Racism needs to be understood as a global phenomenon – our humanity depends on it

In order to eliminate global racism, we must dismantle the ideological architecture that allows it to thrive worldwide

Around the world, racism is fueling a new wave of global unrest. In recent weeks, demonstrations in France turned violent amid mounting frustrations over socioeconomic and racial inequities, led by a younger generation that has had enough. Earlier this month, the Green party of England and Wales’s decision to define Zionism as a form of racism sparked controversy and renewed public debate about what racism is and who gets to decide it. In September, electoral gains by Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party raised alarms in a nation with a dangerous history of racist, antisemitic fascism. And for the past year, the Trump administration has pushed ahead white supremacist agendas throughout the United States, highlighted by violent Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids targeting people by race, regardless of citizenship status.

To understand each of these examples of racism in isolation would be a mistake. They are connected. Racism is not merely a series of random occurrences affecting certain people in certain places. It is more than institutional discrimination in schools or workplaces or even systemic inequalities in healthcare and policing. Racism is an interconnected, global phenomenon, spreading throughout our human ecosystem and embedded in world order. This global racism, which I name and define in my new book Global Racism: A Challenge for the World, is dangerous – it underpins wars and threatens our very humanity.

Global racism is an old story and an evergreen one. It is often powered by leaders who seek to divide humans through dehumanizing “us v them” narratives. In 1095, for example, Pope Urban II called upon Frankish nobles and common folk alike to take up arms against the Seljuk Turks, urging them in one account of his speech “to destroy that vile race from the lands of our friends”. Nearly nine centuries later and a continent away, the Hutu Ten Commandments, published in 1990 in a Rwandan newspaper, invoked ideologies of racial superiority that created the conditions in which the Rwandan genocide unfolded four years later. The worst things we humans have ever done to one another – slavery, genocide, segregation, apartheid – have been justified and sustained by ideologies underlying global racism. When this racist fervor subsides, we realize that such acts have not only killed countless people but diminished our humanity.

Today, evidence of racism’s global disruption is clear. According to the United Nations, racial discrimination is among the most common forms of discrimination worldwide, often intersecting with gender discrimination against women and girls. A Pew survey found that across 36 countries a median of 68% of adults consider racial or ethnic discrimination as a significant worldwide problem. The international community recognized the need to confront such challenges back in 1965 when nations created the first treaty banning racial discrimination, defined as certain acts of discrimination on the basis of race, color, descent, national or ethnic origin (but not nationality). A laudable first step, the treaty failed to define and ban racism, alongside racial discrimination.

Understanding global racism reveals why this gap matters. Racism can’t be eliminated by banning acts of racial discrimination, nation by nation, alone. Racism’s deeper roots are embedded not only in how humans and the institutions we create behave, but in what we believe. White supremacist movements, for example, teach followers to believe that being white makes someone inherently superior to everyone else. This ranking of humans by group based on a construct that has no basis in biology isn’t accidental. It is by design and always has been. Today, because of social media and new technology, global racism moves throughout our human ecosystem with rapid speed, making it possible anywhere and everywhere people are.

Consider the racist, anti-immigrant riots that erupted last June across Northern Ireland after a knife attack in Belfast, where people violently targeted minority communities, setting fire to homes and vehicles. It exposed how far-right ideologies amplified online could help drive people to commit racist crimes. Like a spark that turns into a raging wildfire, racism doesn’t go viral without hot, dry, windy conditions in the air that allow it.

Launching an effective campaign to combat global racism starts with dismantling the ideological architecture that allows racism to thrive. Many governments, however, have been reluctant to do this, privileging free speech and ideas even when the unfettered exercise of those freedoms enables the spread of racial hatred. But protecting the right to express an idea, however objectionable, should not mean allowing racist beliefs to become systems of power. An idea, after all, is not the same as an ideology. The difference, according to Merriam-Webster, is between an idea as a “formulated thought or opinion” and an ideology as a “systematic body of concepts”. The goal isn’t to police an individual’s ideas; it is to stop national leaders who command military power and vast resources from spreading ideologies of racial superiority that threaten peace and security.

WEB Du Bois warned of precisely this danger in 1935 in an unpublished essay, A Pragmatic Program for a Dark Minority. He described a world in crisis, where leaders of nations amassed power built on platforms of racist ideologies that promised a bleak future for everyone. “All this,” he wrote, “must inevitably move toward an increase of race hate and war.” History proved him right. The Holocaust, the Rape of Nanjing, and US internment of Japanese Americans, among other horrors, were all built on ideologies of racial superiority. Du Bois understood something we still miss today: racism is not a national peculiarity but a global force, one that degrades those who wield it as surely as those who suffer under it – and that, left unchecked, threatens to plunge the world into chaos and war.

Racism is, indeed, a global force, but so is our ability to overcome it. Recognizing global racism is the first step. For nations, this requires banning racism, alongside racial discrimination, under international law. For the rest of us, this means giving up the allure of ideologies of racial superiority. Like all global challenges, real solutions will require collective action. We can start by demanding dignity from our leaders and from ourselves. Why should we try? Because the future of our human species depends upon us acting as one.

Anna Spain Bradley is the author of Global Racism: A Challenge for the World and a professor of law at the UCLA School of Law