UC Berkeley

This article presents the main terms of the racial contract, as they appear in the subcontracts of Mills’ theory, such as the spatial, epistemological, cognitive subcontracts. It is important to keep in mind that these subcontracts are by no means separate and represent analytical moments of the main contract. Furthermore, other than its institutional form, education is not a separate sphere from the racial contract. Finally, I end with the racial contract’s gaps to determine the possibility of its own demise, which requires the active signing off from the terms of the contract. That is, I sketch ideas about ways to counteract (i.e., counter-write) the racial contract as part of a corrective to the history that interpellates people of color as its targets. Both Whites and people of color have a stake in the rewriting of the contract, where in the end they are imagined as neither Black nor White but free. In this last portion, I spend some text on what Whites’ role may look like in signing off the contract, such as the case of white ‘race traitors’ within the white abolitionist proposal, recast as the ‘epistemological traitor’ in education.