Quotes from Charles W. Mills

Whiteness is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations.

European humanism usually meant that only Europeans were human.

And concepts are crucial to cognition: cognitive scientists point out that they help us to categorize, learn, remember, infer, explain, problem-solve, generalize, analogize. Correspondingly, the lack of appropriate concepts can hinder learning, interfere with memory, block inferences, obstruct explanation, and perpetuate problems.

on matters related to race, the Racial Contract prescribes for its signatories an inverted epistemology, an 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.

White supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today.

a conviction of exceptionalism and superiority that seems vindicated by the facts, and thenceforth, circularly, shapes perception of the facts. We rule the world because we are superior; we are superior because we rule the world.

In other words, he saw himself as simply doing at home what his fellow Europeans had long been doing abroad.

psychological, and moral implications it has had both for its contractors and its victims. By treating the present as a somehow neutral baseline, with its given configuration of wealth, property, social standing, and psychological willingness to sacrifice, the idealized social contract renders permanent the legacy of the Racial Contract.