In this video, you'll learn key features of Charles Mills' "The Racial Contract." We'll apply Mills' ideas to refining Trevor Noah's suggestive thoughts about George Floyd's murder and the protests and looting that followed.

Noah suggests the looting is a result of a broken social contract between black American's and those in power. Mills refines Noah's thoughts by implying the social contract is still in place. It isn't null and void. The contract still in place is not the classical social contract of Hobbes, Locke, Kant, or Rousseau. It's the Racial Contract between whites and nonwhites that maintains white supremacy.

The Racial Contract is enforced through violence and ideological conditioning. This explains Noah's claim that "police in America are looting black bodies." Looting such bodies is a way of maintaining and enforcing the Racial Contract. White people will be, as Mills says, "unable to understand the world they themselves have made." The Racial Contract imposes and epistemology of ignorance, which explains resistance by whites to the reality of white privilege in America.