A. Establishing Personhood & Sub-personhood based on the contract of race
§1. Resolves Aristotle’s problem “For that which can foresee by exercise of the mind is by nature intended to be lord and master, and that which can with its body give effect to such foresight is a subject, and by nature a slave; hence master and slave have the same interest.” However, “Nature would like to distinguish between the bodies of freemen and slaves… but the opposite often happens - that some have the souls and others have the bodies of freemen.” (Politics)
§2. The racial contract est. a particular “somatotype as the norm, deviation from which unfits one for full personhood and full membership in the polity.” (54) personhood defined as a negation of subpersonhood. “Superiority is the logic or the glue for the grouping. This is not to say that members of the group are in fact superior intellectually, physically or otherwise, but rather, that superiority served as the reason to justify the creation of the group.” (Jacqueline Battalora, Birth of a White Nation, 90-91.)
B. Implications of Citizenship Status
§3. The first meeting of the US Congress in 1790 determined that in order to become a naturalized citizen, one had to be white (Act of March 26, 1790, ch.3, Stat. 103). The requirement of establishing that one was white for the purpose of naturalization was the law of the land until its repeal in 1952 (8 U.S.C. § 1422). The protections that citizenship brings: civil, political, and social rights.
Civil rights: enable individual freedom, such as liberty of the person, freedom of speech and religion, intellectual pursuit, the right to contract and to own property, and the right to justice.
Political rights: the right to engage in the political process, either as a member of the political body or an elector of those who make up that body.
Social rights: a wide range including a measure of economic welfare and security, the right to fully participate in the social heritage and to a civilized life as measured by the prevailing social standards.
C. Whiteness connected to exploitive capitalism
§4. Noncitizens excluded from citizenship (i.e., nonwhite) were denied all but low-wage jobs and difficult conditions. Each exclusion and limitation placed upon nonwhites via the white-only requirement in naturalization law created value for whites, white men in particular, including: access to more land at better prices (via the exclusion of large populations of potential buyers), less competition for skilled jobs, generally more desirable jobs, less competition for advancement within all levels of society, greater access to education and training, and a more influential voice in the body politic.
- Used to exploit Chinese laborers (in 1882 with the Chinese Exclusion Act)
- Mexicans defined as ‘conditional whites’ by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) after the Mexican-American War, classified as white by the Federal Government by not by Texas or other states. Only Mexicans of with wealthy Spanish lineages considered white.
- The 1.8 million Irish who came in the ten-year span between 1845 and 1855, many fleeing starvation in Ireland, originally considered non-white or ‘white negros;’ end up being classified as white in order to build the Democratic Party (Martin Van Buren and then Andrew Jackson) removing the requirement of property ownership as a prerequisite to vote.
D. Whiteness as Cultural Norm: A Standard of beauty and goodness
§5. The white body as the somatic norm image, “deviation from which triggers alarms.” White privilege includes the privilege of having the ideals of human perfectibility encoded in images that look like you. Malcolm X called this out in bold clarity, in his Autobiography: “This was my first really big step toward self-degradation: when I endured all of that pain, literally burning my flesh to have it look like a white man’s hair. I had joined that multitude of Negro men and women in America who are brainwashed into believing that the black people are ‘inferior’ - and white people ‘superior’ - that they will even violate and mutilate their God-created bodies to try to look ‘pretty’ by white standards.
E. The Racial Contract as being continually re-written: From de jure to de facto white supremacy
§6. Phase 1 de jure white supremacy - expropriation contract: “Manifest Destiny” against lazy savages who don’t develop the land; slave contract, non-whites as morally incapable of self-rule. “Kill the Indian, but save the man.” (88).
§7. Phase II de facto white supremacy - the racial contract writes itself out of formal existence; ongoing tension between continuing de facto privilege and formal extension of rights of nonwhites. (E.g. Jim Crow Laws and Black Codes, The racial caste system which operated primarily, but not exclusively in southern and border states, between 1877 and the mid-1960s. A black male could not offer his hand (to shake hands) with a white male because it implied being socially equal. Obviously, a black male could not offer his hand or any other part of his body to a white woman, because he risked being accused of rape. Blacks and whites were not supposed to eat together. If they did eat together, whites were to be served first, and some sort of partition was to be placed between them. Under no circumstance was a black male to offer to light the cigarette of a white female -- that gesture implied intimacy; De facto slavery continues after the Civil War: Vagrancy laws, onerous labor contracts, criminalize self-sufficiency while attacking blacks as lazy, Convict leasing system + debt peonage sharecropping as continuation of slavery.
F. White Backlash against Civil Rights Era
§8. Begins with Brown vs. Board of Education (1954): Supreme Court, esp. Thurgood Marshall, rules that Jim Crow schooling violates 14th and 5th amendments; Racism trumps even education for poor whites - Mississippi abolishes its public system to avoid integration; Nixon and Reagon redefine what the Civil Rights Movement was about ( bus seats and water fountains and not multigenerational plunder); slavery (the best thing that ever happened to blacks - Patrick Buchanan; Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” - painting the Democratic Party as the party of African Americans; creating social chaos by inducing unreasonable expectations in blacks for equality; weakening the enforcement of the Voting Rights Act 1965; Reagan’s “plausible deniability racism” - radicalizes social welfare, guts the social welfare system; fewer blacks enrolled in college in 1980s than in the 1970s; orders layoffs in federal employment - cumulatively, “by 1990 blacks in the bottom 20% were poorer in relation to whites than at any time since the 1950s.
G. Racial Contract enforced through violence and ideology
§9. The liberal-democratic state of the social contract: based on consent of the governed and neutral with respect to the lives of its citizens vs the racial polity of the racial contract as imposed through violence, (nonconsensual) and not neutral
§10. Imposing white supremacist ideology on nonwhites. (83) - the significance of lynching and anti-black police violence, mass incarceration; Origins of the Black Panther Party: “Huey suggested … that we bring these brothers off the block, openly armed, on the campus and bring the press down. We could reach the community and show them that Malcolm X has advocated armed self-defense against the racist power structure and show the racist white power structure that we intend to use guns to defend the people.” - from Bobby Seale, Seize the Time: The Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton, p. 30-31.
H. The Racial Contract creates a radicalized moral psychology: Evasion, Self-deception and Fragility
§11. Dropping a culture bomb on nonwhites: “If the social contract req. that all citizens and persons learn to respect themselves and each other, the Racial Contract prescribes nonwhite self-loathing and racial deference to white citizens.” (89) The need to justify one’s superiority by degrading the other: “It is impossible for us to suppose these creatures to be men, because, allowing them to be men, a suspicion would follow that we ourselves are not Christians.” (Montesquieu quoted by Mills, p. 97)
§12. “How can U.S. culture and society be altered when the roots of white supremacy are foundational as a matter of history and law? How can a group of people invented in part through the assertion that they are more deserving of rights and privileges than others be transformed? Is it possible to take something conceived out of superiority and deployed as a wedge between American laborers, and make it humane and fair?”
“Whites will act in racist ways while thinking of themselves as acting morally. In order words, they will experience genuine cognitive difficulties in recognizing certain behavior patterns as racist, so that quite apart from questions of motivation and bad faith they will be morally handicapped…” (93) E.g. failure to denounce crimes, downplaying suffering of nonwhites, “national web of self-deception” (97), exaggerated alarm at nonwhite violence against whites.
§13. “White people in this country will have quite enough to do in learning how to accept and love themselves and each other, and when they have achieved this—which will not be tomorrow and may very well be never—the Negro problem will no longer exist, for it will no longer be needed.” James Baldwin
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