American Untouchables: America The Racial Contract: A Historical Perspective On Race-Based Politics (critical Perspectives On Social Science) [Paperback]

The issue of race is often a scab Americans choose to ignore. However social science has a responsibility and an obligation to examine not simply the amenable subjects but also the controversial. This work, in a word, is controversial. Thomas Franks (2004) argued that cultural differences led white Kansans to abandon the Democratic Party for the Republican Party during the 1980s. He specifically argued that abortion was the unifying issue in this ideological migration. Simultaneously, future President Ronald Reagan opened his campaign for the presidency in Philadelphia, Mississippi, the sight of the massacre of four young civil rights activists over a decade earlier. Race has and is a factor in the American experience; Franks' premise is simply that the absence of the concentration of African Americans in the Kansas area negated the influence of the black threat hypothesis on the observed ideological switch of white Kansans. This work argues that Franks' premise fails to incorporate the over arching ideological switch of white voter migration to the Republican party that was occurring during the same period, and that Reagan's speech in Philadelphia, Mississippi was an overt cue that he was rejecting the civil rights consensus for an historically established race-based social contract that positioned people of color outside the traditional bounds of the social contract.

The study is a sociopolitical analysis of the African American experience utilizing the racial contract framework developed by Charles Mills. The racial contract holds that the social contract explicitly dictates interactions and transaction costs between citizens and government. Mills supposition is that historically non-Western Europeans were excluded from the penalties for violations of the social contract, and a tacit race based contract dictated transaction costs and interactions between Europeans and non-Europeans. The work utilizes the framework to trace the sociopolitical envil#*