hello everybody and I just wanted to go over Charles Mills racial contract very broad overview and I will also be uploading a talk I did a couple years back and fall of 2017 which is generally inspired by chart of the work amongst many but specifically Charles Mills really tracing the genealogy of what do what the concept of white supremacy as a social political and economic system so you can view both of these complement each other to really think through Mills in relation to our contemporary society and one of the things when there's Charles Mills that the picture I shared with you the other day at the American Political Science Association conference in San Francisco a couple years ago as we began white supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today this is the very first sentence of the text to set the ground to really analyze in these three chapters on how that is structured so in in the overview this is on page three here it really lays out how this is going to be structured these are we've already gone over a lot of this right so as what he's trying to do as a philosopher again he's really think through how these areas that were largely segregated from each other mainstream ethics right so if you're in philosophy thinking of ethics and justice and rights its namely in what he's arguing us for in the abstract to what he's saying we need to reconcile that fact the abstract notions of justice and rights that we think through with the reality of the world of the native of the african-american third and world and have third and fourth world political thought historically focused on issues of conquest imperialism colonialism white settlement land rights race and racism slavery Jim Crow reparations apartheid cultural authenticity national identity and you handy small Afrocentric etc so the point is and I really want to have a think about this when we're thinking about notions of freedom notions of democracy notions of Liberty notions of citizenship all these in ideal forms from an ethical a moral perspective how do we reconcile those ideas that mainly emerge from the fields of philosophy and in this application in political philosophy to the reality and the brutality that these other worlds have endure right or have not lived within that realm of those abstract principles so what he says here on page six the aim is to adopt a non ideal contract as a rhetorical trope and a theoretical method for understanding inner logic of racial domination and how its structures apologies of the west and elsewhere how do these ideas emerge and provide the system of domination what are you making is the three claims one is at existential it's both local global exists and it's existed for many many years secondly its conceptual it should be thought of itself as a political system and it's thirdly methodological as a political system white supremacy can illuminate and be theorized as based on a contract between whites a racial contract so it became a racial contract much like the US Constitution as I've argued is B codifies the racial contract codifies a racialized form of citizenship with the 17 1990 Naturalization Act US citizenship free whites only etc etc so is ontology it's the branch of in metaphysics concerned with the nature and relations of being the study of being right so in this Charles Mills when he refers to a social ontology is that structure that is created due to these ideas right the color so social ontology is what he calls it's the color coded morality of the racial contract restricts the possession of this natural freedom and equality to white men so what begins to emerge here is by virtue of their complete non recognition or at best in adequate myopic recognition of the duties of natural law non-whites are appropriately relegated to a lower rung on the moral ladder the great chain of being they are designated as born unfree in unequal a partition social ontology is therefore created a universe divided between person and then racial sub persons right so and these would be the subject races not the objects of inquiry from any of those philosophical realms of inquiry and if we're thinking now historically but in the present we are dealing with this but he calls this great chain of being right and we're thinking about who is free who is unfree who is the benefit of all rights and recognition and who is not who was to be racialized in society or dehumanized and cast out of this chain of being so and as we discuss the other day this concept of epistemology of ignorance it becomes an epistemological contract right when the the racial contract prescribes for its signatories in inverted epistemology and epistemology of ignorance a particular pattern of localized and global cognitive dysfunctions which are psychologically and socially functional producing the ironic outcome that whites will in general be unable to understand the world they themselves have made now think about that for a moment in our particular discussions and in this present moment in global society race is pretty prominent where years back it's kind of covered over yes it's almost and it's still marginalized and the reality we have if you go out into society and you pull individuals he will have a racial racial chasm on who perceives racism to be a problem in society right so what mills gives us is kind is not kind of a distinct way to think about how the system upholds itself the failure from those four who benefit from the system to see it never ignorance is just not knowing you don't even know that it exists so therefore you deny it exist right but it is structural racism in u.s. society today to give you an example and not being eight not having the ability to see it that is dependent upon this concept of this epistemology of ignorance thus making it an epistemological contract so as we move through it I'm going to move through a couple to think about slides here and I think you'll get a broader array on in the lecture that I'm posting but when we're thinking about race what is race right or is it sociologist tell us it's a social construction what I'm arguing is race it becomes a political technology it becomes a way in which racial societies used to construct and order human hierarchies so this epistemology this way that we come to know the world and then we perceive the world we move in the world is used as a mode to shape law policy determine outcomes for specific human bodies right we see it in the present who is confined to what space who was confined to what realm not only of knowing but of determining policy and outcomes and access to resources and how do we move interpersonally so race and racism is not an interpersonal relation it is a structural relation and it emerges from the air that we breathe in that form of racial knowing or epistemology and I'm I'm gonna pause here as he's laying out how it becomes an expropriation contract slavery contract and a colonial contract to think about how this these contracts were established right now emanating into laws and policies right that really begin to structure the production of inferiority through law law becomes the main Avenue in which two other those who are non-whites from whether the conduits Constitution black bodies are simply property anybody who is non-white is not a citizen right to give you our example but this begins to function with Europe proper and its colonial possessions and appendages into the present so the legal production of inferiority the legal who was a legal citizen who was an illegal these are political racialized concepts right not neutral juridical terms right so one example if you're thinking about immigration do that you think about the legal too easily those are racialized constructions once we begin to adopt how race really informs every form of naturalization and it becomes a global historical system and I'm going to pause here and now we will be and now we will be shifting over to the my lecture on white supremacy which will provide a broad overview of Charles Mills his work and hopefully you're thinking about eginning through chapters two and three today and as we move towards the final paper exam