Twenty-Five Years of Charles Mills’s Racial Contract in Sociology

Introduction

After the death of the philosopher Charles W. Mills at the age of 70 in 2021, colleagues at The Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY) organized a day-long conference to honor his life and work. At the conference, Paul Taylor, the W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, remarked that Mills “met the needs and alleviated the suffering” of Black philosophers whom the discipline of philosophy, in its institutionalized and professionalized form, had profoundly marginalized. To underscore his point, he noted that when Charles W. Mills’s (1997) landmark The Racial Contract (henceforth TRC) was published, “one had to hunt in the sociology section of bookstores” to find it (Taylor 2022).

The task of interpreting how, why, and for how long the gatekeepers of professional philosophy excluded TRC as a contemporary classic in the discipline, or from its position on the philosophy bookshelf, is best left to philosophers. For sociologists, however, Taylor’s observation about the sociology section of the bookstore is a warrant to consider whether a text like TRC, arguably the most famous book in the critical philosophy of race, has been fulsomely engaged by its sociological shelf-mates. In other words: if those who curate academic bookstores think of sociology as a suitable adoptive home for TRC, do sociologists agree?

To this end, on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of TRC, I have been asked by the editors of Sociology of Race and Ethnicity to write a reflection on the impact of TRC on the sociological study of race and racism. I take seriously the multiple meanings of “reflection” implied in their invitation, and in this essay, I try to hold a mirror to the diverse and longstanding connections that sociologists of race have had with TRC over the past quarter century. Because engagement of a text requires its citation, but citation does not necessarily require engagement, I make some distinctions between sociologists’ engagement of TRC versus their citation of TRC. I also reflect upon what these suggest about the subfield and share my own intellectual relationship to the text. However, like any reflective surface, the mirror I offer here is to some extent warped, distorted, and incomplete; there are texts I have left out and vistas my sightlines occlude.

The essay continues in two parts. In Part 1, “The Life History of TRC in Sociology,” I summarize the argument and intervention of the text and describe some patterns I observe in sociologists’ engagement and citation of it over the past quarter century. I take interpretive liberty to periodize this scholarship into two chronologically coherent waves: a TRC First Wave (1997–2009) and a TRC Second Wave (2010–present). ¹ The two waves share some authorial origins and substantive concerns through a vanguard of early adopters of TRC who engaged the text in their sociological writings. These early adopters are largely (although not exclusively) Black sociologists of race and racism who drew on TRC as part of a paradigmatic shift in the subfield away from the study of “race relations” to the study of racism. As part of this paradigmatic shift, first wave adopters drew on TRC to name and challenge the unmarked tradition of white sociology and assert and affirm a tradition of Black sociology (Du Bois [1899] 1996; Ladner [1973] 1998). I then describe how, at the turn of the 2010s, an observable cut point can be drawn between the TRC first and second waves. The second wave is characterized by a fivefold increase in the number of sociological citations to TRC, the explosion of TRC as a core text among a cohort of second wave early-career sociologists (some of whom studied with mentors from the TRC first wave), and diffusion of TRC beyond the sociology of race into other subfields of the discipline.

In Part 2, “TRC in My Life History,” I recount my introduction to TRC in 2010 at the chronological and epistemological cut point of the two waves and explain its influence on my research as a graduate student and what I interpret as its influence on the work of several other “dissertators” in the second wave. I continue elaborating on the influence of TRC in my life history by describing how the text begins and ends my 2017 book, The Limits of Whiteness, as well as the first years of my career as pre-tenure faculty at the University of Toronto, Mills’s alma mater. As a new tenure-track hire in 2015, I brought TRC “home” to Toronto to advance an overdue revision of our graduate department’s priorities and teaching agenda in race and ethnicity—a revision that required me and other committed colleagues to “think against the grain” (Mills 1997:119, emphasis original). I end the essay with thoughts on how TRC will undoubtedly yield even more generative cross-pollination across areas of foci in Sociology and how our reading practices might be expanded to include a new generation of critical philosophers who are, in turn, engaging sociology.

The Life History of Trc in Sociology: A First Wave (1997–2009)

The major scholarly intervention of TRC is to demonstrate that mainstream philosophy, represented by Western theory and its purportedly race-neutral social contract tradition (e.g., Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Rawls), can only, at best, explain moral and political relations between whites. Despite claims to universalism, Mills (1997) argues that Western philosophy is ignorant on white supremacy, even though white supremacy is “the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today” (p. 1). TRC argues that relations among persons and the state must instead be understood as a global racial contract that is political, moral, and epistemological; at its root, it is an exploitation contract (Mills 1997:9). Mills (1997) combines abstract, Rawlsian “ideal theory” with grounded, materialist reality to offer a multitude of insights for sociologists of race: that the essential idea of race is to distinguish between “persons” and “subpersons” (p. 53); that the racial contract induces white epistemic ignorance (p. 18) and white cognitive dysfunction (1997:95); that the racial contract is “continually being rewritten to create different forms of the racial polity” ² (p. 72); and that nonwhites, and especially Black persons, have a foundational prerogative to assert for themselves a moral, cognitive, and aesthetic power in the “political project of reclaiming personhood” (pp. 118–20). Mills (1997) closes TRC’s slim 133 pages “in the long, honorable tradition of oppositional black theory . . .” in which “we are literally the men and women who know too much . . . who know where the bodies are buried (after all, so many of them are our own)” (pp. 131–32, emphasis original). TRC ultimately proposes a seriously reworked, radicalized (anti-racist, feminist, Third World) vision of liberalism because although he knows “too much,” for its ability to “unite description and prescription, fact and norm” (Mills 1997:130), Mills remained steadfastly committed to normative philosophy.

Within a few years of the publication of TRC, a vanguard first wave of sociologists engaged the text. In the first wave (1997–2009), TRC early adopters (~843 citations, see Note 3) shared a paradigmatic concern to shift the subfield’s attention from “race relations” to racism (e.g., James McKee’s (1993) Sociology and the Race Problem and Stephen Steinberg’s (2007) Race Relations: A Critique). ³ In fact, the earliest engagement of TRC from within the center of sociology is an enthusiastic book review by Stephen Steinberg (1999) in American Journal of Sociology, who wrote that TRC “offers a theoretical framework that ought to serve as the starting point for any serious study of race in American society” (p. 1228). Soon after, Walter Allen and Angie Chung (2000) cited TRC in the introduction to their essay on “race, ethnicity, and social inequality in America” in Contemporary Sociology. Other early adopters like Joe Feagin ([2000] 2014, 2004), Bob Blauner (2001), Joanne Nagel (2001), Nirmal Puwar (2001), Chris Uggen, Jeff Manza, and Angela Behrans (2003), Yen Le Espiritu (2003), and Rodney Coates (2004, 2008) found TRC particularly useful for understanding structural racism in purportedly race-neutral contexts. Most profoundly, however, Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2000, 2001, [2003] 2021, 2004) consistently cited and engaged TRC in the development of a structural approach to studying and theorizing racism. From insights on the “racialized social system” to the “colorblind racism” of Western nations, Bonilla-Silva’s scholarly interventions in sociology during the first wave of TRC’s adoption paralleled closely with Mills’s intellectual agenda on racial oppression, social domination, and white ignorance.

The influence of Bonilla-Silva in the citation, engagement, and diffusion of TRC by other sociologists is significant. During the early TRC first wave, David Embrick, Tyrone A. Forman, Carla Goar, and especially Amanda E. Lewis, all of whom worked with Bonilla-Silva as graduate students, brought TRC deeper into sociology to understand colorblind ideology and whites’ denial of racism (see, for example, Bonilla-Silva, Lewis, and Embrick 2004; Forman, Goar, and Lewis 2002; Lewis 2001, 2004). Amanda E. Lewis and co-editor Maria Krysan (2004) even secured a book chapter from Mills himself (“Racial Exploitation and the Wages of Whiteness”) for the edited volume The Changing Terrain of Race and Ethnicity, where Mills got to have the last word in a text otherwise populated by sociologists like Bonilla-Silva, Feagin, Lawrence Bobo, and Evelyn Nakano Glenn. And, finally, in their canonical edited volume White Logic White Methods, Tukufu Zuberi and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (2008) built on TRC’s intervention in philosophy to identify the particular “epistemologies of ignorance” (Mills 1997:18) underpinning social science methods.

Additional significant interlocutors in the TRC first wave include David Brunsma (2005) and Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Brunsma ([2001] 2008), who analyzed Black/White multiracial self-identities against the tenants of Mills’s racial contract. Vilna Bashi Treitler (2007) engaged TRC to understand the relative position of “Black” as a racial category within North American and European racial ideologies. Steve Garner (2007) drew centrally on TRC to define white supremacy in Whiteness: An Introduction, and Stephen Cornell and Douglas Hartmann (2007) acknowledged TRC in the second edition of Ethnicity and Race in a Changing World. Wendy Leo Moore (2008) engaged TRC to understand whites’ moral and political justifications for inequality in her analysis of law schools. And finally, James M. Thomas (2007), as a graduate student, authored a review essay on the tenth anniversary of TRC for the first issue of Sociology Compass, urging colleagues to deeply engage TRC and “re-up the contract with Sociology” (p. 255).

The Life History of Trc in Sociology: A Second Wave (2010–Present)

A distinct second wave of sociologists’ engagement with TRC (2010–present) is evinced by a fivefold increase in citation (~3,640 sociology citations to TRC, see Note 3). This upsurge roughly corresponds to three types of engagement: a continued citational incorporation of TRC into almost all of the major programmatic and synthetic texts in the sociology of race that co-occur with a related resurgence in Du Boisian sociology; new engagements of TRC in the theoretical frameworks of the dissertations (and later, major research outputs) of a critical mass of early-career sociologists of race; and finally, the citational diffusion of TRC through “Handbooks” and bridging articles into other subfields of sociology (e.g., human rights, religion, political sociology, and theory).

As mentioned, a major programmatic shift in the subfield crystallized during the TRC second wave: a resurgence of Du Boisian sociology to understand and ameliorate social suffering and address white ignorance in Sociology (e.g., see Blume Oeur 2021; Clair 2021; Itzigsohn and Brown 2020; Morris 2015; Wright 2016; Yazdiha 2021). ⁴ Within this resurgence, TRC makes appearances in major works like Aldon Morris’s (2015) Scholar Denied, Earl Wright II and Edward V. Wallace’s (2015) Ashgate Research Companion to Black Sociology, and Marcus Anthony Hunter’s (2018) The New Black Sociologists. In addition, nearly all TRC first wave interlocutors continued to bring TRC into their major synthetic works in the sociology of race and racism published during the second wave. These included revised editions of Joe R. Feagin’s White Racial Frame (2013) and Racist America ([2000] 2014), Steve Garner’s (2017) Racisms: An Introduction, State of White Supremacy edited by Moon-Kie Jung, Joao H. Costa Vargas, and Bonilla-Silva (2011), and multiple revised editions of Eduardo Bonilla-Silva’s Racism Without Racists ([2003] 2021) and his American Sociological Association (ASA) presidential address, “Feeling Race: Theorizing the Racial Economy of Emotions” (2019).

The founding of this very journal in the second wave (Brunsma, Embrick, and Nanney 2015) provided a serious new venue for sociologists engaged in Millsian thinking. These include Tanya Golash-Boza (2016), who relied on TRC to historicize the modern concept of race and link structure and ideology in the system of white supremacy, and Dwanna McKay, Kirsten Vinyeta, and Kari Marie Norgaard (2020) who use TRC to surface prevailing forms of colonialism in Sociology. TRC also became a signal citation in nearly all the other major synthetic texts of the second wave. For example, Michelle Byng (2013) used TRC to explain the flexibility of racism, whereas Michael Omi and Howard Winant (2014) deployed it to problematize the obfuscation of race in political theories of the state, as did Mustafa Emirbayer and Matthew Desmond (2015), who quoted liberally from Mills to describe an interlocked, worldwide system of “racial advantage and disadvantage” stemming from the spread of colonialism, imperialism, and slavery (p. 59). In a more explicit U.S. framework, Moon-Kie Jung and Yaejoon Kwon (2013) cited TRC for its distinctively relational approach to anti-Blackness and racism, whereas scholars like Shirley Anne Tate (2016) productively applied TRC to the analyses of the academy itself.

The TRC second wave is further distinguished from the first wave by an explosion in the number of very early-career sociologists of race and racism (i.e., “the dissertators”) who engage TRC in the theoretical frameworks of their dissertation projects. When considered on their own, the projects may appear quite different from one another, but, when seen collectively, they appear to confront an interlocked set of world problems that necessitate a reworking of TRC into an even more expansive, global program for the sociological study of race. A non-exhaustive but diverse list of second wave TRC sociologists and major articles and books from their dissertation research include Matthew Hughey (2012), Geoff K. Ward (2012), Melissa Weiner (2012), Alyasah Ali Sewell (2016), W. Carson Byrd (2017), Crystal Fleming (2017), Atiya Husain (2017), Celia Lacayo (2017), Jennifer Mueller (2017, 2020), Michael Rodriguez-Muniz (2017), Angel Parham (2017), Karida Brown (2018), Louise Seamster (2018), Sarah Mayorga-Gallo (2019), Victor Ray (2019a), Trenita Brookshire Childers (2020), hephizibah strmic-pawl (2020), Ali Meghji (2021), Whitney Pirtle (2021), Theresa Rocha Beardall (2022), Kiara Wyndham Douds (2021), and Daanika Gordon (2022). My own 2012 dissertation and resulting book (Maghbouleh 2017) could be understood as part of this chronological and epistemological second wave, and I elaborate on the impact of TRC for such early-career adopters like me in Part 2 of this essay.

Finally, the TRC second wave is distinguished from the first by significant dispersion of TRC beyond the sociology of race. TRC is cited to bridge sociological subfields like cognitive sociology and sociology of race (Brekhus et al. 2010), critical race methodology and algorithmic fairness (Hanna et al. 2019), organizational theory and sociology of race (Ray 2019b), and economic sociology and sociology of race (Hirschman and Garbes 2021). Increased citational dispersion of TRC in the second wave is also observed in recent handbooks of different subfields of sociology, including Religion in Sociological Perspective (Roberts and Yamane 2011), the Handbook of Sociology for Human Rights (Brunsma, Lyall Smith, and Gran [2015] 2019), the Handbook of the Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations (Batur and Feagin 2018), the New Handbook of Political Sociology (Janoskiet al. 2020), and the Handbook of Classical Sociological Theory (Abrutyn and Lizardo 2021). It remains to be seen whether a TRC third wave will push the text even further into new case studies, subfields, and, most importantly, programmatic agendas to keep the study of race analytically sharp and responsive to the needs of the world.

Trc in my Life History

In 2010, at the hinge point of the two TRC waves I have sketched above, I was a PhD student in Sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). For reasons beyond the scope of this essay, I found myself without language competency or institutional affiliation in Bielefeld, Germany, a city Germans liked to joke did not really exist (a satirical conspiracy that, I think, pokes fun at Bielefeld for being unremarkable). I wanted to move forward on my dissertation but had little structure. Back at UCSB, George Lipsitz was teaching a rarely offered graduate seminar, “Color Blindness Across the Disciplines,” anchored by 10 books in 10 different fields, including sociology and philosophy. I finagled a copy of the syllabus and read along with the seminar from nine time zones and 5,700 miles away, only emailing Professor Lipsitz after Week 4—on philosophy and TRC—to confess I was creeping on the course, having read the paragraph below:

. . . Finally, the Racial Contract evolves not merely by altering the relations between whites and nonwhites but by shifting the criteria for who counts as white and nonwhite . . . [t]he overall trend is toward a limited expansion of the privileged human population through the “whitening” of the previously excluded group in question, though there may be local reversals. (Mills 1997:78, emphasis added)

The six words in Mills’s subordinating conjunction—“. . . though there may be local reversals”—appear in a section (“Part 2: Details”) of TRC where Mills outlines how the racial contract is continually rewritten to accommodate social change and account for unstable population boundaries by modifying the criteria for who is and is not white. Although Mills emphasized that the global, political-economic trend was toward modest, opportunistic expansions of whiteness to include formerly excluded nonwhites, Mills’s openness to the possibility of “local reversals”—where formerly included groups are subject to contractions of whiteness and excluded—was a shove pushing me forward on the dissertation I was avoiding. So, from my isolation in Germany, instead of reading German-germinated sociology by Du Bois, Marx, Simmel, or Weber, I read TRC. For this, I thank George Lipsitz, the distinguished UCSB historian, who until his recent retirement was appointed to Black Studies and Sociology, and the other iconoclastic members of my dissertation committee (Jon Cruz, now Professor Emeritus, and G. Reginald Daniel) who allowed me to file a dissertation on racial reversals, in and out of whiteness, experienced by young Iranians in the United States.

Despite a strong identification as a sociologist and my semi-cringy devotion to the discipline, my book The Limits of Whiteness: Iranian Americans and the Everyday Politics of Race (Maghbouleh 2017) begins (p. 4) and ends (p. 173) not with sociology, but with TRC. I drew on TRC because its definition of race and characterization of Western contractarianism as taken-for-granted, exploitative, and based on an epistemology of ignorance was, for analyzing the empirical data I had collected, superior to the prevailing definitions of race, ethnicity, and (shudder) race relations that sociology offered. The two key concepts I advance in Limits of Whiteness, “racial hinges” and “racial loopholes,” and the legal, ethnographic, and historical evidence I martial to substantiate the concepts are inspired in no small part by TRC’s rigorous rejoinder to contractarian legal and political thought.

Perhaps more importantly, though, the global scope of TRC and Mills’s internationalism allowed me—at an early stage of the book project—to analytically untether myself from fixed, racial/ethnic categories bounded to any given nation-state to instead prioritize Mills’s political philosophical definition of race as marked by full versus subordinate personhood. This allowed the scope of my dissertation and book project to ricochet (conceptually and empirically) between Iran, where the dregs of empire and scientific racism sustain an illusory “Aryan myth” that erases ethno-racial heterogeneity, to the United States, where a remarkably heterogeneous population from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is administratively homogenized as white de jure but not de facto.

Such influence of TRC across theory, data, and method is characteristic among other TRC second wave sociology dissertators, whose projects extend well beyond the United States too. Three illustrative examples are Pirtle (2021), who draws centrally on TRC’s definition of race and its political framework to analyze how nation-states like post-Apartheid South Africa transform racial categories to co-opt racial redress while practicing “colored blindness,” and Fleming (2017), who engages TRC’s epistemic commitment to Black political subjectivity in her analysis of French activists who martial commemorative practices to disrupt anti-Black erasures of slavery, abolition, and Black belonging in purportedly “post-racial” societies like France (see also Beaman (2020) who engages TRC to great effect in research on Black activists mobilizing against global white supremacy and police violence in Europe). While this is only a brief sketch, I suspect that those of us who draw on TRC do so because we aspire to move the way Mills moves: between abstraction and materiality, the local and the global, with a parsimony and elegance that too often eludes us as sociologists.

Concluding Thoughts

As Mills (1997) writes in TRC, “the fish does not see the water, and whites do not see the racial nature of a white polity because it is natural to them, the element in which they move” (p. 76). Extending Mills’s metaphor to my Sociology undergraduate and graduate education through the 2000s and my professional appointment in the academy, racialized (and American) elitism is the natural element in which I move. Therefore, this essay and its author are, to use Mills’s (1997) memorable language, “beneficiaries” of if not “signatories” to (p. 11) the white polity of academic sociology. To deny that is to reproduce the very system of epistemological ignorance that TRC argues against.

But TRC also encourages readers to “think against the grain” (Mills 1997:119, emphasis original), and in this way, new trends and developments will surely emerge in a third wave of sociological engagement with the text. Working on this essay has persuaded me that at least two waves of sociologists of race and racism have duly taken up TRC, in both citation and engagement. It stands to reason that TRC’s treasures will continue to be shared with new generations. Indeed, when I started my tenure-track job in 2015 at the University of Toronto Sociology Department, TRC was the first text I added (or brought back home) to the graduate department’s “ethnicity” comprehensive exam reading list (until recently the word “race” was absented from our teaching schedule and department Web site).

Mills, a University of Toronto philosophy alumni (Masters [1975] and PhD [1985]) has remarked that his formative experiences were “extra-academic” in Toronto’s progressive Anglo-Caribbean solidarity movements (Philosophy News 2018). So, a distinct pleasure of reading TRC with sociology graduate students at the University of Toronto has been to share this connection with them and witness how they extend TRC into the local and transnational histories of our city as a space of Black, Caribbean, Indigenous, and Third World political community and creativity. In the first chapter of my faculty career at the University of Toronto, those of us with expertise in global white supremacy and colonialism were committed to thinking against the grain of our Canadian department’s long-dominant practice of erasing race and denying Indigenous sovereignty through the euphemisms of ethnicity and immigration. Together, we have over time transformed the “Ethnicity” research and teaching area and its related exam reading list into, first, “Race and Ethnicity” and now, “Colonization, Racialization, Indigeneity (CRI).” ⁵ And TRC is the first book I carried over from the old exam reading list to CRI, where it still speaks trenchantly to racism, Indigenous activism, and Global South self-determination.

Given the significant intellectual energy behind Black Feminist Sociology (Luna and Pirtle 2022), perhaps a third wave of sociological engagement with TRC will more rigorously engage the text’s originating relationship to feminist political theory. Mills himself was unambiguous that TRC was inspired by Carole Pateman’s (1988) Sexual Contract, published a decade earlier. By 2007, Carole Pateman and Charles W. Mills (2007) teamed up to write Contract and Domination, which included a chapter on intersectionality penned by Mills alone. He delineates a “racia-sexual contract” (p. 174) that underwrites “diamond”-shaped intersections of asymmetrical power relations between people. Indeed, Nancy Lopez and Howard Hogan (2021) draw on TRC to invite “street race white Latinx” persons to practice intersectional thinking about race and ethnicity by refusing the homogenization of vastly different experiences of racism and social exclusion faced by Latinx persons into a single racial category, as has been insinuated in a possible future revision of federal race/ethnicity standards. Thus, as TRC continues its diffusion through a range of sociological subfields, a third wave might test, build on, or complicate the original racial contract or Mills’s theorization of the intersectional diamond from data that illuminate life at the margin of multiple categories.

Finally, in the same way that a vanguard first wave of Black sociologists engaged Mills’s philosophy to reform our discipline, a current wave of Black philosophers like Olúfẹmi O. Táíwò (2022) are engaging sociological pioneers like E. Franklin Frazier to advance philosophical thinking on race, class, and identity politics. There is something beautiful about the interdisciplinary act of “discovering” or re-discovering one another’s respective geniuses. Both from TRC and from the history of our engagement with it, I hope a final lesson any future third wave might take up is that it is a good thing for sociologists to invite critical philosophers into our edited volumes, as Krysan and Lewis did with Mills, and to review their books in our journals, as Steinberg did with TRC. Our theories are made sharper, our insights more incisive, and our critiques more persuasive through engagement with critical philosophers both off and on the bookshelf.