Political Lingua Franca

Having just finished my first reading of Charles Mills's The Racial Contract, I have a loud collection of unexamined ideas buzzing excitedly between my ears. My initial reaction is one of admiration - I think that Mills has made a compelling argument (or series of arguments, really) that illuminate the pernicious silence surrounding racism and racist ideals, the need to recognize and name it, and more. In his introduction, Mills asserts that "what is needed...is a recognition that racism (or, and I will argue, global white supremacy) is itself a political system, a particular power structure of formal or informal rule, socioeconomic privilege, and norms for the differential distribution of material wealth and opportunities, benefits and burdens, rights and duties" (3). A provocative and dangerous idea, to be sure. That racism has historically (as presently) been willfully erased as part of a national attempt to hide an extraordinarily shameful past I do not doubt; Mills offers up each atrocity with a shocking frankness from which it is impossible to look away.

Yet as always, knowing and doing are two very different things. Once an awareness is raised, once acceptance has begun, things start to get really sticky. Continuing in ignorance, while definitely the more quiet, tranquil route, is no longer a possibility. But Mills does offer up the idea that whites, at least in theory, have a choice. The color of one's skin cannot be helped, any more than I could go back and change the course of events that systematically constructed and then subverted the evils of racism and white supremacist oppressions. Neither skin nor ancestry should ever be used as a weapon against anyone, white or otherwise.  But one could take it upon oneself to reject the Racial Contract, "to speak out and struggle against the terms" (107). Admittedly, I have very little idea of what such a struggle might look like, how it might take shape from my specific positionality. However, I think that Mills is correct that first, it does become necessary to distinguish between whiteness ("phenotype/genealogy") from Whiteness (political commitment to white supremacy") (126). According to Mills, "By unquestioningly 'going along with things,' by accepting all the privileges of whiteness with concomitant complicity in the system of white supremacy, one can be said to have consented to Whiteness" (107). If I take Mills to be correct, then, my compliance, and silence, and passivity and cooperation are potentially the equivalent to complicity in a system against which, at least ideologically, I am vehemently opposed? Stings quite a bit, doesn't it?

Bibliography: Mills, Charles W. The Racial Contract. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997. Print.