The Global Racial Order

Abstract

Chapter 7 offers a differential diagnosis of global racial injustice. Against Charles W. Mills’s theory that we live under global white supremacy, the chapter argues that the white racial group no longer dominates all other racial groups in the world. In particular, those raced as yellow by global society—roughly, East Asians and their descendants—are no longer dominated by racial whites and whiteness. More than this, the supreme political and social status enjoyed by whites over all other racial groups is also waning. The chapter therefore argues that our global racial order is best understood as a system of “partitioned white primacy.” In this system, racial whites exert racial primacy over racial reds, browns, and blacks; but the system is partitioned, because whites do not exert such primacy over those raced as yellow. Moreover, such primacy as whites do exert over other racial groups is less than supremacy, and it is even now being challenged. The chapter then shows how such primacy still suppresses resistance and thereby makes all unfree.