The Racial Contract: Challenging White Supremacy in Sociological Theories and Providing a Global Theory for Race

In The Racial Contract Charles Mills argues that the social contract is an epistemological theory that is steeped in white supremacy. I do two things in this essay. First, I use my personal experiences in graduate school to show how gate keeping in academia is still perpetuated via promoting scholarship that was created for white experiences by white scholars. I use Mills' work to highlight how scholars of color who study communities of color are still struggling with theoretical frameworks that do not adequately explain or represent the lived experiences of the populations they are studying. In the second portion of the essay, I call on race scholars in the United States to think more broadly about colonialism and global racism, something that Charles Mills advocates for in The Racial Contract.