If racial americanization has privatized race, racial europeanization has assumed a prior step. It has rendered race unmentionable, unspeakable if not as reference to an antisemitism of the past that cannot presently be allowed to revive.

For Europeans generally, race is not, or really is no longer. European racial denial concerns wanting race in the wake of World War II categorically to implode, to erase itself. This is a wishful evaporation never quite enacted, never satisfied. A desire simultaneously frustrated and displaced. As diffuse as they are, racist implications linger, silenced but assumed, always already returned and haunting. Buried, but alive. Odorless traces but suffocating in the wake of their nevertheless denied diffusion.

Latin America projected itself, at least ideologically, as nation-building through the racial mosaic, by making nations in the name of constituting the new national character distinctly as racial metis.

Israel was forged, of course, in the fire and fury of all those migrations, the experiences of expulsions and exiles, arrivals and starting over, assimilations and abjected evictions, wrongful convictions and threatened extinctions.

By the latter half of the nineteenth century, the United States of America emerged as the beacon of modernity, the model of what a nation-state might aspire to in seeking its modernity. Its postabolition ethnoracial republicanism, civic religion and religious secularism, social segregation and aspirational colorblindness suggested the contours of modern state-making.

The reach of political theology is everywhere, its traces deep in the political psyche, the historical ontology, of South Africa.