The Racial Contract

The Racial Contract is an excellent book.... It is a testament to Mills's expertise as a philosopher, a scholar, and a downright intelligent writer that he has managed to pull off so comprehensive, informative, and persuasive a work in an elegant 133 pages (excluding notes).... He achieves this explanation through some of the clearest prose I have encountered in recent philosophical literature.

* Small Axe: A Journal of Criticism *

A very important book.... The Racial Contract has the potential to radically challenge many of us to reevaluate how we think about social contract theory. As well, to take the arguments that Mills makes is to be prepared to rethink about the concept of race and the structure of our political systems. This is a very important book indeed, and should be a welcome addition to the ongoing discussions surrounding social contract theory.

* Teaching Philosophy *

An ambitious book.... Mill's racial contract thesis is so convincing that one wonders why it hasn't been explored until now in the precincts of mainstream political philosophy. But that's his point. The racial contract's effectiveness lies in its very invisibility.

* In These Times *

An important work of philosophy that is at the same time short and accessible.... Mills succeeds admirably in arguing his case for the existence of a racial contract. That he can do this in a way that is rigorous, passionate, and accessible is an important achievement.

* Philosophy in Review *

Courageously creative.

* Social Theory and Practice *

Mills uses the idea of the social contract to argue that racially structured discrimination is a norm, rather than a deviation from the ideal.... Framed by a lucid discussion of the modern global exploitation of nonwhites is Mills's appeal to standpoint epistemology to maintain that the racial contract is a naturalized version of social contract theory.

* Choice *

Offers a bold conceptualization of the racial order and a critique of the way it has been (mis)represented within the domain of scholarship.... Mills cuts through the shibboleths and the mystifications that pervade both popular and academic discourse on race.... The Racial Contract offers a theoretical framework that ought to serve as the starting point for any serious study of race in American society.... At a time when 'the epistemology of ignorance' is ascendant, we can be grateful for a book that speaks the unpalatable truth.

* American Journal of Sociology *

This compelling and even explosive book argues that white racism is itself a political system with its own levels of rights, duties, benefits, burdens, etc.... Sure to provoke a heated debate far beyond the field of political philosophy, this bold and wide-ranging study makes a clear and convincing case for the view that systematic racial oppression was not an anomaly sullying otherwise universalistic assumptions about individual rights, but the context in which theorizing about such rights occurred.

* The Front Table *

This is a significant and compelling work.... Mills turns our attention to the racial domination and exploitation that have been equally pervasive features of the history of liberalism.... A major contribution.

* Ethics *

The objective of this bookis nothing less than the reshaping of liberal political philosophy from the bottom up. Mills contends that the ground zero of Western democratic societies is not the mythical social contract that has prevailed among political philosophersbut a 'racial contract'. In short, we have a white supremacist world because 'whites' have agreed to make it so. The revisionary power of this move is evident.

* The Nati