Racism in the Present Tense

An American or French passport opens roughly 180 countries without a visa. A passport from Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia or Sudan opens fewer than thirty. This is not a neutral administrative fact. It is the inheritance of the colonial map — the same powers that drew the borders now decide who is allowed to cross them.

A European tourist photographing a fishing village in West Africa is a traveler. A West African trying to reach Europe by the same sea is a 'migrant crisis.' The same human movement, in opposite directions, is described in opposite moral languages.

When a country in the Global South builds a high-speed rail network, designs a successful vaccine, lands a probe on the moon, or produces a globally dominant technology company, the response in the Western press is almost always disbelief, suspicion, or condescending surprise. The default assumption — quietly, persistently — is that modernity is something that happens elsewhere and is borrowed.

When an Indian, Iranian, Nigerian or Brazilian professional is genuinely brilliant in their field, the most generous frame available is often 'a credit to their country.' The frame is never applied in reverse. No one calls a Norwegian software engineer 'a credit to Norway.' They are simply a software engineer.

This is not about individual prejudice. It is about a hierarchy of expected competence baked into the global imagination of who counts as 'world-class' and who counts as 'impressive for where they're from.'

'Developing country' is a remarkable phrase. It quietly implies that the destination of development is the country doing the naming. It treats centuries of plunder as a head start that the plundered are slowly catching up on, under benevolent supervision. It would be more accurate to use Walter Rodney's phrase: over-exploited countries.

The financial architecture that maintains this — the IMF's structural adjustment programs, the World Bank's lending conditions, the rating agencies of New York, the CFA franc tying fourteen African economies to the French Treasury — is not a meritocracy. It is the legal continuation of empire by other instruments.

The post-colonial Western imagination has a strong preference for a particular type of person from a formerly colonized country: poor, grateful, suffering, in need of rescue, photogenically powerless. Charity campaigns, NGO posters, prestige cinema and humanitarian journalism are organized around this figure.

The same imagination has enormous difficulty processing the formerly colonized person who is none of these things — who is wealthy, educated, confident, technically advanced, unimpressed by Western institutions, and uninterested in being rescued. That person is read as suspicious, arrogant, probably corrupt, or somehow inauthentic. 'Where did you really learn English?' is, at heart, the same question as 'Are you sure you belong here?'

The clearest test of how a society really thinks about race is what happens when the supposed inferior reaches parity. A Black neighbor on welfare is, in racist eyes, an object of complaint. A Black neighbor with a higher-paying job, a better house, and children at a better school is, often, an object of fury. The first can be patronized. The second cannot.

This is the racism that hides inside many polite societies: comfortable with the dependent foreigner, viciously hostile to the flourishing one. The migrant is welcome as a cleaner, tolerated as a doctor, suspected as a CEO, and treated as a threat as a head of state.

When facial-recognition systems sold by Microsoft, IBM, Amazon and the major Chinese vendors were audited by Joy Buolamwini and Timnit Gebru at MIT in 2018, error rates on darker-skinned women ran above 34%, against under 1% on lighter-skinned men. Predictive-policing tools deployed in Chicago, New Orleans and London have been shown to reproduce the racial geography of the arrest records they were trained on, then to rebrand the bias as data. Apple Card and several large U.S. mortgage algorithms have been investigated for giving women and Black applicants worse terms after controlling for income.

The point is not that machines are racist. It is that they are extremely loyal to whoever wrote them. They inherit the prejudices of the data and the priorities of the engineers, then perform them at a scale and speed no human bureaucracy could match — while wearing the cultural costume of objectivity. Discrimination by spreadsheet is harder to sue than discrimination by sentence.

Compare the front-page treatment of 130 dead in Paris (November 2015) with 147 dead at Garissa University in Kenya (April 2015), or with the average week in eastern Congo, Sudan, Yemen or Tigray. Compare the front-page treatment of Ukrainian refugees in 2022 with that of Syrian, Afghan, Sudanese or Rohingya refugees fleeing comparable wars in the decade before. The discrepancy is not a coincidence. It is the residue of a hierarchy of grievability.

Journalists openly said the quiet part on air after the invasion of Ukraine — refugees who 'look like us', who are 'civilised', who are 'European'. The correspondents who used those words later apologised. The frame did not. It still organises what is treated as a tragedy and what is treated as a weather report.

Border regimes that present themselves as humanitarian — 'we are protecting migrants from smugglers, women from traffickers' — are, in practice, the largest single cause of migrant death and exploitation. The Mediterranean has killed more than 30,000 people since 2014, in conditions European coastguards repeatedly chose not to prevent. Australia's offshore detention regime on Nauru and Manus Island documented the sexual assault of children. The U.S. southern border separated thousands of children from their parents and lost track of where it put many of them.

The colonial pattern is exact: violence performed in the name of protecting the very people it harms. The 'civilising mission' of the nineteenth century and the 'anti-trafficking framework' of the twenty-first are operationally indistinguishable — both produce the suffering they then propose to manage.

Diversity, equity and inclusion in its corporate form has, in many institutions, become a brand-safety measure rather than a redistribution. The strategy deck is bought, the optical changes happen — the board adds a face, the lobby adds a portrait, the website adds a statement — while pay, equity, board votes, supplier contracts and political donations move barely at all. After the murder of George Floyd in 2020, U.S. corporations publicly pledged roughly $50 billion to racial equity; by 2023 independent audits could account for under $250 million actually disbursed.

When the political weather changed in 2024–2025, many of the same firms dismantled their DEI offices in a single news cycle on the explicit logic that diversity had been a cost rather than a value. That is the test that exposes the original commitment. A justice you abandon when it stops paying was a marketing campaign.

Western governments routinely impose sanctions on Cuba, Iran, Venezuela, Syria, Zimbabwe and others on stated grounds of human rights — while arming Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the UAE, Israel, and previously Suharto's Indonesia and Pinochet's Chile under indistinguishable governance records. The variable predicting sanction is not human-rights performance; it is alignment with U.S. and EU foreign-policy preferences. The variable predicting weapons sales is the same.

The intellectual class that produces the moral framing for this — think tanks, op-ed pages, certain NGOs — performs the rhetorical heavy lifting that allows a foreign policy of selective outrage to look like a foreign policy of principle. The selectivity is the point. A universal standard would cost too much.