Rhetoric & Race Traitors: Charles Mills' Work

Rhetoric and “Race Traitors”: Reading Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract as AfroModern Political Thought A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for graduation with Honors in Politics. ________________________ ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iv Abstract ............................................................................................................................... v Introduction: Reading The Racial Contract........................................................................ 1 Part I: Reading The Racial Contract as Afro-Modern Political Thought ........................... 7 Part II: Reading The Racial Contract as a Manifesto ....................................................... 12 Performing the “We” of the Manifesto ......................................................................... 16 Part III: Reading The Racial Contract as French Structuralism ....................................... 23 Part IV: Reading The Racial Contract as Contract Theory .............................................. 30 Part V: The Return to Afro-Modern Political Thought: Souls and TRC........................... 36 iii iv Abstract This thesis examines political philosopher Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract (1997) within the context of the Afro-modern tradition of political thought. By reading The Racial Contract (hereafter TRC) as part of this tradition, I draw attention to aspects of the text that have been overlooked in the scholarly literature, namely the role of rhetoric in accomplishing the goals of the text. Specifically, TRC calls for white people to become “race traitors,” meaning those who reject their racial privilege and actively work to dismantle systems of white supremacy. I highlight the ways in which the rhetoric of TRC works to incite a subjective transformation in white readers, working on both cognitive and affective dimensions to re-orient their relationship to the world and those around them. The transformation of white readers hinges crucially on the epistemological insight of nonwhite people. In addition to the larger context of Afro-modern political thought, I show how TRC draws on rhetorical strategies from three other genres within modern political thought—manifestoes, French structuralism, and contract theory—and orients them toward the questions of white supremacy and racial domination. Ultimately, I argue that the role of rhetoric in TRC affords a distinct approach to the problem of white supremacy in the contemporary moment, a moment marked by forms of colorblind racism that often make white supremacy invisible to those who benefit from it most. TRC shows how rhetoric plays a role in the political, subjective, and epistemological transformations required if white people are to make a contribution to achieving racial justice. v Introduction: Reading The Racial Contract Charles Mills’ 1997 book The Racial Contract begins from a straightforward premise: “white supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.”1 Mills, a political philosopher working mainly in the analytic tradition, proceeds from this claim to note the conspicuous absence of matters of race–– more specifically, white supremacy––from standard textbook treatments of political theory as well as the writings of mainstream moral and political philosophers. The Racial Contract (hereafter TRC) both explains the origins of the elision and prescribes an alternate normative vision. As a concept, the Racial Contract names the reality of white supremacy in terms amenable with contract theory, “the political lingua franca of our times.”2 The Racial Contract refers to the series of formal and informal agreements among white people beginning in the early modern period of European conquest and colonialism. In addition to constructing the very notions of white and nonwhite racial identities, these “contracts” classified white people as “persons” and nonwhite people as “subpersons”––a “preliminary conceptual partitioning” establishing the groundwork for the racialized patterns of exploitation and domination that characterize white supremacy at the local, national, and global level into the contemporary period.3 Subpersons, according to Mills, were assigned inferior political, moral, and epistemological standing in the polity. Where the social contract is said to be an 1 Charles W. Mills, The Racial Contract (Cornell University Press, 1997), 1. Ibid., 3. 3 Ibid,. 11, 13, 20, 44, 56-7, 75. 2 agreement between all people, the Racial Contract shows that the notion of “people” is delimited to include “only those people who count, the people who really are people,” that is, white people.4 In this sense, the Racial Contract is both historically and conceptually prior to the social contract, a meta-contract that “set[s] the limits of the [other] contracts’ validity.”5 As a theoretical framework,6 the “Racial Contract” understands racial injustice in the western polity not as an exception—an aberration in an otherwise race-neutral polity—but instead the rule, forming the normative basis of western social and political structures.7 Since TRC was published, mainstream philosophy largely continues to ignore race in its discussions of justice, fairness, and equality. Scholars in other disciplines, however, have taken up the theory of the “Racial Contract” as a useful model for explaining the ways in which white supremacy structures the outcomes of a variety of situations, from the classroom and court cases to national and international political arenas.8 By revealing how the terms of the Racial Contract are behind the manifold aspects of racial domination, this body of literature has done much to illuminate the explanatory power of 4 Ibid., 3. Ibid., 11. 6 Ibid., 3-4. In my writing as in Mills’, quotation marks distinguish the theory of the “Racial Contract” as an explanatory framework from the Racial Contract itself. 7 Ibid., 122. 8 Zeus Leonardo, “The Story of Schooling: Critical Race Theory and the Educational Racial Contract: Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education: Vol 34, No 4,” accessed October 15, 2018; Zeus Leonardo, “Contracting Race: Writing, Racism, and Education: Critical Studies in Education: Vol 56, No 1,” accessed October 15, 2018; James M. Thomas, “Re-Upping the Contract with Sociology: Charles Mills’s Racial Contract Revisited a Decade Later,” Sociology Compass 1, no. 1 (September 1, 2007): 255– 64; Anna Marie Smith, “The Racial Contract, Educational Equity, and Emancipatory Ideological Critique,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 3, no. 3 (July 3, 2015): 504–23; J. L. Schulz, “Restaging the Racial Contract: James Weldon Johnson’s Signatory Strategies,” American Literature 74, no. 1 (March 1, 2002): 31–58; Annie Menzel, “Birthright Citizenship and the Racial Contract,” Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race 10, no. 1 (2013): 29–58; Mark Lawrence McPhail, “A Question of Character: Re()Signing the Racial Contract,” Rhetoric & Public Affairs 7, no. 3 (2004): 391–405; Patricia Huntington, “Challenging the Colonial Contract: The Zapatistas’ Insurgent Imagination,” Rethinking Marxism 12, no. 3 (2000): 58–80; Yasmeen Abu-Laban and Abigail B. Bakan, “The Racial Contract: Israel/Palestine and Canada,” Social Identities 14, no. 5 (September 1, 2008): 637–60. 5 2 the “Racial Contract,” providing powerful critiques on local and global scales and pointing toward routes for future analysis and action. While scholars have understood TRC as explaining white supremacy, I argue something valuable is missed unless we also examine how the text performs its challenge to white supremacy through rhetorical gestures that incite the subjective transformation of white readers.9 Given the persistence of de facto white supremacy characterized by colorblind forms of racism,10 understanding the possibilities of a text in transforming the subjectivities of white readers is a matter of political and conceptual importance. In shaping the very sensibilities with which white readers orient themselves to the world, themselves, and those around them, language plays a central role in making the realities of white supremacy visible and in moving white people from stated ideals of equality to a more embodied commitment of them. Rather than applying the “Racial Contract” as an explanatory device, I examine how TRC as a textual whole works to achieve one of its central aims11: the conversion of white people into “race traitors,” from those complicit, 9 My intervention bears some resemblance to J.L. Austin’s theory of speech acts, which holds that statements do not only describe reality but also have the capacity to perform certain acts. An important difference between my project and Austin’s is that where Austin asserts a distinction between constative utterances (statements that can be appraised as true or false) and performative utterances (statements that serve to perform some act and that are not appraisable as true or false), I would argue that TRC blends the two kinds of utterances. Mills’ assertion that the Racial Contract is a historical truth (descriptive) also seeks to persuade readers of the falsity of the social contract, an argument that I argue has performative effects insofar as it contributes to the subjective transformative of white readers. See: How To Do Things With Words: The William James Lectures Delivered at Harvard Universtity in 1955, ed. J.O. Urmson and Marina Sbisaa (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975); Guy Longworth, “John Langshaw Austin,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2017), 10 Colorblind racism is characterized by a denial that race is a primary factor in determining one’s life chances and structuring larger societal patterns. 11 In addition to working to convert white readers into race traitors, TRC affirms the epistemological perspective of nonwhite people (see Parts IV and V of this essay). In this sense, the rhetorical aims of TRC engage an audience of both white and nonwhite readers. Although my focus in this essay remains on the conversion of white people, this conversion is, I will argue, only possible by virtue of the insights of nonwhite people. 3 consciously or not, with the terms of the Racial Contract to those who struggle to dismantle them.12 The conceptual and rhetorical dimensions of TRC can only be understood within the context of the Afro-modern tradition of political thought. In addition to the central focus on white supremacy and racial domination, the Afro-modern tradition contributes to TRC’s approach to resignification, the act of investing familiar words and concepts with new meanings. TRC incorporates rhetorical strategies from three genres of modern political thought that span the twentieth century: manifestoes, French structuralism, and contract theory. Along the way, TRC re-signifies these genres to engage with the central concerns of Afro-modern political thought, including white supremacy, racial ideologies, and possibilities for black emancipation. Following Torrey Shanks, by rhetoric I mean language that not only has the capacity to move the cognitive and affective dimensions of the self but also to put things into new relations with one another, potentially provoking a re-orientation of the self to the world and to others.13 Shanks, however, leaves open the possibility that rhetoric could operate on the level of reason alone. In contrast, my essay collapses the distinction between cognitive and affective dimensions of the self, seeing them as so intertwined that to move one is necessarily to affect the other. Each of the aforementioned genres provides a piece of the rhetorical and conceptual scaffolding of TRC. The manifesto’s characteristic rhetoric of “us” versus 12 Mills, Contract, 107-108. Torrey Shanks, “Affect, Critique, and the Social Contract,” Theory & Event; Baltimore 18, no. 1 (2015), 4. Shanks attributes the capacity to put things into new relation to rhetoric in general. I deem resignification to be a specific mode of rhetoric. Because I argue that various kinds of rhetorical strategies are enlisted in the service of TRC’s larger project—which is ultimately characterized by resignification—this essay uses the terms rhetoric, affect, and resignification interchangeably. 13 4 “them” lends TRC a powerful device for suturing the conceptual rift between the concerns of white and nonwhite philosophy, inviting cognitive and affective identification of white readers (“them”) with nonwhite people (“us”). The notion of social constructs, rooted in French structuralism, forms the conceptual underpinnings of race traitorship. By distinguishing race as phenotype from a racialized system of power, white people can choose to reject their complicity with Whiteness. Finally, while TRC engages in non-ideal contract theory, its critique of the normative assumptions of the genre ultimately moves beyond contract theory. I conclude with a comparative reading of TRC and W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) (hereafter Souls). In addition to affirming black people’s material and cultural contributions to the American polity and inherent worth as human beings, Souls engages in rhetoric that appeals explicitly to the affective dimensions of white readers. While both Souls and TRC invoke the “aspirational people” as a rhetorical strategy to persuade white readers, TRC resignifies key concepts within Souls in the service of a distinct political vision. Tracking the divergences between the texts’ respective political visions allows us to not only register the transformation of white supremacy from the beginning of the twentieth century to that of the twenty-first but also conceive of the importance of rhetoric in contemporary efforts toward racial justice. I do not claim that TRC is directed exclusively or primarily toward a white audience, nor that the key to solving white supremacy lies in persuading white people. Rather, I focus on the conversion of white readers because, as Mills argues, it is primarily white readers and philosophers who fail to recognize the Racial Contract and who therefore stand in need of a wake-up call regarding matters of race and white supremacy. 5 As TRC implicitly argues but does not adequately theorize, questions of cognition are deeply related to questions of affect. The difficulties white people have in recognizing the Racial Contract are engrained in patterns of cognition and affect, which are compounded by contemporary colorblind discourse. Using rhetoric, TRC provokes white readers to recognize the ways in which they—their sense of self and belonging, their history, their everyday comportment—are intricately entangled with histories of race and racial domination and the persistence of these systems into the present. Such a realization, while not immediately producing racial justice and equality, provokes the kind of sustained self- examination on the part of white people that is necessary if they are to contribute to the social, political, and subjective transformations required to get there. 6 Part I: Reading The Racial Contract as Afro-Modern Political Thought Robert Gooding-Williams describes the Afro-modern tradition of political thought as a distinct genre centered around three “thematic pre-occupations”: “the political and social organization of white supremacy, the nature and effects of racial ideology, and the possibilities of black emancipation.”14 Historically less concerned with the nation-state than other genres of modern political thought, the Afro-modern tradition examines the “regimes of white supremacy” that exist adjacent to the state and/or transcend state boundaries.15 As Shatema Threadcraft elaborates, the Afro-modern tradition is “modern” in part because it responds to key formations of power, organized along racial lines, that emerged in the modern period: the plantation, the colony, the urban ghetto, etc.16 In order to understand TRC as a text, we need to account for three strands within Afro-modern political thought, or what Michael Dawson calls “ideologies.”17 The first strand is assimilation; here the goal is for black people to integrate into systems of white power.18 The second strand is marked by an emphasis on radical rupture. Thinkers within 14 Robert Gooding-Williams, In the Shadow of Du Bois: Afro-Modern Political Thought in America (Cambridge, United States: Harvard University Press, 2009), 3. 15 Gooding-Williams distinguishes the Afro-modern tradition from contract theory and French liberal thought. Ibid., 1-3. 16 Shatema Threadcraft, Intimate Justice: The Black Female Body and the Body Politic (Oxford University Press, 2016), 28. 17 While political and social theorists tend to view ideology as a singular universal force dominating society, Dawson contends that ideologies are multiple, do not necessarily reproduce the dominant order, and embody diverse sets of “values, hopes, and fears” as opposed to being a top-down imposition of dominant norms and ideals. Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary AfricanAmerican Political Ideologies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 47-55. 18 The classic example is Booker T. Washington, who insisted that African Americans undertake projects of self-improvement—mainly in the economic arena and through technical and industrial education—before they could expect to be granted full civil and political rights. See Black Visions, 19-20, 283-287. 7 this strand argue that black emancipation is possible only with a total break from prevailing systems of power, be that the colonial state or postcolonial regimes of economic, social, and political control.19 The third strand is concerned with questions of resignification. Promoting neither assimilation into nor a radical rupture from systems of white supremacy, resignification entails the transformation of already existing concepts and ideas from within by imbuing them with new or altered meanings.20 In working on and within language, this strand emphasizes the way that epistemology and discourse shape and are shaped by the practices, institutions, and social relations that compose systems of power and privilege. Resignification in the Afro-modern tradition hinges on bringing to light previously elided historical experiences. As Jack Turner points out, in the past two decades a number of scholars have shown that the Afro-modern tradition presents correctives and critiques to the normative categories of modern political thought.21 When considered from the historical perspective of the Afro-modern experience,22 concepts 19 Frantz Fanon and Marcus Garvey, for instance, each argue that genuine emancipation for nonwhite people is possible only by effecting a complete break with the dominant order (respectively, French colonial rule and the American state). See Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2004). Dawson, Visions, 21, 23. 20 While I present the three strands in a schematic fashion, it is possible to understand resignification as bridging the two other strands. In articulating demands for change in terms that cohere with the values and ideals of the dominant order rather than contradict them, resignification serves to assimilate radical ideas into the dominant order. The latter is not left intact but is rather changed from within. Where assimilation and rupture posit the dominant order as an ontologically stable entity, resignification views it as mutable rather than fixed. 21 Jack Turner, “Democracy, Freedom, and Afro-Modern Political Thought,” Contemporary Political Theory; London 16, no. 4 (November 2017): 532–40. Turner cites Patricia Hill Collins, Lawrie Balfour, Tommie Shelby, and Juliet Hooker. To this list we may add more recent contributions by Adom Getachew, Shatema Threadcraft, Neil Roberts, and Nick Bromell, though there are surely others. 22 My discussion of “the Afro-modern experience/perspective” is not meant to collapse what is in reality a distinct set of experiences into a single monolithic entity but rather to evoke TRC’s emphasis on the centrality of the history of blackness in understanding modernity. TRC insists that a world shaped by white supremacy must be thought through from the Afro-modern perspective, which is shaped by a set of shared historical experiences of domination and exploitation. In centering the question of white supremacy—and the central opposition of black and white on which it is predicated—TRC identifies the black experience as central to understanding the experiences of all nonwhite people and all white people in the modern era. 8 such as freedom, equality, democracy, citizenship, and sovereignty are opened up to “conceptual reconfiguration.”23 In re-signifying key concepts of political thought, the Afro-modern tradition puts forth distinct visions of emancipation that are irreducible to the categories of European thought. While resignification is not the only strand of the Afro-modern tradition engaged with questions of history,24 it is a particularly salient mode of critique in the contemporary moment. The de facto rule of white supremacy is predicated on the systematic forgetting of historical wrongs, which in turn naturalizes existing inequalities. In assigning new meanings to existing concepts, resignification brings the dominant perspective into direct confrontation with the suppressed historical viewpoint. In addition to correcting for the omission of historical experiences, resignification indicates that the meaning of words and concepts entails a political struggle over whose experience is seen as mattering. Like Du Bois’s Souls, Mills’ TRC belongs to this strand of resignification. As Melvin Rogers explains, for Du Bois black emancipation hinges on the resignification of America from an exclusionary white identity into a “hybridized vision of an American identity” of black and white.25 In resignifying the ostensibly race-neutral social contract as an explicitly racial contract, Mills brings the racial character of the polity out into the open. In doing so, he seeks to transform the values and ideals of contract theory so as to take into account the reality of white supremacy. Instead of reifying present 23 Ibid., 532. Hanchard, for instance, writes about the concern for attending to historical injustices within a strand of Afro-modern political thought that asserts a radical break from the past. See “Afro-Modernity: Temporality, Politics, and the African Diaspora,” Public Culture 11, no. 1 (January 1, 1999): 245–68, https://doi.org/10.1215/08992363-11-1-245. 25 Melvin L. Rogers, “The People, Rhetoric, and Affect: On the Political Force of Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk,” American Political Science Review 106, no. 1 (February 2012), 197. 24 9 configurations of power as natural, contract theory would be oriented toward the correction of racial domination. Race, in turn, is resignified so that whiteness as a skin color is separable from Whiteness as a system of power. In provoking white readers to dis-identify with white supremacy, TRC opens up conceptual room for race traitors, a term that is itself a resignification.26 While Souls has long been read within the canon of Afro-modern political thought, there has been little focus on reading TRC as part of this same tradition. Even those who do examine TRC within the context of the Afro-modern tradition have mostly neglected to consider the rhetorical dimensions of the text.27 Either focusing broadly on Mills’ larger oeuvre or narrowly on the theory of the “Racial Contract,” the dominant scholarly approaches fail to treat TRC as a textual whole. By way of contrast, a number of scholars consider Souls as a literary work, attending to the rhetorical, formal, and otherwise literary dimensions of the text as constitutive components of Du Bois’s political thought.28 26 Although the term “race traitor” was originally used by white supremacist groups in the American South to describe white people who were sympathetic to the plight of black people, it was resignified by American author and historian Noel Ignatiev who founded the journal Race Traitor in 1992. Ignatiev envisions race traitors as comprising only a minority of white people who “break the laws of whiteness” in such a way that makes it impossible for white skin to be a reliable predictor of behavior. This entails both personal and collective struggle against racism. See “The Point Is Not to Interpret Whiteness But to Abolish It.” Presented at “The Making and Unmaking of Whiteness,” Berkeley, California, U.S.A., April 11, 1997. http://racetraitor.org/abolishthepoint.html. 27 See, for example, Dawson, Black Visions; Gooding-Williams, Du Bois; Threadcraft, Intimate Justice. Mills himself has located his overall project of “black radical liberalism” and “non-ideal-theory liberalism” within the Afro-modern tradition, though he does not discuss TRC specifically in this regard. See Charles W. Mills, “Black Radical Kantianism,” Res Philosophica 95, no. 1 (January 2018); Charles W. Mills, Black Rights/White Wrongs: The Critique of Racial Liberalism (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2017). My understanding of rhetoric as evoking both a cognitive and an affective response is continuous with a line of thought within the Afro-modern tradition. Rogers argues that the rhetoric in Souls works to incite both cognitive and affective dimensions of the reader as he or she is brought to see African Americans in an expanded framework of judgment. See: “Rhetoric.” 28 See, for example: Arash Davari, “On Democratic Leadership and Social Change: Positioning Du Bois in the Shadow of a Gray To-Come,” in A Political Companion to W.E.B. Du Bois, Political Companions to Great American Authors (Lexington, Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky, 2018), 241–70; Rogers, “Rhetoric;” Eugene Victor Wolfenstein, A Gift of the Spirit: Reading The Souls of Black Folk (Ithaca, N.Y.: 10 In reading TRC as both part of Afro-modern political thought and as involving questions of resignification, my thesis approaches the TRC as a work of both political theory and literature. In the following three sections I will consider how TRC mobilizes rhetoric from three genres of modern political thought in its efforts to convert white readers to race traitors. Three concerns from the Afro-modern tradition in particular guide my analysis: breaks and ruptures (to which it offers the alternative approach of resignification); historical consciousness; and rhetoric. Proceeding in chronological order through the twentieth century, I first examine manifestoes (1910-1970s), followed by French structuralism (1960s-70s), and contract theory (consolidated in the last decades of the twentieth century). I examine how these genres provide the conceptual and rhetorical underpinnings for TRC’s particular approach to the problem of white supremacy, attending to the ways in which these genres are resignified in the process. Souls and TRC re-ground our attention in the concerns of the Afro-modern tradition. In updating the resignifying efforts in Souls for the twenty-first century, TRC asserts an alternate normative vision. No longer are “black folk” called to live up to the standards of the polity; instead it is white people who need to measure up by becoming race traitors. Cornell University Press, 2007); Shamoon Zamir, Dark Voices: W.E.B. Du Bois and American Thought, 1888-1903 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). 11 Part II: Reading The Racial Contract as a Manifesto The manifesto is a genre of modern political discourse commonly associated with revolutionary change. The individuals and groups who make use of the manifesto typically articulate their claims in terms that demand a radical break from the prevailing order. On these terms, it can seem contradictory to read TRC as a manifesto––especially if, as I argue, TRC enacts the resignification of prevailing norms and ideals of contract theory as opposed to making a radical break from them. Upon closer examination of the interactions between revolutionary discourse, the diverse groups who inhabit that discourse, and the formation of modern public spheres, however, we see that the manifesto occupies a tenuous, often contradictory rhetorical position that yields ambivalent outcomes. It is, in short, “a complex, ideologically-inflected genre” resistant to straightforward categorization.29 Through the selective incorporation and modification of the manifesto’s characteristic conventions, TRC responds to the paradoxes of the genre in a way that is shaped by the particular goal of achieving racial justice in the contemporary period of de facto white supremacy. TRC invokes the manifesto’s characteristic argumentative gestures to emphasize the relation between “us” (nonwhite people) and “them” (white people). Although the relation is expressed in conceptual terms, I argue that the epistemological critique entails and incites affective forms of identification as well. As Janet Lyon argues, the manifesto arose in post-Enlightenment Europe as “a public genre for contesting or recalibrating the assumptions underlying” the 29 Janet Lyon, Manifestoes: Provocations of the Modern (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999), 2. 12 contemporaneous idea of a “newly ‘universal’ subject.” The manifesto engages the discourse of universalism in a “double-edged” fashion. That is, at the same time as the manifesto critiques the limited scope of the universal, it performs its allegiance to universalism by invoking it on behalf of a particular group.30 While the earliest iterations of the manifesto may be traced to the arguments for popular sovereignty waged by the Digger and Leveler movements in seventeenth century England,31 it is the manifestoes of twentieth century European avant-garde movements that best exemplify the vicissitudes of modernity in the West. In addition to grappling with a strident individualism alongside questions of collectivity, the manifestoes of political and aesthetic avant-garde movements asserted their agendas for creating “the new” as a radical break from the old.32 In marking and contesting the gaps between “the ideals of democracy and the reality of political practices,” the manifesto “exposes the broken promises of modernity.” In this sense manifestoes do not merely respond to an already completed modernity but rather partake in the constitution of modern public spheres.33 In serving as a vehicle through which a provisionally united “public ‘we’” can voice its claims, grievances, and demands in opposition to an oppressor figured as “you” or “them,” the manifesto is a site of new subject formation.34 Importantly, the “we” is indeterminate, evoking as much as addressing an audience. By inviting the “affective identification” of the audience, the “we” plays a “synaptic role,” suturing new subject positions and offering them “a foothold in a culture’s dominant ideology.”35 While we 30 Ibid., 3, 32. Ibid., 17. 32 Ibid., 3, 5. 33 Ibid., 8, 34. 34 Ibid., 15, 23-28. 35 Ibid., 23-24, 36. 31 13 might expect new subject positions to provoke a change in the dominant order, attending to the process of subject formation reveals a more attenuated process of negotiation where subordinate groups must make their claims legible within the dominant discourse and thus enact a kind of assimilative work. It is this bridge-like quality of the manifesto’s “we” that Mills evokes in urging the conversion of white people to race traitors. By articulating the “broken promises” of white contractarians and nonwhite demands for recognition in the “unifying conceptual space” of personhood,36 TRC seeks to bring about an affective identification of “them” with “us.” In the years during and following the French revolution, the synaptic quality of the “we” was overridden by the rise of a revolutionary discourse that presented itself in starkly Manichaean terms.37 Trading on “a coded distinction between corrupt femininity and hygienic masculinity,” French revolutionaries rendered women the “other” against which the “universal” (but actually coded white and male) subject defined itself. This absolutist character carried over into manifestoes of the twentieth century, which construed their agendas in terms of “radical departures” from the prevailing order, emphasizing the creation of “the new” in ways that often reproduced the gendered (and racialized) terms of French revolutionary discourse.38 The heightened sense of division between “us” and “them” leaves little rhetorical space for maneuvering between the two terms,39 on the one hand amplifying rhetorical urgency but at the same time reproducing prior fault lines of oppression. As Lyon argues, the rhetorical projection of a rigid opposition places subordinate groups in a double bind. 36 Mills, Contract, 111. Lyon, Manifestoes, 24. 38 Ibid., 4-5. 39 Ibid., 24 37 14 To be legible to the dominant order, they must articulate their claims within the hegemonic revolutionary discourse.40 Yet in doing so they risk watering down or erasing the particularity of their demands, which are then threatened with assimilation into the dominant discourse without having achieved concrete political gains. Although the manifesto presents itself, on the one hand, as an emancipatory genre that “chronicle[s] the exclusions and deferrals experienced by those outside the ‘legitimate’ bourgeois spheres of public exchange,” on the other hand, it promulgates a “rhetoric of exclusivity” that frequently ends up valorizing a certain type of “universal” political subject—white and male—at the expense of other groups.41 It is in response to this particular paradox of the manifesto that we can understand TRC’s emphasis on resignification as opposed to radical rupture. If the post-1789 manifesto emphasizes the division between “us” and “them” and thereby produces the appearance of a radical break, TRC highlights the relation between “us,” the nonwhite victims of the Racial Contract, and “them,” the Contract’s white beneficiaries, recalling a tendency prevalent in the pre-1789 manifesto. By articulating its arguments in the language of contract theory, TRC resignifies language and concepts already familiar to white philosophy. While the “Racial Contract” provides the “conceptual bridge” that connects the concerns of white and nonwhite philosophy,42 the two versions of reality promulgated therein are able to enter into conversation with one another through “the mutually commensurable and mutually intelligible language of personhood.” By translating race into the language of personhood, it becomes apparent that white and 40 Ibid., 55-59. Lyon explains this dynamic in relation to the attempt of women in revolutionary France to be seen as universal subjects. 41 Ibid., 3. 42 Mills, Contract, 3-4, 111. 15 nonwhite philosophy occupy a shared “conceptual space.” When nonwhite philosophy insists on race, it refers to the “conceptual partitioning” between white persons and nonwhite subpersons.43 When white philosophy insists on the social contract, it fails to account for this preliminary racial partitioning. In an era of de facto white supremacy, where white people experience difficulty recognizing that the Racial Contract even exists, the appearance of a divide or a “break” between white and nonwhite philosophy reinforces the terms of the Racial Contract.44 By articulating its critique through an appeal to the common ideal of personhood yet pointing out the betrayal of this ideal by white contractarians, TRC enacts the “double-edged” function of the manifesto as a way of demanding that contract theory take race into account. In this sense, insisting on the shared conceptual space of personhood affords a way of countering the illegibility of subordinate claims without simply being absorbed into the dominant discourse. Whereas the assertion of a radical break might only reinforce the appearance that white and nonwhite philosophy are engaged in fundamentally different projects, resignification affords a way of bridging the appearance of a gap between the two realms. Performing the “We” of the Manifesto Far from building an argument on purely cognitive grounds, however, TRC’s epistemological critique is woven through rhetoric that arouses an affective response of sympathy and shame in white readers.45 Drawing on the three “argumentative gestures” 43 Ibid., 13. Ibid., 132. 45 Lest the reader forgets, I understand rhetoric as producing both a cognitive and an affective response. 44 16 of the manifesto—a foreshortened history, an enumeration of grievances, and a rhetorical mode of directness46—TRC constructs a growing and urgent sense of the dissonance formulated in terms of “we” who recognize the Racial Contract and “they” who do not (and thus fail to recognize “us” as persons). In this way, the manifesto’s us/them relation maps onto the “affective structures” entailed in a contractual relation, in which two parties agree to a set of terms or promises that shape each side’s expectations of the future in regards to rights, freedoms, and equalities.47 The ideals of universal subjecthood and personhood that are put forth, respectively, by the manifesto and the contract create “a shared normative and affective horizon” to which both “us” and “them” hold sympathetic identification and thus to which both groups feel accountable.48 Therefore, pointing out white people’s failure to uphold these shared ideals with respect to nonwhite people—which amounts to the failure of white people to uphold their end of the contractual agreement—ought to evoke a sense of shame in the white reader. Although the “we” does not explicitly emerge until the final pages of TRC, the rhetorical arguments woven throughout the book’s three chapters—which, respectively, detail the historical, moral, and epistemological dimensions of the Racial Contract—build a case for “us” versus “them.” Yet, instead of creating a divide between the two terms, TRC asserts the language of personhood as a commensurate conceptual terrain and the ideal of universal personhood as the common goal to which both “us” and “them” aspire. Importantly, the evocation of sympathy via the appeal to a set of shared standards—the commitment to justice, equality, and universal personhood—precedes the evocation of shame in TRC. While sympathy produces an outward-looking orientation in 46 Lyon, Manifestoes, 14-15. Shanks, “Affect”, 1. 48 Rogers, “Rhetoric,” 200. 47 17 which the white reader imagines the perspective of a nonwhite person, shame induces the white reader to look inward and question his or her complicity in the present state of injustice.49 Without the prior evocation of sympathy, however, shame might result in white readers lashing out at nonwhite people or further repressing the negative selffeelings induced by shame. If shame is to adequately serve as an impetus to the selftransformation of white people and not lead to harmful behavior toward nonwhite people, it must be preceded by sympathy. Chapter One asserts the “historical actuality” of the Racial Contract,50 recounting the series of agreements that construct a “partitioned social ontology” of persons and subpersons.51 The listing of slave codes, Indian laws, doctrines of discovery, and papal bulls that span multiple continents and centuries expose the Racial Contract as a global and non-consensual agreement, one that was made exclusively among white people over and above nonwhites.52 In citing the enormous amounts of material wealth that accrue from labor discrimination and slavery—while noting that “there are costs in anguish and suffering that can never really be calculated”53—TRC highlights the one-sided nature of the contract, evoking a sense of unpaid dues. Chapter Two heightens the sense of one-sidedness by highlighting the “racialized moral psychology” that characterizes white-nonwhite intersubjective relations.54 In examining the way the Racial Contract “norms and races” space—both geographical and bodily—through “violence and ideological conditioning,” Mills confronts the white 49 Ibid. Ibid., 119. 51 Ibid., 16. 52 Ibid., 12, 20-31. 53 Ibid., 39. 54 Ibid., 93. 50 18 reader with the material and psychic damage that follow from the person/subperson distinction. Aesthetic norms predicated on whiteness create physical discomfort between white and nonwhite people and can bring about the internalization of inferiority on a psychic and affective level for some.55 As part of this “racialized moral psychology,” white people exhibit “patterns of affect and empathy” that correlate with a devaluation of nonwhite life.56 Over the course of this chapter, the white reader is brought to feel shame for being complicit in the perpetuation of these harms, rendered as not merely historical wrongs or conceptual blind spots but also moral failures. Yet it is not only nonwhite self-perceptions at stake here. In linking the negation of nonwhite personhood with the white conception of self, TRC exposes the ways that “white self-conceptions of identity, personhood, and self-respect are then intimately tied up with the repudiation of the black Other.”57 Normative conceptions of, for instance, freedom and American national identity are defined in relation to “an oppositional blackness,” producing a situation where “whiteness and blackness evolved in a forced intimacy of loathing in which they determined each other by negation and selfrecognition in part through the eyes of the other.” By articulating the ways in which the Racial Contract affects the person at the deepest level of the self, TRC shows that not only nonwhites but whites, too, are deeply implicated in questions of race. While the privileged position of white people means they are not forced to confront this on a daily and visceral level the way nonwhite people are, exposing white readers to the dependence of their identity on racial privilege provokes a reorientation in how white people view themselves in relation to the world. 55 Ibid., 52, 62. Ibid., 95. 57 Ibid., 58-59. 56 19 Organized around the “explanatorily superior” theoretical framework of the “Racial Contract,”58 Chapter Three highlights the privileged epistemological position of nonwhite people in the polity and invites white identification with this perspective. By starting from “ahistorical abstractions,”59 the social contract fails to account for the reality of racial domination. In fact it even prescribes for white people “an epistemology of ignorance” that blinds them to the structural realities of racism and to their own racist actions and behavior.60 The epistemological failings of white people are articulated as a withholding of recognition: “by the terms of the Racial Contract white people have agreed not to recognize nonwhites as persons.”61 By upholding the terms of the Racial Contract, white people are portrayed as betraying the higher ideals of a universal personhood to which they claim to aspire. In contrast, nonwhite people—having “always recognized the existence of the Racial Contract” and its role in shaping the world—are placed in a position of epistemic authority.62 Mills cites a variety of nonwhite thinkers, activists, and leaders whose grievances testify to the shared recognition of the Racial Contract across time and space. The list-like repetition of the word “recognition” builds a sense of nonwhite people as united in an insistence on the truth of their historical experience, exemplifying the manifesto’s “rhetorical mode of directness” that passionately proclaims it speaks the truth.63 In the face of this long history of non-recognition by white people, projecting and claiming a “we” united in recognition of the Racial Contract is itself a rhetorically 58 Ibid., 120. Ibid., 92. 60 Ibid., 93. 61 Ibid., 97. 62 Mills, 91, 96, 109. 63 Lyon, Manifestoes, 13-14. 59 20 powerful act. It testifies to the demand for personhood that, despite being ignored and violently suppressed for centuries, persists. For the nonwhite reader, Chapter Three provides the affective benefit of affirmation, asserting that what nonwhite people feel and think about the world is true.64 Furthermore, the montage of quotes expresses recognition of the Racial Contract in terms that highlight the subjective experience of being treated as a subperson. Martin Luther King, Jr., for instance, speaks of “a degenerating sense of nobodiness;” Aimé Césaire uses the term “thingification” to describe being seen as subhuman; a 1982 protest statement by Australian Aborigines speaks of their humanity and history being “degraded” and “distorted.”65 The repetition of words such as “feeling” and “sense” and emotionally charged words such as “respect” and, in this context, “recognition” evinces an understanding of epistemological insight as deeply related to affective experience.66 These experiences of non-recognition speak to a sense of degradation, abjection, and lowliness that work to evoke a sense of shame in the white reader for his or her complicity in creating and sustaining these negative experiences. Just as importantly, they invite an emotion of their own, a sense of sympathy with the desires of nonwhite people to be treated as equal persons. Following this litany of white wrongs, the white reader feels diminished.67 Although white people have historically reproduced the Racial Contract, however, they are not doomed to do so. The white reader has the “choice” to become a race traitor and 64 Within a discussion about what it takes for “a subperson to assert himself or herself politically,” Mills remarks on the need for nonwhite people to “think against the grain,” which entails that they “trust [their] own cognitive powers, […] develop [their] own concepts, insights, modes of explanation, overarching theories, and […] oppose the epistemic hegemony of conceptual frameworks designed in part to thwart and suppress the exploration of such matters.” Contract, 118-120. 65 Ibid., 112-113. 66 Ibid. 67 Rogers, “Rhetoric.” 200-201. 21 thereby the opportunity to work against the systems that perpetuate nonwhite subpersonhood.68 If the incitement of shame and sympathy has brought about a disidentification with the terms of the Racial Contract, the possibility for becoming a race traitor offers an alternate site for affective attachment.69 In this sense, one does not abandon one’s ideals of universal personhood but rather redirects them to bring them into alignment with a new sense of reality. Through the language of personhood and race traitors, TRC forges a bridge to convert “them” to the side of “us.” To cross that bridge, however, requires a decision on the part of the reader that no text can guarantee. 68 Mills, Contract, 107. Ibid., 108-109, 127. Mills offers several examples of race traitors, characterized by “the repudiation of [their] Herrenvolk standing and its accompanying moral epistemology.” These include writers, activists, and ordinary individuals who join abolition movements and slave revolutions, write to expose the truth of the Racial Contract, and give their lives for the cause of racial justice. Among the latter, Mills mentions John Brown’s role in the white American antislavery revolution and the anti-apartheid white members of the African National Congress. Mills writes about race traitors: “the mere fact of their existence shows what was possible, throwing into contrast and rendering open for moral judgment the behavior of their fellow whites, who chose to accept Whiteness instead.” This remark implies that Mills does not expect that all whites will become race traitors but rather that those who do will expose injustice by evoking a contrast to other white people. 69 22 Part III: Reading The Racial Contract as French Structuralism The school of thought known as French structuralism emerged in 1955-60 as part of a larger desire within the social sciences to pursue a more “scientific” approach.70 As French structuralism spread to the American academy by way of the humanities,71 scholars in literary studies and elsewhere turned to the structural linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure for both the method and specific concepts of this new approach, which asserted that the inner workings of language could be understood by studying language as a formal system composed of elements and the relations among them. Words, according to Saussure, did not have meanings in and of themselves but rather received meanings only in relation to other words, that is, according to their particular position within the larger linguistic system. Meaning, in this view, is relational, contingent, and constructed. As French structuralism reached its heyday in the 1960s through the 1970s, scholars from a variety of disciplines used the model of linguistic structuralism to study a wide variety of phenomena. Various social and cultural codes came to be understood as contingent constructions whose meaning derived not from something inherent to them but rather in relation to the larger social or cultural systems in which they were embedded. While behaviors and norms may be produced by the social systems we inhabit, the fact that these systems are constructed—that is, the contingent outcomes of human behavior and action—means humans have the ability to co-create the social realities in which they live. 70 Robert Weimann, “French Structuralism and Literary History: Some Critiques and Reconsiderations,” New Literary History 4, no. 3 (1973): 437–69. 71 Dirk de Geest, “French Structuralism: A. J. Greimas (1917±1992), Tzvetan Todorov (1939±) and Gérard Genette (1930±),” in Modern European Criticism and Theory: A Critical Guide, ed. Julian Wolfreys (Edinburgh, United Kingdom: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 264. 23 Social construction plays a central role in the explanatory framework, normative critique, and prescriptive vision of TRC. In tracing the Racial Contract to its historical emergence at the start of the modern period, Mills identifies white supremacy as a construct of human artifice and historical contingency. In the form of slave codes, Indian laws, and other juridical norms; academic debates and popular discourse; and narratives and mythologies, the Racial Contract is made up of “a series of acts” that enshrine a system of “differential privilege and entitlement.”72 The fact that this racialized power structure has come to be one of white supremacy as opposed to some other race is not the result of something intrinsic to whiteness but rather is “the contingent outcome of a particular set of circumstances.” In this sense, “Whiteness [itself] is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations.” In distinguishing between “whiteness as phenotype/genealogy and Whiteness as a political commitment to white supremacy,” Mills opens conceptual space for imagining race traitors. While one’s racial identity as a white or nonwhite person may shape one’s actions, behaviors, and beliefs in characteristic ways, it does not determine how one acts in an essential sense. Put differently, whiteness has a specific meaning inscribed onto it because it is embedded in a system of white supremacy, but this meaning can be resignified. By choosing to reject the privileges of whiteness and seeking to dismantle the Racial Contract, white people can distinguish themselves from the political system of Whiteness. While French structuralism enables us to conceive of white people rejecting their complicity with Whiteness, TRC’s focus on historical and social situation provides a corrective to the dehistoricizing tendencies of French structuralist thought. Despite its 72 Mills, Contract, 127. 24 attempts to take history into account, French structuralism ends up reproducing an ahistorical model of the individual that carries forth many of the underlying assumptions of the idealized social contract. Particularly emblematic in this regard is the writing of Roland Barthes, a literary critic and semiologist active from the 1950s through the 1970s. Barthes’ focus on the subjective experience of reading and the relationship between text and history offers a particularly revealing point of comparison with my reading of the TRC as working to incite a subjective transformation of white readers. While Barthes’ notion of the “death of the Author” asserts that the meaning of a text is wholly distinct from authorial intention, I argue TRC demonstrates that the author-text-reader triad that emerges out of this notion fails to attend to the role of historical consciousness in the production of knowledge.73 In so doing, it risks re-inscribing existing inequalities rather than dismantling them. Far from being an outlier within French structuralism, Barthes’ ideas are emblematic of a broader pattern of thought within the genre.74 Following the structuralist supposition of language as a socially constructed system of meaning, Barthes understands language as a repository of social and historical conventions.75 All writing, strive as it may to escape the dominant order, is marked by inherited social and historical convention and is thus “a compromise between freedom 73 Roland Barthes, “Death of the Author,” in The Rustle of Language, 1st ed. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986). 74 Michel Foucault is a prominent figure within French structuralism who set the precedent for many of genre’s characteristic patterns of thought. See, for instance, Béatrice Han, Foucault’s Critical Project: Between the Transcendental and the Historical, trans. Edward Pile, (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002). The role of the “death of the Author” in Foucault’s thought leads him to theorize that the knowledges produced by subordinate groups become politically viable only through the work of the genealogist as opposed to the collective mobilization of these groups themselves. In this sense, their knowledge is attributed not to their subjective consciousness but to the larger machinations of history. Like Barthes’ figure of the reader, Foucault’s genealogist is portrayed as somehow able to escape (at least partially) the capillary workings of power that prevent subordinate groups themselves from rendering their knowledge oppositional. See Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Culture/Power/History: A Reader in Contemporary Social Theory, ed. Nicholas B. Dirks, Geoff Eley, and Sherry B. Ortner (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1994), 200–221. 75 Roland Barthes, Writing Degree Zero., [1st American ed.]. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1968), 9-10, 14. 25 and remembrance.”76 This lingering mark of convention imposes determinate meanings onto words, limiting the truth of language.77 For Barthes, that truth has no single or determinate meaning but is instead the site of radical plurality, of nearly infinite possibilities of signification and resignification. Accordingly, emancipation entails the experience of a rupture in conventional uses of language. Barthes locates the possibility for this rupture not within the text, fixed as it is within social convention, but in the reader’s reception of the text, in the subjective experience of reading. By virtue of his or her imaginative capacities and structural position in relation to the text, “the reader” is able to see past conventional meaning and receive the plurality of meanings in any given text.78 In so doing, the limitations of conventional language are exposed and the radical contingency of language brought into the open. Indeed, in Barthes’ writings the reader––“the possible site of a radical disjunction between conditioned meaning and its disruption”79––comes to stand not just for an individual but for a universal structural position vis-à-vis the text. Although Barthes theorizes a variety of ways in which the reader may be brought to experience this rupture, what remains is the notion that emancipation entails an experience of the plurality of a text. 80 And that experience involves a radical break from social and historical convention. This conception of the text is set up in explicit opposition to a long tradition of literary criticism that endows the Author with the 76 Ibid., 16. Roland, Barthes, Criticism and Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 27. 78 Barthes, “Death,” 54-55. 79 De Geest, “Structuralism,” 256. 80 Barthes coined “zero degree writing” to describe writing that, in divesting language from the trappings of style and historical convention, affords the reader an unmediated encounter with the world that exposes the contingency of received meaning. Later, Barthes theorized the experience of jouissance as the climax of pleasurable reading, producing a loss of the self that is experienced outside of historical and social conditions. Barthes, Zero; Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, 1st American edition. (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975). 77 26 authority to impose a single, determinate meaning on the text, a tradition Barthes sees as complicit with the reproduction of the bourgeois order.81 Where Barthes locates the emancipatory potential of literature in the destabilization of meaning opened up by the death of author, I locate the critical, generative, and emancipatory possibilities of TRC in its capacity to produce a determinate meaning or particular affective responses in a directed fashion. While the death of the author eliminates the role of the historical consciousness of those who write, attending to the problem of non-recognition in regards to nonwhite people necessitates a qualified resuscitation of the author. For asserting nonwhite authorship—the capacity of nonwhite people to narrate the truth of their historical experience—is vital to claiming personhood and thus achieving the recognition that has historically been denied them. Crucially, the epistemological insights of TRC do not come solely from Mills as an individual author but rather from the collective authorship of nonwhite people in general. TRC insists, therefore, that all nonwhite people are potentially authors. As opposed to merely rehabilitating a notion of uninhibited authorial control unhinged from any sociohistorical context, nonwhite authors unmask the supposed universality of white meaning and thus allows for a more genuinely universal personhood to come into being. In this sense, TRC shows how a structuralist framework that is informed by actual historical experience better serves the emancipatory aims to which it claims to aspire. The dehistoricizing quality of the death of the author speaks to the wider problematic of resignification versus rupture. Barthes’ conception of emancipation displays continuities with the manifestos of the early to mid-twentieth century. Just as the post-1789 manifesto figures emancipation as a “rupture” from the dominant order, so 81 Barthes, “Death,” 49-53. 27 does French structuralism locate emancipation in those moments, however fleeting, of total dislocation from historical and social reality. In emphasizing a radical rupture, both genres fail to engage with the way that historical forms of oppression play a key role in shaping the paths of emancipation and the subjectivities of those who struggle for it. As TRC and the Afro-modern tradition more broadly reflect, for those whose perspective is marked by historical experiences of oppression and domination, emancipation, even when envisioned as a break, necessarily entails a focused engagement with the past. As TRC frequently repeats, the social contract’s failure to attend to historical actuality reproduces past harms: “By providing no history, contemporary contractarianism encourages its audience to fill in a mystified history, which turns out to look oddly like the (ostensibly) repudiated history in the original contract itself.”82 That is, in failing to account for history, the dominant historical and social conventions are filled in by the reader. Similarly, in seeking to bring about a rupture from received uses of language without attending to the past, Barthes assumes that an experience of emancipation in the present is enough to correct for patterns of injustice. In contrast, Mills engages with social construction as a means of attending to historical wrongs through resignification. Whereas French structuralism wants to effect a complete break from history, Mills’ wants to redirect our vision toward the historical truth of the Racial Contract so injustices may be corrected in a particular manner. As part of this endeavor, Mills demonstrates that a universal reader cannot be simply assumed. For readers exist within social ontologies, and their structural position within these groupings means they read differently. In contrast to the ahistorical and individualized Reader, Mills shows that histories of oppression mean some readers see what others do 82 Mills, Contract, 122. 28 not. As “readers” of the “text” of social reality—and as authors of texts about reality— nonwhite people are more adept at seeing the multiple meanings in social conventions, patterns, and processes related to matters of race based on their structural position within systems of white supremacy. By narrating the “reading” experience of nonwhite people—showing how they have always recognized the racial character of the polity— TRC allows white people to partake in a subjective transformation. Being made aware of the new meanings of contract theory ostensibly incites a cognitive and affective change in white readers. The experience depends however on their ability to recognize a particular history as opposed to a total dislocation from history. 29 Part IV: Reading The Racial Contract as Contract Theory Standard accounts of contract theory place its origins in early modern Europe. Contract theory, however, did not achieve its status as the dominant lingua franca of political philosophy until the middle decades of the twentieth century and did not morph into its contemporary understanding until the turn of the twenty-first.83 In this sense, Mills’ engagement with contract theory is more relevant to dealing with contemporary iterations of white supremacy and the discourses that perpetuate them than might otherwise be expected. By writing in the reality of race, Mills resignifies contract theory in a way that locates TRC beyond the boundaries of contract theory itself. In her essay “Affect, Critique, and the Social Contract,” Torrey Shanks examines the Racial Contract within a larger strand of “critical contract-talk.”84 Reading Mills’ The Racial Contract alongside Carol Pateman’s The Sexual Contract as well as their coauthored work Contract and Domination, Shanks notes how the two authors use the framework of a contract to connect instances of domination that cut across social, political, and economic realms.85 In employing the creative and imaginative dimensions of language to refigure the conventional understanding of the contract, “contract talk” works on the reader in ways both cognitive and affective. Drawing on Lauren Berlant’s theory of cruel optimism, Shanks argues we can understand the contract as one of the many objects to which political subjects form affective attachments.86 As “a bundle of promises” regarding freedom, rights, and equality “that orient[s] readers toward certain 83 Duncan Bell, “What Is Liberalism?,” Political Theory 42, no. 6 (December 1, 2014), 692. Shanks, “Affect,” 10. 85 Ibid., 6. 86 Berlant describes a relation of cruel optimism as “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” See Lauren Gail Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 1. 84 30 futures,” the contract forms part of “a scene of fantasy” to which political subjects return to shape how they see themselves in relation to the world.87 By investing the “political idiom” of the contract with new meaning, both Pateman and Mills work “affectively as well as reasonably” to “reorient our attention and our encounters with the world and others.”88 Turning to Mills specifically, Shanks argues that the Racial Contract utilizes “the power of naming” to direct the reader’s attention toward the white supremacist character of the polity. In making visible what the social contract hides, the Racial Contract as a “vehicle of disclosure” attests to the “fundamentally aesthetic” and “specifically rhetorical” nature of Mills’ project.89 In addition to being a rhetorical trope, the Racial Contract stands for historical fact, “the truth of the social contract.”90 Yet according to Shanks, Mills fails to account for the rhetorical aspects of his project, instead attributing to “history alone” the creative work of transforming political orientations and rewriting the contract in a way that attends to a history of racial domination.91 He thus fails to adequately consider “the normative, prescriptive, and generative possibilities” of the contract tradition in “negotiating the affective binds and impasses of political, economic, and intimate spheres.” As a corrective to Mills, Shanks turns to the early modern tradition of contract theory to recover “a fugitive tradition in which rhetorical invention sustains the language of contract across a wide-ranging spectrum of social and political projects.”92 In this way 87 Shanks, “Affect,” 1. Ibid., 6, 4. 89 Ibid., 6. 90 Mills, Contract, 64. 91 Shanks, “Affect,” 10. 92 Ibid., 4. 88 31 she figures TRC as a re-appropriation of tendencies already present within the contract tradition: “To claim broken promises should not be understood as a break with the contract tradition. Rather it is to claim this tradition for a mode of critique that seeks to refigure distributions of material and symbolic power.”93 Shanks ultimately shores up contract theory as a place of imaginative (re)constitution of political subjectivities with diverse possibilities for shaping affective orientations. Despite its virtues, Shanks’ efforts to place TRC solely within contract theory do not hold up. Recent engagements with TRC have difficulty accounting for the centrality Mills accords to history, either seeing it as incompatible with the social contract tradition94 or, in Shanks’ case, reading it as an impediment to viewing the role of imaginative language. I argue that Mills gives history a central place through the use of imaginative language, or rhetoric. While Shanks is right that Mills does not adequately theorize the role of rhetoric in relation to TRC, turning to contract theory alone is not sufficient. The historical purview of TRC exceeds that available within contract theory. On the one hand, we can understand the “Racial Contract” as a non-ideal or naturalized account of the racial polity, an approach rooted in contractarianism.95 Where ideal contract theory begins from “ahistorical abstractions,” the non-ideal tradition explains the origins of “an unjust, exploitative society” by turning to the actual historically dominant moral and political values and ideals in the hope of reforming them.96 93 Ibid., 10-12. Desmond Jagmohan, “Race and the Social Contract: Charles Mills on the Consensual Foundations of White Supremacy,” Politics, Groups, and Identities, 3, no. 3 (2015). 95 Mills, The Racial Contract, 5-6. 96 Ibid., 6, 92. 94 32 Yet TRC critiques not only the racial polity but also contract theory as such. It goes beyond contractarianism. Thus, rather than seeking to contain the rhetorical or explanatory force of TRC within the contract tradition as Shanks does, we can account for it by understanding TRC as part of Afro-modern political thought. For the theoretical insights and normative critique encapsulated in the “Racial Contract” are only made possible through the Afro-modern perspective. While the specific concerns of the Afromodern tradition can be translated into the language of contract theory—race, for instance, in terms of personhood—ultimately the Afro-modern perspective exceeds the contractarian framework it theorizes. As the larger epistemic, rhetorical, and historical context in which the “Racial Contract” as a trope and as a theory unfolds, Afro-modern political thought forms the conditions of possibility of TRC itself. The distinct historical vantage point of Afro-modern political thought is reflected in the way Mills theorizes white misrecognition of the contract and nonwhite recognition. White blindness to the Racial Contract is prescribed by the “epistemological contract,”97 a dimension of the Racial Contract, and thus is accounted for within the terms of contract theory. In contrast, Mills does not circumscribe the perspective of nonwhite people within contractual language but rather explains it in terms of standpoint theory, which comes from feminist thought. The invocation of standpoint theory indicates that the Afromodern perspective is graspable only by going beyond the bounds of the contract tradition. Indeed, “beyond the bounds of the contract tradition” describes the position of nonwhite people vis-à-vis the Racial Contract in a more straightforward sense. In past and present iterations of the Racial Contract, nonwhite people are excluded from the norms of personhood and instead categorized as subpersons, “viewing it from outside 97 Ibid., 93. 33 rather than inside.”98 It is by virtue of their exclusion that nonwhite people are able to see the reality of the Racial Contract with such clarity, resignifying the disadvantageous position of nonwhite people as a position of epistemic privilege. Considering Mills’ engagement with contract theory in relation to his position within Afro-modern political thought allows us to attribute to TRC a more nuanced view of history than simply a claim to historical actuality. Although, as Shanks notes, the “Racial Contract” enacts a standard demystification of ideology and in so doing asserts “the truth of a particular metanarrative,” it is not that Mills claims to have access to an unmediated “real” of history or “outside” of ideology.99 Rather, he makes the more modest and situated claim of having access to the outside of white ideology. In addition to being rooted in histories of racial domination, this “truth” is expressed through rhetorical language that is likewise grounded in the Afro-modern tradition. Mills invokes imagery to convey his indebtedness to oppositional black theory and its “signifyin(g) capacities” in expressing his critique: “[the “Racial Contract”] is a black demystification of the lies of white theory, an uncovering of the Klan robes beneath the white politician’s three-piece suit.”100 The startling juxtaposition of the standard uniform of a politician concealing the robes of a Klansman puts forth a provocative “counterimage” of the relationship between black and white theory, and between black and white historical experiences of modernity. The Afro-modern perspective lies beneath the white experience of modernity, attesting to the reality of nonwhite domination seething below the appearance of modern civility and uprightness. Conveying the duplicity, corruption, and historical erasure involved in upholding the Racial Contract, 98 Ibid., 110. Shanks, “Affect,” 7. Mills, Contract, 129. 100 Ibid., 121, 131-132. 99 34 TRC uses rhetoric to provoke white readers to rethink the history of modernity with white supremacy and race at its center. Mills’ re-centering of the Afro-modern historical experience via the resignification of contract theory resignifies the Western tradition as a whole. As Duncan Bell explains, it was only in the mid to late decades of the twentieth century that contract theory, in particular John Locke’s, became equated with “liberalism.”101 At the same time, liberalism underwent a spatial and temporal expansion so as to stand for “the inheritance of the West” more broadly, stretching it back to the seventeenth century. In this sense, Mills’ engagement with contract theory resignifies not only mainstream philosophy but also the dominant ideology of the West. The Afro-modern tradition provides the key to thinking through the realities of white supremacy and racial domination that are revealed to be central, not exceptional, to the polity and philosophical tradition of the West. 101 Bell, “Liberalism,” 692, 702-705. 35 Part V: The Return to Afro-Modern Political Thought: Souls and TRC We come to TRC by way of return. Having travelled through the twentieth century via three genres of modern political thought that are primarily informed by a European and white perspective, we now find ourselves where the discussion of TRC began, with the Afro-modern tradition of political thought. Du Bois’s Souls, published in 1903, contends with the Jim Crow era of segregation in the United States when racial inequality was enshrined in the law. Written at the cusp of the twenty-first century, TRC addresses the tension of formal equality alongside de facto white privilege. With nearly one century between them, Souls and TRC nevertheless proceed from a shared diagnosis: the problem of the twentieth century, and in Mills’ case the twenty-first, is what Du Bois calls “the problem of the color-line.”102 For Souls and TRC respectively, the world is structured by a division that apportions ontological superiority and inferiority depending on which side of “the color-line” one falls. While sharing with Souls the rhetorical tactic of invoking “the people,” TRC resignifies key ideas within Du Bois’s text to assert a political vision equipped to dismantle the pervasive historical forgetting that characterizes white supremacy today. This dismantling is premised on the assertion of nonwhite epistemological authority, opposing Du Bois’s characterization of black people as “backward.”103 102 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, (Boston; New York: Bedford Books, 1997), 34. Mills’ directly invokes Du Bois on this account twice in TRC. Contract, 117, 132. 103 Gooding-Williams, Shadow, 63. 36 Du Bois’s thought was shaped in important ways by nineteenth century German race theory, which understands race as a discrete spiritual or sociohistorical essence.104 This essence includes a set of common ideals as well as distinct “gifts.”105 In addition to the gifts of song, physical strength, and Spirit, black people have the gift of “second sight,” the ability to view the world through the eyes of another social group and, more broadly, to see or imagine the world otherwise.106 In Jim Crow America, however, second sight produces what Du Bois terms “double-consciousness,” a state of selfalienation or false self-consciousness that results from black people viewing themselves through the racially prejudiced lens of white people.107 Double consciousness keeps the black masses in a state of “cultural backwardness,” compounding white people’s prejudice while preventing black people from undertaking the projects of selfimprovement that Du Bois considers vital to their successful inclusion into the American polity.108 Du Bois’s rhetorical efforts in Souls are aimed at persuading white people to set aside their racial prejudice. Cultivating sympathy and shame is a key part of this persuasion.109 Inclusion into the polity would allow black people to fully realize their gift of second sight and would entail the resignification of America from an exclusionary white identity to a “hybridized American polity” of black and white.110 By figuring the “descriptive” people as exclusively white and an “aspirational” people as black and 104 Ibid., 51-52. Ibid., 85. 106 Ibid., 77-78. 107 Ibid., 80-81. 108 Ibid., 62-63. 109 Rogers argues that the early chapters in Souls seek to produce sympathetic identification; later chapters generate shame by showing the failure of white people to equally apply principles of equality and freedom to African Americans. See: “Rhetoric,” 200-201. 110 Ibid., 192. 105 37 white, Du Bois works to close the gap between the two by appealing to the ideals of equality and freedom as self-determination.111 In this sense, the aspirational “we” in Souls appeals to white people on behalf of the “black masses,” who require inclusion into the polity and assimilation into modern norms before they can overcome their cultural backwardness and contribute to the realization of a resignified American identity.112 In this regard, Souls links the fulfillment of the essence of black people with the fulfillment of the essence of America as a place of belonging for both white people and black people. In section two I described how TRC invokes the “public ‘we’” of the manifesto to expose the dissonance between “they,” white people, who fail to recognize the Racial Contract and “we,” nonwhite people, who do recognize it. Expressed in terms of the “the people,” TRC—similarly to Souls—equates the descriptive dimension with the present situation of unequal personhood, while the aspirational dimension evokes a vision of universally equal personhood. In contrast to the formal inequality in Souls’ time, TRC confronts a situation of informal inequality, which colorblind forms of racism make difficult for white people to recognize. As with Souls, TRC mobilizes rhetoric that incites sympathy and shame in white readers so that they come to recognize the Racial Contract and work toward dismantling it. As section four argues, this involves the resignification of contract theory such that its values and ideals are re-oriented to address the realities of race and white supremacy. 111 112 Ibid., 188, 200. Gooding-Williams, Shadow, 87. 38 Yet Mills’ underlying conception of race as a social construct rather than an essence113 affords a distinct way of reading—indeed of misreading—Du Bois’s “double consciousness.”114 Instead of signifying the fractured social identity of black people trapped in a state of backwardness, Mills invokes double consciousness as a way of explaining the epistemological authority of nonwhite people. Because of their position at the margins rather than centers of power, nonwhite people have a better understanding of how social reality, including white supremacy, operates. The characteristic cognitive and psychic patterns of nonwhite people derive not from a racial-essentialist gift of secondsight but from a position within a socio-political structure. Their consciousness is double not because the self is fragmented but because it recognizes two distinct realities, the “official (white) reality and the actual (nonwhite) experience.” In this sense, it is the distinct insight of nonwhite people that provides the possibility of bridging the gap between the descriptive and aspirational dimensions of the people. Thus, although Mills figures the recognition of the Racial Contract on the part of white people as a key component of achieving racial justice, any agency attributed to white people is dependent on the agency and epistemological insight of nonwhite people. More than just getting Du Bois wrong then, Mills’ misreading of “double consciousness” as a position of epistemic privilege inverts key points of emphasis in Du Bois’s “we.” For although Souls calls on white people to alter themselves by relinquishing their prejudice, it is primarily black people who are figured as needing to change.115 Only inclusion into the polity will enable black people to overcome their 113 Mills, Contract, 78. Ibid., 109. 115 Gooding-Williams characterizes Du Bois’s emphasis on the “backwardness” of black people as indicative of a broader rule-based, vanguard-centric notion of politics, counter-posing it to the more 114 39 backwardness and achieve the “norms of modernity,” in turn allowing them (and thus “the people”) to reach their full potential.116 Correspondingly, these norms, as well as the social and political structures of the polity, are not themselves figured as fundamentally problematic. The main issue is that in being excluded from them, black people are locked into a cycle of backwardness. In contrast, for Mills it is mainly white people who need to change.117 Exhibiting patterns of “cognitive dysfunctions” so severe as to amount to a “consensual hallucination,” white people fail to recognize the Racial Contract due to their position of privilege.118 As opposed to being fundamentally separate from this blindness and the racialized cognitive and moral norms it perpetuates, the sociopolitical structures of the polity and the values and ideals of contract theory have actually prescribed them. White supremacy, therefore, is not a “prejudice” that exists external to the polity; rather, it is baked into its very foundation. The achievement of an aspirational people, therefore, cannot merely entail the inclusion of nonwhite people into a set of already existing norms and standards but rather requires a more fundamental transformation of those norms and standards themselves. In portraying white people’s recognition of the Racial Contract as a central to achieving this aspirational dimension, Mills attributes a significant amount of agency to white readers. It is, however, only the epistemological authority of nonwhite readers that democratic and cooperative aspects of Frederick Douglass’s thought. See Shadow, 90-95. Rogers offers a counterpoint to this, arguing that attending to the rhetoric of Souls allows us to view the democratic elements in Du Bois’s thought. Insofar as the rhetorician who claims “to speak on behalf of the people” must nevertheless submit his arguments to their “critical appraisal,” rhetoric is less about top-down leadership and more about a practice of give and take. See “Rhetoric,” 189, 197. 116 Gooding-Williams, Shadow, 4, 62-63, 192. 117 Although Mills does talk about the need for nonwhite people to change insofar as they have internalized the terms of the Racial Contract, the main impetus to change falls on white people. Contract, 89, 118-120. 118 Ibid.,18. 40 makes white recognition possible, thus figuring white agency as dependent upon nonwhite agency. Further, although Mills does not specify how many white people he envisions becoming race traitors, Noel Ignatiev—a key founder of the concept of race traitorship—argues that not all white people will become race traitors but rather only a committed minority.119 In this sense, the role of white people in achieving racial justice would remain a relatively limited one. In contrast, all nonwhite people are figured as potential authors of a vision of racial emancipation. As with Du Bois, Mills uses rhetoric as a means of transforming the dominant frameworks through which white people see the world. Unlike Du Bois, however, Mills confronts an era in which white people have been given many opportunities to change their ways and still have not. The lists of historical atrocities and nonwhite grievances amount to a tally of white wrongs and black demands for personhood; they evoke a sense of having waited a long time and refusing to do so any longer. Thus while Mills invites readers to reconsider the modern era as a whole, he addresses the last century in particular. For it is mainly in the last century that formal racial equality is achieved, the purported resolution to “the problem of the color-line.” However, as Mills notes, the Racial Contract has not been destroyed but only rewritten.120 The “color-line” remains in another form. It thus follows that in bringing this truth to light Mills must re-write the very terms with which white people orient themselves to the world. Mills’ resignification of Du Bois’s key concepts not only addresses a different historical formation of white supremacy but also puts forth a distinct normative vision. Du Bois seeks to transform the idea of America by proving to white people the striving of 119 120 See footnote 26 of this essay. Ibid., 62, 72. 41 black people who, even if they are now “culturally backward,” have the potential to realize their essence as both black people and Americans. The narrative and poetic elements of Souls offer stories of exemplary black people, both of the difficulties they face and their efforts to overcome them. In this regard, Souls hinges on getting white people to see black people differently, in an expanded sense.121 In contrast, TRC asserts that white people need to radically question the very concepts and framework that mediate their perception of the world, including themselves. In refusing the kind of narrative elements that characterize Souls, TRC marks itself as part of a different era of Afro-modern political thought, one in which nonwhite people (should) no longer have to prove themselves to a white audience. Instead, it is white people who are figured as needing to prove themselves. In becoming race traitors, white people must betray the ideals of the polity, which uphold Whiteness. In the end, TRC’s portrayal of white and nonwhite people alters the understanding of “the people” that Rogers describes. If in Souls it is black folk who have “not yet” fulfilled their true potential,122 in TRC it is white people who are in the position of “not yet” measuring up to the standards that white and nonwhite people ostensibly share but that only nonwhite people have actually fulfilled. Insofar as nonwhite people have, all along, provided the means to fulfilling the universal ideal of personhood, in a sense the “aspirational” dimension of “the people” exists immanently within the polity as opposed to being essentially outside it. That is, in TRC the gap between factual and aspirational is 121 Rogers argues that rhetoric in Souls seeks to induce an “expansion of the political-ethical horizon” of the reader that amounts to “a transformation at the deepest levels of the self.” The term “expansion” is telling, for it signals that white people need not fundamentally question the norms of polity. They need only question their exclusion of black people from them, thus expanding the sense in which they think about black people and America. “Rhetoric,” 192, 200. 122 Ibid, 192, 200. 42 less temporal (an essence ‘not yet’ fulfilled) than epistemological. This is not to say that Mills does not see the dismantling of the Racial Contract and rewriting of a truly universal contract as a future-oriented project that requires collaboration by both white and nonwhite people. It is rather to say that in some sense nonwhite people have always been ready for—and insistent on—the ideals of equality and universal personhood that Souls identifies with the norms of modernity from which black people are figured as excluded. This is further emphasized by the fact that the epigraph and guiding thesis of TRC is a black American folk aphorism: “When white people say ‘justice’ they mean ‘Just Us.’” The same “black folk” that Souls figures as backward afford the key epistemic insight of Mills’ text. Whereas for Souls the color-line may have been perceived as a problem of temporal lag, Mills asserts that in TRC’s day this is not the case. Nonwhite people recognize the Racial Contract, and the TRC embodies and performs this epistemological viewpoint. The white reader is called upon to recognize the existence of the Racial Contract, participating in the realization of a transformed polity for which nonwhite people have long called. 43