boss, “By the way, Captain, I hear the Japs done declared war on you white folks”; black civil rights militants demanded the “double-victory,” “Victory at Home as Well as Abroad”; Japanese intelligence considered the possibility of an alliance with black Americans in a domestic colored front against white supremacy; and white Americans worried about black loyalty.61 The 1954 Vietnamese victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu (like the Japanese capture of Singapore in World War II) was in part seen as a racial triumph, the defeat of a white by a brown people, a blow against the arrogance of global white supremacy.

So on the level of the popular consciousness of nonwhites—particularly in the first phase of the Racial Contract, but lingering on into the second phase—racial self-identification was deeply embedded, with the notion that nonwhites everywhere were engaged in some kind of common political struggle, so that a victory for one was a victory for all. The different battles around the world against slavery, colonialism, jim crow, the “color bar,” European imperialism, apartheid were in a sense all part of a common struggle against the Racial Contract. As Gary Okihiro points out, what came into existence was “a global racial formation that complemented and buttressed the economic and political world-system,” thus generating “transnational identities of white and nonwhite.”62 It is this world—this moral and political reality—that W. E. B. Du Bois was describing in his famous 1900 Pan-Africanist statement “To the Nations of the World”: “The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line,” since, as he would later point out, too many have accepted “that tacit but clear modern philosophy which assigns to the white race alone the hegemony of the world and assumes that other races . . . will either be content to serve the interests of the whites or die out before their all-conquering march.”63 It is this world that later produced the 1955 Bandung (Indonesia) Conference, a meeting of twenty-nine Asian and African nations, the “underdogs of the human race” in Richard Wright’s phrase, whose decision to discuss “racialism and colonialism” caused such consternation in the West at the time,64 the meeting that eventually led to the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement. And it is this world that stimulated, in 1975, the creation of the World Council of Indigenous Peoples, uniting Australian Aborigines, New Zealand Maoris, and American Indians.65

If to white readers this intellectual world, only half a century distant, now seems like a universe of alien concepts, it is a tribute to the success of the rewritten Racial Contract in transforming the terms of public discourse so that white domination is now conceptually invisible. As Leon Poliakov points out, the embarrassment of the death camps (on European soil, anyway) led the postwar European intelligentsia to a sanitization of the past record, in which racism became the aberrant invention of scapegoat figures such as Joseph-Arthur Gobineau: “A vast chapter of western thought is thus made to disappear by sleight of hand, and this conjuring trick corresponds, on the psychological or psycho-historical level, to the collective suppression of troubling memories and embarrassing truths.”66 That the revival of Anglo-American political philosophy takes place in this period, the present epoch of the de facto Racial Contract, partially explains its otherworldly race insensitivity. The history of imperialism, colonialism, and genocide, the reality of systemic racial exclusion, are obfuscated in seemingly abstract and general categories that originally were restricted to white citizens.

But the overtly political battles—for emancipation, decolonization, civil rights, land rights—were only part of this struggle. The terms of the Racial Contract norm nonwhite persons themselves, establishing morally, epistemically, and aesthetically their ontological inferiority. To the extent that nonwhites accept this, to the extent that they also were signatories to the Contract, there is a corollary personal dimension to this struggle which is accommodated with difficulty, if at all, in the categories of mainstream political philosophy. Operating on the terrain of the social contract and thus taking personhood for granted, failing to recognize the reality of the Racial Contract, orthodox political theory has difficulty making sense of the multidimensionality of oppositional nonwhite political thought.

What does it require for a subperson to assert himself or herself politically? To begin with, it means simply, or not so simply, claiming the moral status of personhood. So it means challenging the white-constructed ontology that has deemed one a “body impolitic,” an entity not entitled to assert personhood in the first place. In a sense one has to fight an internal battle before even advancing onto the ground of external combat. One has to overcome the internalization of subpersonhood prescribed by the Racial Contract and recognize one’s own humanity, resisting the official category of despised aboriginal, natural slave, colonial ward. One has to learn the basic self­respect that can casually be assumed by Kantian persons, those privileged by the Racial Contract, but which is denied to subpersons. Particularly for blacks, ex-slaves, the importance of developing self-respect and demanding respect from whites is crucial. Frederick Douglass recounts “how a man was made a slave,” and promises “you shall see how a slave was made a man.”67 But a hundred years later this struggle is still in progress. “Negroes want to be treated like men,” wrote James Baldwin in the 1950s, “a perfectly straightforward statement, containing only seven words. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable.”68

Linked with this personal struggle will be an epistemic dimension, cognitive resistance to the racially mystificatory aspects of white theory, the painstaking reconstruction of past and present necessary to fill in the crucial gaps and erase the slanders of the globally dominant European worldview. One has to learn to trust one’s own cognitive powers; to develop one’s own concepts, insights, modes of explanation, overarching theories, and to oppose the epistemic hegemony of conceptual frameworks designed in part to thwart and suppress the exploration of such matters; one has to think against the grain. There are excavations of the histories concealed by the Racial Contract: Native American, black American, African and Asian and Pacific investigation and valorization of their pasts, giving the lie to the description of “savagery” and state-of­nature existence of “peoples without history.”69 The exposure of the misrepresentations of Eurocentrism, not-so-innocent “white lies” and “white mythologies,” is thus part of the political project of reclaiming personhood.70 The long history of what has been called, in the black oppositional tradition, “vindicationist” scholarship,71 is a necessary political response to the fabrications of the Racial Contract, which has no correlate in the political theory of the social contract because Europeans were in cultural control of their own past and, so, could be confident it would not be misrepresented (or, perhaps better, that the misrepresentations would be their own).

Finally, the somatic aspect of the Racial Contract—the necessary reference it makes to the body—explains the body politics that nonwhites have often incorporated into their struggle. Global white supremacy denies subpersons not merely moral and cognitive but also aesthetic parity. Particularly for the black body, phenotypically most distant from the Caucasoid somatic norm, the implications often are the attempt to transform oneself as far as possible into an imitation of the white body.72 Thus the assertion of full black personhood has also sometimes manifested itself in the self-conscious repudiation of somatic transformation and the proclamation “Black is beautiful!” For mainstream political philosophy this is merely a fashion statement; for a theory informed by the Racial Contract, it is part of the political project of reclaiming personhood.

The “Racial Contract” as a theory is explanatorily superior to the raceless social contract in accounting for the political and moral realities of the world and in helping to guide normative theory.

The “Racial Contract” as a naturalized account (henceforth simply the “Racial Contract”) is theoretically superior to the raceless social contract as a model of the actual world and, correspondingly, of what needs to be done to reform it. I therefore advocate the supplementation of standard social contract discussions with an account of the “Racial Contract.”

It might be replied that I am making a kind of “category mistake,” since even if my claims about the centrality of racism to recent global history are true, modern contractarianism has long since given up real-world explanatory pretensions, being hypothetical, subjunctive exercises in ideal theory. So the fact that actual societies were not based on these norms, even if true, and unfortunate, is simply irrelevant. These are just two different kinds of projects.

The discussion at the beginning should have made clear why I think this answer misses the point. Insofar as the moral theory and political philosophy of present-day contractarianism are trying to prescribe ideals for a just society, which are presumably intended to help transform our present nonideal society, it is obviously important to get clear what the facts are. Moral and political prescription will depend in part on empirical claims and theoretical generalizations, accounts of what happened in the past and what is happening now, as well as more abstract views about how society and the state work and where political power is located. If the facts are radically different from those that are conventionally represented, the 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 discussions of race and white supremacy would lead one to think that race and racism have been marginal to the history of the West. And this belief is reinforced by the mainstream conceptualizations of the polity themselves, which portray it as essentially raceless, whether in the dominant view of an individualist liberal democracy or in the minority radical Marxist view of a class society. So it is not that mainstream contractarians have no picture. (Indeed it is impossible to theorize without some picture.) Rather, they have an actual (tacit) picture, which, in its exclusion or marginalization of race and its typically sanitized, whitewashed, and amnesiac account of European imperialism and settlement, is deeply flawed and misleading. So the powerful image of the idealized contract, in the absence of an explicit counterimage, continues to shape our descriptive as well as normative theorizations. By providing no history, contemporary contractarianism encourages its audience to fill in a mystified history, which turns out to look oddly like the (ostensibly) repudiated history in the original contract itself! No one actually believes nowadays, of course, that people formally came out of the wilderness and signed a contract. But there is the impression that the modern European nation-states were not centrally affected by their imperial history and that societies such as the United States were founded on noble moral principles meant to include everyone, but unfortunately, there were some deviations.73 The “Racial Contract” explodes this picture as mythical, identifying it as itself an artifact of the Racial Contract in the second, de facto phase of white supremacy. Thus—in the standard array of metaphors of perceptual/conceptual revolution—it effects a gestalt shift, reversing figure and ground, switching paradigms, inverting “norm” and “deviation,” to emphasize that nonwhite racial exclusion from personhood was the actual norm. Racism, racial self-identification, and race thinking are then not in the least “surprising,” “anomalous,” “puzzling,” incongruent with Enlightenment European humanism, but required by the Racial Contract as part of the terms for the European appropriation of the world. So in a sense standard contractarian discussions are fundamentally misleading, because they have things backward to begin with: what has usually been taken (when it has been noticed at all) as the racist “exception” has really been the rule; what has been taken as the “rule,” the ideal norm, has really been the exception.

The second, related reason that the “Racial Contract” should be part of the necessary foundation for contemporary political theory is that our theorizing and moralizing about the sociopolitical facts are affected in characteristic ways by social structure. There is a reflexiveness to political theory, in which it theorizes about itself and later theorists critique the blindnesses of earlier ones. The classic texts of the central thinkers of the Western political tradition—for example, Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Burke, Marx—typically provide not merely normative judgments but mappings of social ontologies and political epistemologies which explain why the normative judgments of others have gone astray. These theorists recognized that to bring about the ideal polity, one needs to understand how the structure and workings of the actual polity may interfere with our perception of the social truth. Our characteristic patterns of understanding and misunderstanding of the world are themselves influenced by the way the world is and by the way we ourselves are, whether naturally or as shaped and molded by that world.

So one needs criteria for political knowing, whether through penetrating the illusory appearances of this empirical world (Plato), through learning to discern natural law (Hobbes, Locke), through rejecting abstraction for the accumulated wisdom of “prejudice” (Burke), or through demystifying oneself of bourgeois and patriarchal ideology (Marxism, feminism). Particularly for alternative, oppositional theory (as with the last two), the claim will be that an oppressive polity characterized by group domination distorts our cognizing in ways that themselves need to be theorized about. We are blinded to realities that we should see, taking for granted as natural what are in fact human-created structures. So we need to see differently, ridding ourselves of class and gender bias, coming to recognize as political what we had previously thought of as apolitical or personal, doing conceptual innovation, reconceiving the familiar, looking with new eyes at the old world around us.

Now if the “Racial Contract” is right, existing conceptions of the polity are foundationally deficient. There is obviously all the difference in the world between saying the system is basically sound despite some unfortunate racist deviations, and saying that the polity is racially structured, the state white-supremacist, and races themselves significant existents that an adequate political ontology needs to accommodate. So the dispute would be not merely about the facts but about why these facts have gone so long unapprehended and untheorized in white moral/political theory. Could it be that membership in the Herrenvolk, the race privileged by this political system, tends to prevent recognition of it as a political system? Indeed, it could. So not only would meeting this political challenge imply a radically different “metanarrative” of the history that has brought us to this point, but it would also require, as I have sketched, a rethinking and reconceptualization of the existing conventional moral/political apparatus and a self-consciously reflexive epistemic examination of how this deficient apparatus has affected the moral psychology of whites and directed their attention away from certain realities. By its crucial silence on race and the corresponding opacities of its conventional conceptual array, the raceless social contract and the raceless world of contemporary moral and political theory render mysterious the actual political issues and concerns that have historically preoccupied a large section of the world’s population.

Think of the rich colorful tapestry over the last two centuries of abolitionism, racial vindicationism, aboriginal land claims, antiimperial and anticolonial movements, antiapartheid struggle, searches to reclaim racial and cultural heritages, and ask yourself what thread of it ever appears within the bleached weave of the standard First World political philosophy text. It is undeniable (one would think) that these struggles are political, but dominant categories obscure our understanding of them. They seem to be taking place in a different conceptual space from the one inhabited by mainstream political theory. One will search in vain for them in most standard histories and contemporary surveys of Western political thought. The recent advent of discussions of “multiculturalism” is welcome, but what needs to be appreciated is that these are issues of political power, not just mutual misconceptions resulting from the clash of cultures. To the extent that “race” is assimilated to “ethnicity,” white supremacy remains unmentioned, and the historic Racial Contract–prescribed connection between race and personhood is ignored, these discussions, in my opinion, fail to make the necessary drastic theoretical correction. Thus they still take place within a conventional, if expanded, framework. If I am right, what needs to be recognized is that side by side with the existing political structures familiar to all of us, the standard subject matter of political theory—absolutism and constitutionalism, dictatorship and democracy, capitalism and socialism—there has also been an unnamed global political structure—global white supremacy—and these struggles are in part struggles against this system. Until the system is named and seen as such, no serious theoretical appreciation of the significance of these phenomena is possible.

Another virtue of the “Racial Contract” is that it simultaneously recognizes the reality of race (causal power, theoretical centrality) and demystifies race (positing race as constructed).74 Historically, the most influential theories of race have themselves been racist, varieties of more or less sophisticated biological determinism, from naive pre-Darwinian speculations to the later more elaborated views of nineteenth­century Social Darwinism and twentieth-century Nazi Rassenkunde, race science. To speak of “race theory” in the officially nonracist climate of today is thus likely to trigger alarm bells: hasn’t it been proven that race is unreal? But it is a false dichotomization to assume that the only alternatives are race as nonexistent and race as biological essence. Contemporary “critical race theory”—of which this book could be seen as an example—adds the adjective specifically to differentiate itself from the essentialist views of the past.75 Race is sociopolitical rather than biological, but it is nonetheless real.

Thus, on the one hand, unlike mainstream white theory, liberal and radical, the “Racial Contract” sees that “race” and “white supremacy” are themselves critical theoretical terms that must be incorporated into the vocabulary of an adequate sociopolitical theory, that society is neither just a collection of atomic individuals nor just a structure of workers and capitalists. On the other hand, the “Racial Contract” demystifies race, distancing itself from the “oppositional” biological determinisms (melanin theory, “sun people” and “ice people”) and occasional deplorable anti-Semitism of some recent elements of the black tradition, as the 1960s promise of integration fails and intransigent social structures and growing white recalcitrance are increasingly conceptualized in naturalistic terms.

The “Racial Contract” thus places itself within the sensible mainstream of moral theory by not holding people responsible for what they cannot help. Even liberal whites of good will are sometimes made uneasy by racial politics, because an unsophisticatedly undifferentiated denunciatory vocabulary (“white”) does not seem to allow for standard political/moral distinctions between a politics of choice—absolutist and democrat, fascist and liberal—for which it is rational that we should be held responsible, and a skin color and phenotype that, after all, we cannot help. By recognizing it as a political system, the “Racial Contract” voluntarizes race in the same way that the social contract voluntarizes the creation of society and the state. It distinguishes between whiteness as phenotype/genealogy and Whiteness as a political commitment to white supremacy, thus making conceptual room for “white renegades” and “race traitors.” And its aim is not to replace one Racial Contract with another of a different color but ultimately to eliminate race (not as innocent human variety but as ontological superiority and inferiority, as differential entitlement and privilege) altogether.

Correspondingly, the “Racial Contract” demystifies the uniqueness of white racism (for those who, understandably, see Europeans as intrinsically White) by locating it as the contingent outcome of a particular set of circumstances. It is proper, given both the historical record and the denial of it until recently, that white racism and white Whiteness should be the polemical focus of critique. But it is important not to lose sight of the fact that other subordinate Racial Contracts exist which do not involve white/nonwhite relations. In a sense, the “Racial Contract” decolorizes Whiteness by detaching it from whiteness, thereby demonstrating that in a parallel universe it could have been Yellowness, Redness, Brownness, or Blackness. Or, alternatively phrased, we could have had a yellow, red, brown, or black Whiteness: Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations.

That it is, is illustrated by the only serious twentieth­century challenger to European domination: Japan. As I have mentioned throughout, their unique history has put the Japanese in the peculiar position of being, at different times, or even simultaneously by different systems, nonwhite by the global White Racial Contract, white by the local (Nazi) Racial Contract, and a (White) yellow by their own Yellow Racial Contract. In Asia the Japanese have long considered themselves the superior race, oppressing the Ainu in their own country and proclaiming during the 1930s a Pan-Asiatic mission to “unite the yellow races” under their leadership against white Western domination. The ruthlessness displayed on both sides during the Pacific War, a “war without mercy,” arose in part because on both sides it was a race war, a war between conflicting systems of racial superiority, competing claims to the real Whiteness, pink or yellow. The headline of one Hearst paper summed it up: “The war in the Pacific is the World War, the War of Oriental Races against Occidental Races for. the Domination of the World.”76 As written during the Japanese occupation of China, from the 1937 Rape of Nanking on, the Yellow Racial Contract produced a death toll estimated by some to be as high as 10-13 million people.77

What Axis triumph might have meant for the world is revealed in a remarkable document that survived the desperate burning of files in the last weeks before the arrival in Tokyo of the occupying U.S. army: An Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato Race as Nucleus. Not exactly an equivalent to the infamous 1942 Nazi Wannsee Protocol that put the details of the Final Solution into place, it does nonetheless describe the “natural hierarchy based on inherent qualities and capabilities” of the various races of the world, envisages a global order in which the “Yamato race” would be the “leading race” (which would have to avoid intermarriage to maintain its purity), and prescribes a postwar mission of expansion and colonization based on an ominously revised global cartography in which, for example, America emerges as “Asia’s eastern wing.”78 The Yamatos and the Aryans would, postvictory, have had to fight it out to decide who the real global master race was. So there is no reason to think that other nonwhites (non­yellows?) would have fared much better under this version of the Racial Contract. The point, then, is that while the White Racial Contract has historically been the most devastating and the most important one in shaping the contours of the world, it is not unique, and there should be no essentialist illusions about anyone’s intrinsic “racial” virtue. All peoples can fall into Whiteness under the appropriate circumstances, as shown by the (“White”) black Hutus’ 1994 massacre of half a million to a million inferior black Tutsis in a few bloody weeks in Rwanda.

Though it may appear to be such, the “Racial Contract” is not a “deconstruction” of the social contract. I am in some sympathy with postmodernism politically—the iconoclastic challenge to orthodox theory, the tipping over of the white marble busts in the museum of Great Western Thinkers—but ultimately, I see it as an epistemological and theoretical dead end, itself symptomatic rather than diagnostic of the problems of the globe as we enter the new millennium.79 The “Racial Contract” is really in the spirit of a racially informed Ideologiekritik and thus pro-Enlightenment (Jürgen Habermas’s radical and to-be-completed Enlightenment, that is—though Habermas’s Eurocentric, deraced, and deimperialized vision of modernity itself stands in need of critique)80 and antipostmodernist. It criticizes the social contract from a normative base that does not see the ideals of contractarianism themselves as necessarily problematic but shows how they have been betrayed by white contractarians. So it assumes inter­translatability, the conceptual commensurability of degraded norm and critique, and brings them together in an epistemic union that repudiates the postmodernist picture of isolated, mutually unintelligible language games. Moreover, it is explicitly predicated on the truth of a particular metanarrative, the historical account of the European conquest of the world, which has made the world what it is today. Thus it lays claims to truth, objectivity, realism, the description of the world as it actually is, the prescription for a transformation of that world to achieve racial justice—and invites criticism on those same terms.

In the best tradition of oppositional materialist critique of hegemonic idealist social theory, the “Racial Contract” recognizes the actuality of the world we live in, relates the construction of ideals, and the nonrealization of these ideals, to the character of this world, to group interests and institutionalized structures, and points to what would be necessary for achieving them. Thus it unites description and prescription, fact and norm.

Unlike the social contract, which is necessarily embarrassed by the actual histories of the polities in which it is propagated, the “Racial Contract” starts from these uncomfortable realities. Thus it is not, like the social contract, continually forced to retreat into illusory idealizing abstraction, the never-never land of pure theory, but can move readily between the hypothetical and the actual, the subjunctive and the indicative, having no need to pretend things happened which did not, to evade and to elide and to skim over. The “Racial Contract” is intimate with the world and so is not continually “astonished” by revelations about it; it does not find it remarkable that racism has been the norm and that people think of themselves as raced rather than abstract citizens, which any objective history will in fact show. The “Racial Contract” is an abstraction that is this-worldly, showing that the problem with mainstream political philosophy is not abstraction in itself (all theory definitionally requires abstraction), but abstraction that, as Onora O’Neill has pointed out, characteristically abstracts away from the things that matter, the actual causal determinants and their requisite theoretical correlates, guided by the terms of the Racial Contract which has now written itself out of existence but continues to affect theory and theorizing by its invisible presence.81 The “Racial Contract” throws open the doors of orthodox political philosophy’s hermetically sealed, stuffy little universe and lets the world rush into its sterile white halls, a world populated not by abstract citizens but by white, black, brown, yellow, red beings, interacting with, pretending not to see, categorizing, judging, negotiating, allying, exploiting, struggling with each other in large measure according to race—the world, in short, in which we all actually live.

Finally, the “Racial Contract” locates itself proudly in the long, honorable tradition of oppositional black theory, the theory of those who were denied the capacity to theorize, the cognitions of persons rejecting their official subpersonhood. The peculiar terms of the slavery contract meant that, of all the different varieties of subpersons, blacks were the ones most directly confronted over a period of hundreds of years with the contradictions of white theory, being both a part and not a part of the white polity, and as such epistemically privileged. The “Racial Contract” pays tribute to the insights of generations of anonymous “race men” (and “race women”) who, under the most difficult circumstances, often self­educated, denied access to formal training and the resources of the academy, the object of scorn and contempt from hegemonic white theory, nevertheless managed to forge the concepts necessary to trace the contours of the system oppressing them, defying the massive weight of a white scholarship that either morally justified this oppression or denied its existence.

Black activists have always recognized white domination, white power (what one writer in 1919 called the “white­ocracy,” rule by whites),82 as a political system of exclusion and differential privilege, problematically conceptualized by the categories of either white liberalism or white Marxism. The “Racial Contract” can thus be regarded as a black vernacular (literally: “the language of the slave”) “Signifyin(g)” on the social contract, a “double-voiced,” “two-toned,” “formal revision” that “critique[s] the nature of (white) meaning itself,” by demonstrating that “a simultaneous, but negated, parallel discursive (ontological, political) universe exists within the larger white discursive universe.”83 It is a black demystification of the lies of white theory, an uncovering of the Klan robes beneath the white politician’s three-piece suit. Ironic, cool, hip, above all knowing, the “Racial Contract” speaks from the perspective of the cognizers whose mere presence in the halls of white theory is a cognitive threat, 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 where the bodies 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 ghettoization 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 nonwhite­majority 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 honestly addressed. Those who pretend not to see them, who claim not to recognize the picture I have sketched, are only continuing the epistemology of ignorance required by the original Racial Contract. As long as this studied ignorance persists, the Racial Contract will only be rewritten, rather than being torn up altogether, and justice will continue to be restricted to “just us.”