After George Floyd was murdered by a policeman in Minneapolis in May last year, comedian and political commentator Trevor Noah did a segment on ‘The Daily Show’, an American satirical news programme, on the protests that followed and the whining about looting that accompanied them. He argued that law-breaking was to be expected. The police, Noah said, had broken their social contract with Black Americans with their brutality. I remember watching that item and wondering if Noah had read Charles Mills’ 1997 book, ‘The Racial Contract’, and if not, whether he might feel differently if he had.
Mills was a Jamaican philosopher who died in September. Discovering his work was one of the ‘a-ha!’ moments of my PhD research over a decade ago. More recently I interviewed him for an episode of openDemocracy’s ‘ourVoices’ podcast after Floyd’s murder. The topic was: ‘Is Capitalism Racist?’ While I was making the podcast I realised that I wasn’t the only one who had rediscovered Mills. Reading groups were springing up to discuss his ideas. Mills’ arguments were helping people make sense of the monolithic state violence they had witnessed and the pain, fury, love and hope they were experiencing on the streets. When I was asked to write something for this year’s Black History Month, I knew it was going to be about Mills and the racial contract.
The book begins with a Black American folk saying: “When white people say ‘Justice’, they mean ‘Just us’”. ‘The Racial Contract’ is a critique of social contract theory espoused by Enlightenment thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. Social contract theory argues that society is based on a tacit contract whereby citizens give up some of their freedoms and agree to be governed in exchange for certain rights and protections. It is this social contract that confers legitimacy on the authority of the state.
