Why the racial order remains invisible: Answer is in the machinery that sustains it

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.

A Black man cannot baptize himself into blue-eyed Whiteness; a Brown man’s ascent to corporate leadership does not grant him existential equivalence with his White peers; a wealthy East Asian, ‘the model minority’, remains at the gate. Even Eastern Europeans, despite geographic proximity, face racialization when they do not conform to Anglo-American norms of classed Whiteness.¹¹¹ These boundaries are ontological in nature. Du Bois foresaw this in his haunting declaration: ‘The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line’,¹¹² a problem that has shapeshifted into the twenty-first century.

However, despite such personal experiences, in the global context colour coding has a very strange ambivalence: hypervisible at the personal level, it is persistently invisible on the global scale. Most people across races have, at some point, encountered or internalized this racial ordering, felt its sting, or witnessed its operations, especially in the mundane: the job interview, airport queue, police stop, or the classroom. However, this everyday recognition rarely extrapolates into political consciousness, especially globally.

Why is it, then, that the most fundamental form of hierarchical ordering in this global pigmentocracy is still not treated as a central axis of world affairs? The conceptual division of the world into ‘the West and the Rest’ as a structuring principle of global power and identity is still deemed only economic, political, or cultural – whereas it is deeply racial; however, despite being underpinned by a deeply racialized logic, rarely is it interpreted in terms of race.

Multiple mechanisms enable the silent endurance of racism within the international context. One is obfuscation – the active erasure, dilution, or conceptual masking of international racial hierarchy through intellectual abstraction. The discipline of international relations, for example, has cultivated what Robert Vitalis¹¹³ calls a strong ‘norm against noticing’ race, producing what Debra Thompson¹¹⁴ terms ‘racial aphasia’, a systemic inability or refusal to name racial power even when it is structurally determinative. In academia, Sankaran Krishna¹¹⁵ argues, ‘abstraction’, is valorized as a marker of theoretical sophistication, as it helps in obscuring the empirical analyses of conquest, plunder, slavery, or domination all of which are dismissed as emotional, moralistic, or insufficiently ‘rigorous’. Such built-up epistemic structures ensure that Du Bois’s concept of the global ‘color line’, the foundational architecture of international society, remains invisible even academically. Consequently, rather than recognizing racism as a transnational mode of governance of our present, mainstream literature reduces it to isolated incidents, historical aberrations, or the residue of a bygone era. The episodes of racial violence or exclusion are largely individualized, treated as isolated moral lapses or policy failures rather than manifestations of a global racial order. The result is organized (and calculated) obfuscation.

In addition, in dominant Western narratives, particularly within the US, the hegemonic centre of the world, the conception of race has vastly been reduced to a binary: Black and White.¹¹⁶ Such racial imagination leaves little analytical room for forms of discrimination experienced by people outside of this framework,¹¹⁷ the colonized and formerly colonized populations of Asia, Africa, West Asia, and Latin America. As a result, the global operation of race through colonial conquest, Orientalism, and economic dispossession remains largely un-theorized or under-theorized. There are scholars such as Aníbal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, and others but, in comparison to the Black: White racial prejudice studies within the dominant public frameworks of the West and the Global South, their work is not extensive. This seclusion or under-reportage leads to the epistemic narrowing of race. Consequently, the racialization of the Rest – Indians, Southeast Asians, Arabs, and Latin Americans – becomes irrelevant unless it intersects with the Western narrative of, say, Black and White. Consequently, the struggles of the Rest remain peripheral even when these are explicitly racial – Islamophobia, anti-Arab sentiment, anti-Asian violence, talk of ‘normalization of Indian hate’¹¹⁸, or the racialized nature of global migration. This epistemic marginalization has profound political consequences: it limits the scope of global solidarity and conceals the universal operation of racialized othering that sustains the postcolonial global order.¹¹⁹ Therefore, the scope of US-centered formulations of critical race theory¹²⁰ is insufficient for the Rest of the world, as it does not fully address that the phenomena of racial formation and racialized hierarchies are not restricted to contexts domestic to the US but global in origin and consequence, and it must be expanded.¹²¹ As race is a globalized fact, when the category of the Rest is properly interpreted as a conglomeration of racialized subjects, a broader theoretical intervention is called for.

Simply put, the Black–White binary does not capture the complexity of racial stratification beyond the Atlantic. However, the very notion of race, and the corresponding systemic violence, originated in the context of European colonialism was deployed across continents all over the world. And that structure persists. But this does not imply that the ‘Global South’ or the ‘Rest’ is a monolithic entity. Global South states and actors exhibit vast differences in political autonomy and strategic manoeuvrability.

To address this, scholarship must expand the lens of critical race theory beyond the US and incorporate the colonial, transnational, and epistemic dimensions of racialization,¹²² within the Global South and, more importantly, in Europe and the US.

109. 109. Vitalis, White World Order.

110. 110. Mills, Racial Contract.

111. 111. Gurminder K. Bhambra, Connected Sociologies (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014).

112. 112. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk.

113. 113. Robert Vitalis, ‘The Graceful and Generous Liberal Gesture: Making Racism Invisible in American International Relations’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 29, no. 2 (2000): 331–56, https://doi.org/10.1177/03058298000290020701.

114. 114. Debra Thompson, ‘Through, Against, and Beyond the Racial State: The Transnational Stratum of Race’, in Race and Racism in International Relations: Confronting the Global Colour Line, ed. Alexander Anievas, Nivi Manchanda, and Robbie Shilliam (Routledge, 2014).

115. 115. Sankaran Krishna, ‘Race, Amnesia, and the Education of International Relations’, Alternatives: Global, Local, Political 26, no. 4 (2001): 401–24, https://doi.org/ 10.1177/030437540102600403.

116. 116. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard University Press, 1993).

117. 117. Hall, ‘The West and the Rest’.

118. 118. Al Jazeera, “It’s Regular Old Racism, Not ‘Hinduphobia’,” Al Jazeera, 27 February 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/2/27/its-regular-old-racism-not. Vice President JD Vance defended Elez and called for his reinstatement; President Trump agreed and Elez was rehired. See also Stop AAPI Hate, which documented a 115% spike in anti-Indian sentiment online in the preceding two years.

119. 119. Mahmood Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (Pantheon Books, 2004).

120. 120. Scholars such as Derek Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado developed critical race theory as a framework to interrogate how the law and legal institutions perpetuate racial inequalities, particularly between Black and White populations in the US.

121. 121. As suggested by Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak, Walter Mignolo, Nelson Maldonado Torres, and Siba Grovogui, who have theorized the global dimensions of race, power, and colonialism, and provided foundational concepts for a theory which can be termed global critical race theory. 

122. 122. Bhambra, Connected Sociologies.

Excerpted with permission from Sajid Mohamed’s The Chromatic World Order: The Fiction That Rules Our World, Aakar Books (2026).