If this racialized world order is so pervasive and structurally embedded, why, one may ask, does it remain largely invisible in the global political consciousness? The answer lies in the epistemic machinery that sustains it.
Across the world, discrimination assumes diverse forms, some ancient, some modern, some fading, some intensifying. However, colour-based racial prejudice is distinctive for its structural permanence. Other stigmas can be shed, outgrown, or performed away; race, particularly colour-coded race, offers no such exit – it is read as inherited and publicly legible. This ‘ontological racialization’,110 the assignment to a racial category of being itself, explains the shift in classifying Jews from a religious group (convertible) to a racial one (immutable, exterminable). However, unlike that violently engineered fiction, the colour line – especially the White/non-White divide – has maintained an enduring epistemological and political power across societies.
