The Racial Contract: Challenging White Supremacy in Sociological Theories and Providing a Global Theory for Race

I entered graduate school shortly after 9/11, determined to study race and Muslims. I knew from personal experiences that something had drastically shifted after the terrorist attacks. Anti-Muslim racism existed prior to 9/11, but after the attacks, it became more overt, widespread, and institutionalized (Bayoumi 2015; Cainkar 2011; Love 2017; Selod 2018). The terrorist attacks opened the flood gate, releasing the vitriol and anger that had been cooped up in many for so long. And yet in the years after September 11, particularly in a moment of the intense backlash Muslims encountered (Peek 2011), to call anti-Muslim discrimination a form of racism was not widely accepted.

When I told people I wanted to study racism that Muslims were experiencing, I was often met with confused responses, like “Muslims are a religious group, not a race, so how can they experience racism?” The media, friends, professors, fellow graduate students and even members of the Muslim community were dubious that Muslims experienced racism. Still, I was set on understanding this anti-Muslim racism, which is why I decided to pursue a PhD in Sociology. Yet, my path took many divergent turns before I came back to this topic, mostly because the scholarship I was exposed to in graduate school made it difficult to study the experiences of Muslim Americans with racism.

When I began my graduate program in Sociology, I felt both nervous and motivated. I was one of very few students of color in a particularly large cohort and was older than most of my classmates. I was also exposed to a sea of whiteness in my program via the curriculum, faculty, and fellow students. I can see now my naivete in pursuing my topic that was driven by what I saw happening in the Muslim community. The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had visited my father several times after 9/11, something I wrote about in the introduction of my book Forever Suspect (2018). One time they came to his office to ask him questions about supporting terrorist organizations, something many Muslims experienced after 9/11 (Cainkar 2011). Growing up in Texas, we had experienced racism—we heard racial slurs hurled from cars and navigated harassment in public spaces—but my dad had never been visited by the FBI about his “connection” to terrorism prior to 9/11 (to be clear he did not have any). Something shifted.

The first year of graduate school was intimidating to say the least. I read Marx, Durkheim, Weber, Adorno, and Gramsci in my theory course. Cedric Robinson coined the term racial capitalism to address the shortcomings of Marxism and its Eurocentric lens in Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (2000), but I did not read this text alongside Marx. DuBois and other scholars of color, including women like Patricia Hill Collins, were not on the list of revered sociologists we had to know. The disconnect between what I was reading and what I wanted to study was confusing and deflating and often left me wondering if I had made a huge mistake in pursuing a PhD. I remember feeling like an outsider in academia because the scholarship I was reading did not help me understand or explain the experiences of the population I wanted to study, which happened to also be my community.

It was not until I took the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity that I was exposed to texts that addressed many of the issues I was facing as an academic in graduate school. That is where I first encountered the work of Charles Mills. Mills’ The Racial Contract (1999) put into words the experiences I was having. I was and remain blown away by the opening lines from his book:

White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today. You will not find this term in introductory, or even advanced, texts in political theory. A standard undergraduate philosophy course will start off with Plato and Aristotle, perhaps say something about Augustine, Aquinas, and Machiavelli, move on to Hobbes, Locke, Mill, and Marx, and then you wind up with Rawls and Nozick. It will introduce you to notions of aristocracy, democracy, absolutism, liberalism, representative government, socialism, welfare capitalism, and libertarianism. But though it covers more than two thousand years of Western political thought and runs the ostensible gamut of political systems, there will be no mention of the basic political system that has shaped the world for the past several hundred years. And this omission is not accidental. Rather, it reflects the fact that standard textbooks and courses have for the most part been written and designed by whites, who take their racial privilege so much for granted that they do not even see it as political, as a form of domination. (p. 1)

In these first few sentences, Mills calls out the foundational philosophers for excluding the experiences of people of color, for writing from an exclusively white perspective, and for creating a white supremacist field of political inquiry. His argument is an epistemological one, which asks the reader to consider who is creating knowledge (using the social contract theory as his primary example), whose experiences from which these theories derive, and to whose experiences these theories can be applied. Mills argues that one of the most influential political theories, the social contract, is instead a racial contract because it is does not apply to all people, but only to those who count as “white people.” The social contract, then, is a contract for maintaining white racial domination.

As Mills articulates so clearly in his opening lines, the erasure of people of color in the creation of knowledge is a form of political domination. One of the ways this erasure occurs is via publishing in academic journals. Failure to publish can tank one’s career. One major barrier for people who study race (often scholars of color) is the makeup of editorial boards for academic journals (Auelua-Toomey and Roberts 2022). People of color and women are often underrepresented in scholarship, often due to the gatekeeping within academia via journal reviewers, editorial boards, and book publishers (Shim et al. 2021). For example, if an editorial board of a journal consists mostly of white scholars who have relied on scholarship that reifies the theories Mills has called out as written by white people and meant for white people, this impacts which scholarship is chosen for publication in said journal. It becomes difficult to get your scholarship published if you are not using the research that is recognized as legitimate by these reviewers. Kimberly Hoang (2022) provides a personal example, sharing that an article she submitted to the American Sociological Review encouraged her to abandon a woman theorist, whose theory took seriously gender, because they did not view it as theoretically sophisticated. The reviewer encouraged her to instead cite two men. While this example is about gender, we might also see parallel scenarios among race scholars.

I found assimilation theories to be the type of theory Mills writes about—those theories made for white people and meant for white people. I came across assimilation theories when studying the sociology of religion and immigration. They were used to explain and theoretically understand new immigrant populations and the impact their religions had on how they succeeded or failed at integrating into society (Warner 1997, 2007). Lacking in this analysis was a discussion of the structural barriers that prevented racialized groups from the privileges afforded to white populations in the United States. Even a cursory glance at the history of our immigration laws and policies reveals that anti-immigrant sentiments have always been a part of the experience of immigrants from South Asian, African, Middle Eastern, and Latin American countries (Kibria, Bowman, and O’Leary 2014). Yet, this body of scholarship placed the ability to succeed in United States squarely on racialized immigrant populations, including Muslims. Invisible in this scholarship was how these same populations have historically encountered racialized barriers via our immigration laws and policies like exclusion from entering the United States and access to citizenship (Lopez 1997). Missing from these theories were my experiences with racism and harassment. While my experiences were different from African Americans or indigenous populations due to our differential histories with migration, they did not mirror white ethnic immigrant lives either, which was often the basis for the first wave of assimilation theories (Treitler 2015).

Taking the experiences of white immigrants as the standard when theorizing about assimilation, is a perfect example of what Mills refers to when he states the social contract is a racial contract. Vilna Bashi Treitler (2015) also aptly makes this argument in her seminal article, “Social Agency and White Supremacy in Immigration Studies” that was published in the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity. Echoing Mills, Treitler shows how the use of assimilation theories in immigration studies reflects a theory that was based in white supremacy because it failed to acknowledge the centrality of race in its theorizing. She shows that contemporary scholars attempt to bring race into their updated theories of assimilation, yet race is still downplayed, and social agency given too much explanatory power instead of structures.

Had I been exposed to this article or type of scholarship in graduate school, I could have avoided the intellectual gymnastics I had to do in order to show that Muslims experience racialization and not religious discrimination. To give my personal example, the majority of my committee was not convinced that racism, and the field of race scholarship, explained the experiences that the South Asian and Arab Muslim Americans I interviewed were having after 9/11. As a young parent who was working a full-time job, I was faced with a choice to take my analysis of racism out of my dissertation in order to finish my PhD, or risk not finishing. Ultimately, I chose to finish. When I presented my research while on the job market, stripped bare of any meaningful analysis of race or racism, one member of a search committee told me after my presentation, “It seems like there is a tourniquet on you, silencing you.” Similar to Hoang, but in different venues, the gatekeepers in the academy continue to force scholars to reproduce scholarship that “maintains the racial status quo” (Treitler 2015). In The Racial Contract, Mills (1999) provides us with a way to break this vicious cycle.