There is an esteemed tradition of working to end racial configuration in societies long marked by it. This tradition emerged out of resistance movements to racial slavery, subordination, suppression, and segregation both in colonial societies and in postcolonizing social arrangements. Commitments to do away with race, consequently, have long been associated with social movements to end racism. Indeed, a primary prompt to end racial classification and configuration is tied to antiracism.

Civility’s fading (and failing), so commonly supposed as the contemporary condition, has been attributed for the most part to the increasing heterogeneity and diversification of modern urban environments. It has been blamed also for a variety of social ills. These have ranged from charges of selfish and hyper-individualized societies, care-less and increasingly litigious (consider Stephen Carter’s flat and flatulently insistent excuse for Christian revivalism), to complaints of societies stricken by runaway crime rates, vulgarity and violence.

Race is commonly assumed in the popular imagination to be an antique notion, a vestige of premodern or at least not adequately modernized social assertions and arrangements. I want here to extend this frame of analysis by outlining a set of more or less recent typologies of regionally prompted, parametered, and promoted racisms linked to their dominant state formations. I am suggesting regional models or really mappings rather than ideal types, broad generalizations as contours of racist configuration, each one with its own material and intellectual history, its prior conditions and typical modes of articulation. They are often interactive historically, overlapping landscapes. But it remains nevertheless revealing to delineate them, to distinguish one kind and style as well as their conditions of possibility, expressions, effects, and implications from another. Identifying these mappings in the name of the social places and spaces of their principal origination, historical manifestation, and regional articulations is not to limit the (partial) influence of their logics and effects on other places, spaces, and regions that might not be readily identified with their coordinates of origination.

British modernization, as Salim Tamari has pointed out, accordingly transformed a complexly secular, cosmopolitan, broadly communitarian order under Ottoman rule – especially in cities such as Jerusalem and ports such as Jaffa and Haifa (but also more regionally in Beirut and Damascus) – into a more segregating, ethnoracially and religiously discrete and divided set of communities in contest with each other for resources, space, and political favor. Classic colonial divide and rule, ethnoracially fueled. This regional transformation of heterogeneity into the logos of an assertedly homogeneous ethnoracial polity, of ethnoraciality, its promptings and its implications, is what I trace here in the name of racial palestinianization.

While major European cities have seen the informal emergence of segregating residential space, contemporary racial europeanization represents another mode again. I focus in this chapter on the racial evaporations identifiable with europeanization and on their implications.

Latin America. The region of intense métissage, of mestizaje, of mesticagem, indeed, of the very conception. And of an imaginary conjuring it in the first place. Histories of ethnoracial mixtures and categorical transgression, forced and facilitated. Culturally repressed and resisted. Even as they became practiced, projected, and celebrated as national character in the post-abolitionist period. Categorical transgression morphed into mainstream identity. In some regional nation-states more so than others.

From the earliest moments of encounter and unequal exchange, the colonial prehistory of South Africa introduced effects with more or less permanent and interacting impacts: modern urban-making and the politics of its contestation, its remaking according to a blueprint of ruled division; the knotted, contested, often tragic politics of more or less robust mixture, ethnoracially, miscegenationally, socio-culturally; and the threatening political economy of racial division, separation, and segregation, with their invariably, even inevitably, tragic effects.

With neoliberalism, I have been suggesting, race is purged from the explicit lexicon of public administrative arrangements and their assessment while remaining robust and unaddressed in the private realm. Neoliberalism, as I elaborated most explicitly in the case of post-apartheid South Africa, sought expression as racial secularization. Race faded into the very structures, embedded in the architecture, of neoliberal sociality, in its logics and social relations. Race lost its social sacrality while retaining its personal cache and privatized resonance, even in the public sphere.