The Racial Contract Quotes

“Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations.”
― Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract

“And concepts are crucial to cognition: cognitive scientists point out that they help us to categorize, learn, remember, infer, explain, problem-solve, generalize, analogize. Correspondingly, the lack of appropriate concepts can hinder learning, interfere with memory, block inferences, obstruct explanation, and perpetuate problems.”
― Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract

“European humanism usually meant that only Europeans were human.”
― Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract

“on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an epistemology of ignorance, a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions (which are psychologically and socially functional), producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made.”
― Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract

“White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.”
― Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract

“psychological, and moral implications it has had both for its contractors and its victims. By treating the present as a somehow neutral baseline, with its given configuration of wealth, property, social standing, and psychological willingness to sacrifice, the idealized social contract renders permanent the legacy of the Racial Contract.”
― Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract

“His notorious comment in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime is well known to, and often cited by, black intellectuals: “So fundamental is the difference between [the black and white] races of man . . . it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color” so that “a clear proof that what [a Negro] said was stupid” was that “this fellow was quite black from head to foot.”68 The point of Eze’s essay is that this remark is by no means isolated or a casual throwaway line that, though of course regrettable, has no broader implications. Rather, it comes out of a developed theory of race and corresponding intellectual ability and limitation. It only seems casual, unembedded in a larger theory, 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.”
― Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract

“In other words, he saw himself as simply doing at home what his fellow Europeans had long been doing abroad.”
― Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract