Race and structural injustice (Philosophy HL)

The big idea: Suppose every openly racist law is repealed and everyone sincerely tries to be fair. Would racial inequality just vanish?

Many philosophers say no. Gaps in wealth, health and safety, built up over generations, can carry on by themselves — long after the laws that first caused them are gone. That's the puzzle of race and structural injustice.

Structural injustice is the previous micro's idea applied to race: the unfairness isn't mainly in today's individual hearts, but in systems — where families could once buy homes, which neighbourhoods got investment, whose schools were funded — that keep shaping lives now.

The key move is to see how a past injustice becomes a present one, even with no one acting unfairly today.

Checkpoint — structural injustice: In one line: racial inequality can keep running long after racist laws end, because the advantages and disadvantages they created get inherited. Hold that — the next thinker asks how a whole society came to be built this way in the first place.

One philosopher gave this a sharp and famous name.

Mills: an unspoken agreement: You may have met the idea of a social contract — the story that a society rests on an agreement about how to live together fairly. Charles Mills argued that behind the official, fair-sounding contract sat another, unwritten one: the Racial Contract. It was never signed and rarely said out loud, yet it quietly shaped who counted as a full person, who got the land and the vote, and whose interests the rules really served. For Mills, the 'fairness for all' story was, in practice, fairness arranged mainly for some — and that arrangement is baked into institutions we still live inside.

Go further — higher-level insight: Notice how Mills turns a familiar idea against itself. The social contract was meant to explain fairness; Mills uses the SAME frame to expose unfairness — 'here is the deal that was actually struck, and here's who it left out.' Using a theory's own tool to reveal what it hid is a powerful, top-band critical move.

Checkpoint — Mills: In one line: Mills says a silent 'Racial Contract' built society to favour some groups — never signed, rarely spoken, but wired into institutions we still live in.