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.