The big idea: Suppose every openly racist law is repealed and everyone sincerely tries to be fair.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.
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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.
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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.
What the Racial Contract shaped
- It was never signed and rarely said out loud.
- Yet it quietly shaped who counted as a full person.
- It shaped who got the land and the vote.
- It shaped whose interests the rules really served.
Mills' conclusion: 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.