Charles Mills's The Racial Contract

Charles Mills’ first words in his book The Racial Contract, were “white supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the world what it is today” (Mills, Pg. 1). With that one statement, Mills eluded to an idea that most people had previously chosen to ignore. The fact that he called it “unnamed” is important because Mills critiques the social contracts of multiple well known political theorists in order to prove that they have all in their own ways tactfully excluded non-white races from consideration in the establishment of their social contracts. It is unnamed because it is very difficult to see unless someone is looking for it as Charles Mills did. Charles Mills’ critique that Thomas Hobbes’ social contract only considered white people is convincing because he identifies the different states of nature that Hobbes reserved for white and non white people, he makes people question what Hobbes really means when he refers to “people,” and he effectively twists the text in order to compliment his argument.
Charles Mills took advantage of the times in Leviathan where Thomas Hobbes contradicted himself in order to tarnish Hobbes’ …show more content…
According to Hobbes, everyone is equal when they are in the state of nature. Hobbes says that “nature hath made men so equal in the faculties of body and mind (pg. 74).” This statement indicates the idea that Hobbes believes every man is equal to one another when there is not a ruling body. However, as Mills had already established, the state of nature was a real place for only a select group. Therefore, Mills set Hobbes’ ideas up to result in the assumption that non-white people were not even categorized as “people.” Hobbes never directly made a distinction between white people and others; however, that did not matter for Mills’