Making Global Inequalities Racial and Making Racial Inequalities Global

In the first instance, race was an invention of Western imperialists who sought to justify their conquest of land and people, and racial thinking accompanied the capitalist accumulation that eventually engulfed the globe. Today, the philosophy and science of race has expanded beyond its role as justification and has become a means of accumulation itself.  Indeed, the very purpose of race is to determine who gets privilege and who is deprived of rights and resources. Bashi Treitler, in this paper, constructs an anatomy of race, or more precisely, establishes a theory of racial paradigms. This theory is empirically applied to racial thinking in distinctive historical times and geographic spaces, to demonstrate paradigmatic continuities among varied historical, national, and regional racial contexts. The idea is to explain how humans project racial thinking born 500 years ago into today’s modern age, thereby perpetuating global racial inequalities.