Що таке расовий контракт?

[znak25]

Уривки з "The Racial Contract" by Charles W. Mills
Ця книга є дуже важливою для усіх небайдужих до долі людства осіб. Для українців зокрема, як в Україні, так і у діаспорі, важливо зрозуміти про що йде тут мова. Наразі пропоную лише оригінал англійською. Я особисто стикався з українськими імігрантами з діаспори, які, приїхавши після війни (чи й ще до війни у попередніх хвилях еміграції), зазнавши поневірянь, переслідувань і знущань з боку американського мейнстріму, не мають жодного докору сумління щодо їхнього анти-семітизму чи ширшого расизму. Це правда, що психологічно, багато хто використав ці ідеології для того, щоб почуватися краще - мовляв, мене принижують і експлуатують як імігранта, але я кращий ніж ОЦІ (чорношкірі, жиди тощо) і мені все ж не ТАК погано. Німці це називають Schadenfreude - почуття радості через те, що хтось інший страждає більше ніж ти. За Ніцше, це, на мою думку, теж приклад рабської моральності і ментальності.
Отже, уривки з книги:
What is needed is a global theoretical framework for situating discussions of race and white racism, and thereby challenging the assumptions of white political philosophy, which would correspond to feminist theorists’ articulation of the centrality of gender, patriarchy, and sexism to traditional moral and political theory. What is needed, in other words, is a recognition that racism (or, as 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. The notion of the Racial Contract is, I suggest, one possible way of making this connection with mainstream theory, since it uses the vocabulary and apparatus already developed for contractarianism to map this unacknowledged system. Contract talk is, after all, the political lingua franca of our times.
We all understand the idea of a “contract,” an agreement between two or more people to do something. The “social contract” just extends this idea. If we think of human beings as starting off in a “state of nature,” it suggests that they then decide to establish civil society and a government. What we have, then, is a theory that founds government on the popular consent of individuals taken as equals.
But the peculiar contract to which I am referring, though based on the social contract tradition that has been central to Western political theory, is not a contract between everybody (“we the people”), but between just the people who count, the people who really are people (“we the white people”). So it is a Racial Contract.
The social contract, whether in its original or in its contemporary version, constitutes a powerful set of lenses for looking at society and the government. But in its obfuscation of the ugly realities of group power and domination, it is, if unsupplemented, a profoundly misleading account of the way the modern world actually is and came to be. The “Racial Contract” as a theory - I use quotation marks to indicate when I am talking about the theory of the Racial Contract, as against the Racial Contract itself - will explained that the Racial Contract is real and that apparent racist violations of the terms of the social contract in fact uphold the terms of the Racial Contract.

***
Part of the present-day problem in trying to assimilate black Americans into the body politic is the deep encoding in the national psyche of the notion that, as Toni Morrison points out, Americanness definitionally means whiteness; European immigrants who came to America in the late nineteenth-early twentieth centuries proved their assimilation by entering the club of whiteness, affirming their endorsement of the Racial Contract. The longtime joke in the black community is that the first word the German or Scandinavian or Italian learns on Ellis Island fresh off the boat is “nigger.” Black American, African American, is oxymoronic, while White American, Euro-American, is pleonastic. Whiteness is defined in part in respect to an oppositional darkness, so that white self-conceptions of identity, personhood, and self-respect are then intimately tied up with the repudiation of the black Other. No matter how poor one was, one was still able to affirm the whiteness that distinguished one from the subpersons on the other side of the color line.

***
In this framework, then, the golden age of contract theory (1650 to 1800) overlapped with the growth of a European capitalism whose development was stimulated by the voyages of exploration that increasingly gave the contract a racial subtext. The evolution of the modern version of the contract, characterized by an antipatriarchalist Enlightenment liberalism, with its proclamations of the equal rights, autonomy, and freedom for all men, thus took place simultaneously with the massacre, expropriation, and subjection to hereditary slavery of men at least apparently human. This contradiction needs to be reconciled; it is reconciled through the Racial Contract, which essentially denies their personhood and restricts the terms of the social contract to whites. … The Racial Contract is thus the truth of the social contract.

***
Kant’s version of the social contract is in a sense the best illustration of the grip of the Racial Contract on Europeans, since by this time the actual contract and the historical dimension of contractarianism had apparently vanished altogether. So here if anywhere, one would think - in this world of abstract persons, demarcated as such only by their rationality - race would have become irrelevant. But as Emmanuel Eze has recently demonstrated in great detail, this orthodox picture is radically misleading, and the nature of Kantian “persons” and the Kantian “contract” must really be rethought. [“The Color of Reason: The Idea of ‘Race’ in Kant’s Anthropology” in Katherine Faull, ed. Anthropology and the German Enlightenment] For it turns out that Kant, widely regarded as the most important moral theorist of the modern period, in a sense the father of modern moral theory, and - through the work of John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas - increasingly central to modern political philosophy as well, is also the father of the modern concept of race. His 1775 essay “The Different Races of Mankind” (“Von den Verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen”) is a classic pro-hereditarian, antienvironmentalist statement of “the immutability and permanence of race.” For him, comments George Mosse, “racial make-up becomes an unchanging substance and the foundation of all physical appearance and human development, including intelligence.” The famous theorist of personhood is also the theorist of subpersonhood, though this distinction is, in what suspicious might almost think a conspiracy to conceal embarrassing truths, far less well known.
...In fact, Kant demarcates and theorizes a color-coded racial hierarchy of Europeans, Asians, Africans, and Native Americans, differentiated by their degree of innate talent. Eze explains: “… It cannot, therefore, be argued that skin color for Kant was merely a physical characteristic. It is, rather, evidence of an unchanging and unchangeable moral quality.”…
The recent furor about Paul de Man and, decades earlier, Martin Heidegger, for their complicity with the Nazis, thus needs to be put into perspective. These are essentially but players, minor leaguers. One needs to distinguish theory from actual practice, of course, and I’m not saying that Kant would have endorsed genocide. But the embarrassing fact for the white West (which doubtless explains its concealment) is that their most important moral theorist of the past three hundred years is also the foundational theorist in the modern period of the division between Herrenvolk and Untermenschen, persons and subpersons, upon which Nazi theory would later draw. Modern moral theory and modern racial theory have the same father.

***
The Racial Contract evolves not merely by altering the relations between whites and nonwhites but by shifting the criteria for who counts as white and nonwhite. (So it is not merely that relations between the respective populations change but that the population boundaries themselves change also.) Thus - at least in my preferred account of the Racial Contract (again, other accounts are possible) - race is debiologized, making explicit its political foundation. In a sense, the Racial Contract constructs its signatories as much as they construct it. The overall trend is toward a limited expansion of the privileged human population through the “whitening” of the previously excluded group in question, though there may be local reversals.
The Nazi project can then be seen in part as the attempt to turn the clock back by rewriting a more exclusivist version of the Racial Contract than was globally acceptable at the time. (One writer suggests ironically that this was “the attempt of the Germans to make themselves masters of the master race.”) And this backtracking leads to a problem. My categorization (white/nonwhite, person/subperson) has the virtues of elegance and simplicity and seems to me to map the essential features of the racial polity accurately, to carve the social reality at its ontological joints. But since, as a pair of contradictories, this categorization is jointly exhaustive of the possibilities, it raises the question of where to locate what could be called “borderline” Europeans, white people with a question mark - the Irish, Slavs, Mediterraneans, and above all, of course, Jews. In the colonial wars with Ireland, the English routinely used derogatory imagery - “savages,” “cannibals,” “bestial appearance” - that it would now seem incredible to apply to whites. The wave of mid-nineteenth century Irish immigration to the United States stimulated one wit to observe that “it would be a good thing if every Irishman were to kill a nigger and then be hung for it,” and caricatures in the newspapers often represented the Irish as simian. European racism against nonwhites has been my focus, but there were also intra-European varieties of “racism” - Teutonism, Anglo-Saxonism, Nordicism - which are today of largely antiquarian interest but which were sufficiently influential in the 1920s that U.S. immigration law favored “Nordics” over “Mediterraneans.” … Finally, Jews, of course, have been the victims of Christian Europe’s anti-Semitic discrimination and pogroms since medieval times, this record of persecution reaching its horrific climax under the Third Reich.

***

For these and many other horrors too numerous to list, the ideal Kantian (social contract) norm of the infinite value of all human life thus had to be rewritten to reflect the actual (Racial Contract) norm of the far greater value of white life, and the corresponding crystallization of feelings of vastly differential outrage over white and nonwhite death, white and nonwhite suffering. If looking back (or sometimes just looking across), one wants to ask “But how could they?” the answer is that it is easy once a certain social ontology has been created. Bewilderment and puzzlement show that one is taking for granted the morality of the literal social contract as a norm; once one begins from the Racial Contract, the mystery evaporates. The Racial Contract thus makes White moral psychology transparent; one is not continually being “surprised” when one examines the historical record, because this is the psychology the contract prescribes. (The theory of the Racial Contract is not cynical, because cynicism really implies theoretical breakdown, a despairing throwing up of the hands and a renunciation of the project of understanding the world and human evil for a mystified yearning for a prelapsarian man. The “Racial Contract” is simply realist - willing to look at the facts without flinching, to explain that if you start with this, then you will end up with that.) Similarly, the “Racial Contract” makes the Jewish Holocaust - misleadingly designated as the Holocaust - comprehensible, distancing itself theoretically both from positions that would render it cognitively opaque, inexplicably sui generis, and from positions that would downplay the racial dimension and assimilate it to the undifferentiated terrorism of German fascism. From the clouded perspective of the Third World, the question in Arno Mayer’s title Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? betrays a climatic Eurocentrism, which fails to recognize that the blue skies were only smiling on Europe. The influential view he cites (not his own) is typical: “Prima facie the catastrophe which befell the Jews during the Second World War was unique in its own time and unprecedented in history. There are strong reasons to believe that the victimization of the Jews was so enormous and atrocious as to be completely outside the bounds of all other human experience. If that is the case, what the Jews were subjected to will forever defy historical reconstruction and interpretation, let alone comprehension.” But this represents an astonishing white amnesia about the actual historical record. Likewise, the despairing question of how there can be poetry after Auschwitz evokes the puzzled nonwhite reply of how there could have been poetry before Auschwitz, and after the killing fields of American, Africa, Asia. The standpoint of Native America, black Africa, colonial Asia, has always been aware that European civilization rests on extra-European barbarism, so that the Jewish Holocaust, the “Judeocide” (Mayer), is by no means a bolt from the blue, an unfathomable anomaly in the development of the West, but unique only in that it represents use of the Racial Contract against Europeans. I say this in no way to diminish its horror, of course, but rather to deny its singularity, to establish its conceptual identity with other policies carried out by Europe in non-Europe for hundreds of years, but using methods less efficient than those made possible by advanced mid-twentieth-century industrial society.

***
The debate will doubtless continue for many decades to come. But on a closing note, it does not seem inappropriate to get the opinion of that well-known moral and political theorist Adolf Hitler (surely a man with something worthwhile to say on the subject), who, looking ahead in a 1932 speech, “explicitly located his Lebensraum project within the long trajectory of European racial conquest.” As he explained to his presumably attentive audience, you cannot understand “the economically privileged supremacy of the white race over the rest of the world” except by relating it to “a political concept of supremacy which has been peculiar to the white race as a natural phenomenon for many centuries and which it has upheld as such to the outer world.”… So his plan was just to uphold this inspiring Western tradition, this racial “right to dominate (Herrenrecht),” this “frame of mind… which has conquered the world” for the white race, since “from this political view there evolved the basis for the economic takeover of the rest of the world.” In other words, he saw himself as simply doing at home what his fellow Europeans had long been doing abroad.

Finally, the theory of the Racial Contract, by separating whiteness as phenotype/racial classification from Whiteness as a politicoeconomic system committed to white supremacy, opens a theoretical space for white repudiation of the Contract. (One could then distinguish “being white” from “being White.”)
Some resources cited by Mills:

Raul Hilberg The Destruction of the European Jews, rev. and definitive ed., 3 vols. 1985
Arno Mayer Why Did the Heavens Not Darken? The “Final Solution” in History
Alan S. Rosenbaum Is the Holocaust Unique? Perspectives on Comparative Genocide
Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other