The “Racial Contract” and the Racialization of Pathogens and Diseases

In this paper, I use the theoretical framework introduced by Charles W. Mills in The Racial Contract (1997) to examine certain practices of norming and racing space that Mills does not examine in his work—the norming and the racing of the nano-level, which is populated by pathogens. Specifically, I argue that this theoretical framework allows us to understand how pathogens, and the diseases that they cause, have been racialized throughout history. I focus on two historical cases that illustrate this: the yellow fever epidemics in the Americas (particularly in the US) in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the typhus epidemic that struck German-occupied territories in Poland and the Ober Ost during World War I. I then offer some final reflections.