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Charles W. Mills. The Racial Contract.
In "The Adventure of the Abbey Grange," the killer (whom Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson will ultimately acquit) says to Holmes: "I believe you are a man of your word, and a white man, and I'll tell you the whole story." It can be said, of course, that what the speaker meant was not that Holmes was a member of the "white race," but rather that he was, as Webster's Third (1967) has it, "marked by upright fairness...square-dealing." It can be argued that the association of whiteness with absence of spot or taint follows from facts about the nature of things (paper, ink, etc.), and has no essential connection with race.
But such explanations sound lame when one finds Kant, one of the central sources of modern moral theory, suggesting that the mere fact that a man "was quite black from head to foot [is] a clear proof that what he said was stupid." If remarks of this kind are not better known, Charles Mills suggests in his slim and muscular treatise, it is because "white academic philosophy as an institution has had no interest in researching, pursuing the implications of, and making known to the world this dimension of Kant's work." [71] Just as feminist theorists have pointed to the blind spots a predominantly male viewpoint has introduced into traditional philosophy, so Mills indicates ways in which familiar talk about the "social contract" has typically presupposed (and in part obscured) a more fundamental racial contract:
Nonwhites have always...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.... 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 crucial question is whether nonwhites are counted as full persons, part of the population covered by the moral operator, or not. [110]
It is easy to demonstrate that the...