The Racial Contractrevisited: still unbroken after all these years

In this reply to my four (very friendly) critics, I take the opportunity to clarify some points about how I meant the "racial contract" as a theoretical intervention to be understood, and to offer some suggestions about how the idea could be further developed. I begin with some familiar distressing points about the slowness or actual reversal of racial progress in recent years. I then argue that (a) this depressing reality vindicates a structural analysis of race (race as "white supremacy") that (b) can be captured in a revised version of the social contract metaphor (the "domination contract"), which would then provide (c) a superior normative framework for challenging the whiteness of Rawlsian social justice theory, as part of (d) a general rethinking of liberalism and contractarianism to address social subordination in nominally liberal Western societies, especially (e) if intersectional concerns are incorporated into the apparatus.