Consenting to the Racial Contract

This paper seeks to understand Mills' racial contract theory and extend it in the context of the U.S. More specifically, this paper will augment Mills’ racial contract theory by asserting that this contract is not just one that exists between Euro/white persons, but also between those that they subjugate, namely black people. To do this, this paper will engage Mills’ formulation of the racial contract alongside classical contract theory and various authors’ work on secularism in the United States. The core thesis of this paper is that rather than the racial contract being an agreement between white men, it is in the context of U.S. jurisprudence, an agreement between whites and blacks where the magic (that is: the religious force/violence) of the law is deployed to articulate that blacks have always already assented to their subjugation and as such have no legitimate legal claim to relief.