Research Proposal on "Social Contract and Racial Dominance"

Research Proposal 6 pages (1830 words) Sources: 2 Style: APA

[EXCERPT] . . . .

The Social Contract and Racial Dominance in America

Mills' essay "Race and the Social Contract Tradition" (2000) makes a

compelling argument about the nature of social power dynamic in America,

evaluating issues related to race, racial identity and the defacto

acceptance of a social contract which uses these traits to define a clear

hierarchy. The social contract is elaborated in the Mills text in order to

examine the hegemonic impulses which it supports. In particular, this

essay will evaluate Mills' conception of the dominance contract as

reflecting the ethical and ideological distortions used to reinforce

continuing racial inequality in the economic, political and social context.

According to Mills, in spite of the many legal and ideological changes

which have occurred across the last century, racial qualifiers remain a

powerful force with respect to opportunity and social order. The Caucasian

population of the United States most assuredly enjoys a singular reign at

the top of a racially loaded hierarchy which calls into question the logic

of the 'social contract.' To the point, Mills raises the threshold

question of whether the denials, fallacies, and unconscious perceptions of

racial hierarchies are attributable to the inherent problems with the

mechanics of social contracts or primarily consequences of the particular

beliefs and social history of American society. To an extent, he proceeds

to make the argument that some intercession of both is responsible for the

inequality in our society. Mills contends that "insofar as the contract

classically emphasises the centrality of individual will and consent, it

voluntarises and represents as the result of free and universal consensual

agreement relations and structures of domination about which most people

have no real choice, and which actually oppress the majority of the

population." (Mills, 441) This is to suggest that the assumption of a

social contract is a tool of authority in and of itself which dictates an

involuntary consent of all individuals to a common moral disposition. The

result is a self-fulfilling prophecy in which the supposed ethical

responsibility of all to a social contract is assumed without consideration

of the contract's possible inherent flaws. In the case of the social

contract which might be said to exist in the United States, the inherent

racialist biases in our history combine with the shortcomings of the social

contract in order not only to extend a set of expectations to all citizens

but to attach these falsely to moral turpitude. In the case of the case of

the dominance contract, this false moral turpitude is tantamount to the

ethical defense of racial inequality.

Mills also suggests that racial inequalities in contemporary American

society are substantially less resolved than typically represented. Mills

addresses the issue of defining the nature of the debt owed by the white

majority to racial groups which they had subjugated for centuries. Mills

outlines the contextual understanding of contractual relationships by

differentiating literal contracts from the hypothetical, and descriptive

contracts from defacto contracts. In that regard, much of Mills' argument

is that contemporary American society is substantially defined by a defacto

contract in the form of the accepted historical narrative of the evolution

of Western society

According to the author, the shared history of human societies has

produced a tacit contract endorses the responsibility of all individuals to

their respective societies. In the case of Western European societies in

general and the United States in particular, the social contract emergent

in our national history functions as a form of mutual agreement that would

ignore many inconvenient historical truths, such as the manner and degree

to which the white races have relied on their exploitation of non-whites

(and to which white males have relied on exploiting females, and the rich

on exploiting the poor throughout an even longer history). Importantly,

Mills remarks that the assumption of this contract seems to have emerged

almost spontaneously as a device through which to construct an inherency to

such inequalities. Mills tells that "if collectivity is understood as

embodying agreement, it does not necessarily follow that any such agreement

between parties ever actually took place in historical time. . . A

contraction political theory, therefore, can be entirely hypothetical,

analyzing state and society as if agreement must always be presumed."

(Mills, 444) Naturally, this creates quite a bit of latitude for those who

have simultaneously reported to the existence of such a contract and who

have further appointed themselves as distinctly qualified to enforce such a

contract.

This allows for what Mills refers to as a naturalization of the

social contract, in which the hegemonic claim and enforcement of such a

contract allows it to manifest as something real. Where it would be

hypothetical in its originally incarnation, its execution as a mode to the

extension of social control, political exclusivity and economic imbalance

would make it a very real force. Such is to say that the theoretical

construct of the social contract is more accurately understood in the

actual formulation of a dominance contract. Accordingly, the

characterization of racial exploitation through dominance and repression

presented by Mills suggests that the contemporary white majority still

dominates minority races unjustly by virtue of the identical methods used

historically by the upper classes to dominate the lower classes, and

prehistorically by males to dominate females. By rendering political and

economic institutions in which those of the ruling demographic are able to

formalize and legitimize otherwise theoretical inequalities, Mills denotes

that white men have succeeded in establishing a hierarchical order which

functions across characteristics of gender, wealth, and race.

Race is an issue which has especially garnered intense focus both by

those that would defend the legitimacy of the dominance contract and by

those that have sought to reaffirm the validity of the social contract by

removing it from the machinations of white supremacy. Quite to the point,

it is not that social contract in and of itself which comprises the

greatest problem for human civility. Instead, it is a failure to

critically acknowledge that the social contract is vulnerable to distortion

when brandished by an unequal force. This points to the underlying concern

that governments have historically tended toward this inequality by

allowing for or benefiting from notable racial disparities.

This is something which Mills acknowledges in pointing to ways of

refining the social contract theory. He makes the case that an

understanding of the social contract with a concession to the realities of

racial disparity is necessary if it this is to be understood as an

instrument for social order rather than the retention of classicist

dominance. So remarks Mills, describing "what has come to be called

'critical race theory' began in legal theory, as a response to racial

minorities' dissatisfaction with the critical legal studies movement. So

this was, so to speak, a critique of the crits, the claim that their

analysis of the deficiencies and silences of mainstream legal theory did

not pay sufficient attention to race." (Mills, 447) This is an idea which

helps to underscore a view of the social contract as having been stewarded

to reflect society's racism and not necessarily the other way around. In

this regard, the social contract is not a threat to racial equality but

becomes a channel by which inequality can be both manifested and

entrenched.

As Mills finds, there is nothing inherently immoral, unjust, or

problematic, in principle, with the social contract model. Rather, the

justness or unjustness and the social utility of social contracts lies in

the factual validity and ethical fairness of their underlying assumptions

and presumptions. Ultimately, Mills will actually come to find the social

contract a useful instrument for assuring that the moral constants which

help to protect a society from its own internal destruction are defined and

accepted. With respect to the definition of the law, it is expected that

our collective submission to this force is demonstrative of the social

contract in full and defensible respect. In its absence, a society could

descend into chaos. Ultimately, this denotes that the principal

requirement to resolve the problems introduced by social contracts,

therefore, is not to abolish them altogether but to examine the impulses

that have caused them to misrepresent ethical determinations.

Naturally, this is more easily said than done, but it is an imperative

underscored by Mills' argument, which emphasizes the need to deconstruct

the racialist falsehoods that are more a function of political imperative

than biology. Mills indicates that "if there is a key point, a common

theoretical denominator, it is the simultaneous recognition of the

centrality of race and the unreality of race, its socio-political rather

than biological character. The cliche? that has come to express this

insight is that race is not natural but 'constructed'. So race is made,

unmade, and remade; race is a product of human activity, both personal and

institutional, rather than DNA." (Mills, 448) This means that in order to

free the social contract from the dominance framework, we must collectively

unlearn that which we have come to accept about race and society.

Mills details the manner in which… READ MORE

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