It is never easy, is it? Here you thought I’d let you off the hook from politics by offering a full week of blogs about flowers and literature. Think again.

The blossoms have hit rock bottom. So has the social contract. Remember the definition?

“…an implicit agreement among the members of a society to cooperate for social benefits, for example by sacrificing some individual freedom for state protection. Theories of a social contract became popular in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries among theorists such as Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, as a means of explaining the origin of government and the obligations of subjects.”

I don’t need to go into the details of its demise, you read that daily in your news sources. I do want to bring up a related issue, though, the racial contract. The term was coined in a small book, The Racial Contract, written in 1997 by Charles Mills, now professor of philosophy at the Graduate Center at CUNY. He argued that linked to the social contract there was an implicit racial contract that divided the world into Whites and non-Whites, the latter a subhuman class who was originally denied equal rights by the law, while now we pretend that it enjoys them. The book goes on to describe all the historical, political, sociological, economical and structural factors that have continued to keep this racial hierarchy intact.

A refined and extended version of the arguments can be found in Mill’s 2017 Black Rights/White Wrongs, which points, among other things, at “white ignorance” as our shameful ignoring of reality that keeps the status quo intact. My ongoing attempt to fight my own avoidance led to the decision to link to an article today that I found enlightening. I hope you will make time to read it. If you prefer to listen, here is the podcast that talks about the same issues.

Adam Server’s essay describes the many fronts where we currently see racial disparity unfold in full force. He explains Mills in succinct ways:

If the social contract is the implicit agreement among members of a society to follow the rules—for example, acting lawfully, adhering to the results of elections, and contesting the agreed-upon rules by nonviolent means—then the racial contract is a codicil rendered in invisible ink, one stating that the rules as written do not apply to nonwhite people in the same way. 

He offers evidence in form of the the various events of the last weeks, the murder of Ahmaud Arbery and other Black people, the police treatment of social distancing rules depending on who breaks them, and in detail the disproportionate impact the pandemic has had on people of color. Non-Whites get ill and die from Covid-19 in larger numbers relative to their population percentage and they are harder hit by the economic devastation caused by the inertia or deliberate ignorance of the current administration.

Whether we are talking undocumented workers, most often non-White, or prison populations, or even the poor workers of Wisconsin, now forced to get back into infectious situations with little ways of protecting themselves (by a Supreme Court that had the deciding vote cast by a lame duck judge who had been thrown out in the March election…), the touted principle of equal rights for all is glaringly not happening in praxis. The invisible ink of the racial codicil is becoming legible with the heat applied by the current catastrophe.

The revealed injustice goes beyond color lines, but is strongly defined by them. It might lead to changes that we as a nation are not prepared to face – today’s very last reading assignment in this regard comes from the New York Times, and then you can enjoy the weekend!

Photographs today found while hanging my head.

Music by the Tomeka Reid Quartet, on the other hand, lifted me up again, in the Lone Wait her cello playing captures the mood….

and here is an excerpt from her newest album.