At a time of polycrisis, with war and militarism on the rise, racial discrimination continues to influence whose lives are valued and protected, and whose are ignored or treated as collateral damage. In this extended article, PPU Council member Sarri Bater argues that those committed to peace and justice must confront the structures of racism and the history of colonisation that shape our world.

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On 21 March 1960, thousands of Black South Africans gathered outside a police station in the township of Sharpeville. They were protesting the apartheid government’s pass laws. These laws forced Black South Africans to carry documents controlling where they could live, travel, and work. If you were found without your pass book, you could be arrested.

The protest was deliberately peaceful. Many people had left their pass books at home and presented themselves for arrest as a way to expose the injustice of the system. Police opened fire on the crowd. Sixty-nine people were killed. More than 180 were injured. Many were shot in the back while fleeing. The event became known as the Sharpeville Massacre.

Six years later, the United Nations declared 21 March the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination.

Sharpeville matters because it makes something visible that racism often tries to hide: racism is not simply prejudice between individuals. It is a system for organising whose lives are protected, whose movement is controlled, and whose suffering can be normalised or ignored.

Understanding that helps us see why this day still matters now.

Race was invented to separate, control and dominate… and its logic still organises the world today

Prior to European colonial expansion, identity was organised in multiple ways across different historical and social contexts. In many societies, belonging was structured through relationships: responsibilities associated with particular crafts, trades, or communal functions; stewardship of land and shared resources; custodianship of stories, rituals, and knowledge; and reciprocal obligations within kinship and social networks. These forms of belonging situated people within overlapping systems of recognition and responsibility, such that identities could be multiple, layered, and, in some cases, subject to change over time through marriage, migration, alliance, or shifting social conditions.

This is not to suggest that hierarchy, exclusion or violence were absent. Many societies were characterised by complex and, at times, rigid forms of stratification and domination. The distinction that matters here is not between societies with or without hierarchy, but between different organising logics of identity. What did not exist was a single, global system that classified all human beings into fixed groups ranked by inherent worth.

European colonial expansion from the fifteenth century onwards introduced such a system.

As empires expanded across the Americas, Africa, and Asia, colonial powers created, developed, and institutionalised the idea of 'race' as a means of organising humanity at scale into fixed and hierarchical categories. These classifications were central to the large-scale justification of conquest, enslavement, land appropriation, and extraction of labour and resources that were needed for the project of colonial expansion.

Within this framework, human populations were classified according to supposed differences in biology, civilisation, religion, and intellect, that structured a global system determining who was entitled to rule, who could own land and resources, who could move freely, and whose labour could be exploited. 

At the apex of this hierarchy sat a carefully constructed intersection: white, European, Christian, male, property-owning and educated within the epistemic traditions of rationality. Proximity to this intersection conferred full recognition as human, rational and fit to govern. Distance from it marked populations as less civilised, less rational and less capable of self-determination.

This hierarchy did not operate through skin colour alone, nor was it confined to overseas colonial territories. As the project of racialisation expanded, it organised multiple forms of difference. Within Europe, poor and working-class populations were often represented as less disciplined or closer to so-called 'primitive' peoples. Indigenous knowledge systems were dismissed as superstition. Women were framed as emotionally unstable and unsuited to political authority. Entire cultures and societies were categorised as backward or uncivilised.

Racialisation, then, functioned as a global system for organising human value, with skin colour as one visible marker within a wider framework that ranked people according to their proximity to a constructed colonial ideal of civilisation, rationality, and authority.

Although formal colonial rule has largely ended, the global organising logic that produced these hierarchies did not disappear. It became embedded in modern institutions, borders, economies, and dominant ideas about power, authority, knowledge, development and progress. That logic continues to shape the world today.

Anti-Blackness, Proximity to Whiteness and the Spectrum of Racialisation

Once such a hierarchy exists, it does more than classify humanity. It organises how different groups are positioned in relation to one another. At the core of this system sits the constrution of Blackness and anti-Blackness as key concepts for wider racilisaiton: this is the positioning of Blackness as the symbolic 'bottom' of the ordering of human worth, as created during colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. The system required a category of people who could be treated as permanently exploitable and whose suffering could be normalised or ignored. Their enforced position at the bottom of the hierarchy also stabilised the system itself, allowing other groups to be positioned as more human by comparison.

Crucially, whiteness does not simply refer to skin colour. It refers to the constructed pinnacle of the hierarchy, a particular intersection of identity, culture, knowledge, and power positioned historically as the model of full humanity, rationality and authority. Race therefore operates as more than colour and ethnicity. Racialisation functions as a broader system for organising human value by positioning anyone who falls outside this constructed superiority as less civilised, less rational, and less human. This is the ordering that has historically been used to justify unequal access to authority, security, and resources. The spectrum of racialisation therefore affects groups beyond skin colour, and in different ways depending on how they are positioned in relation to this supreme category.

Some groups or individuals may be partially incorporated into the hierarchy through closer alignment of dominant norms, values, and knowledge systems. Others remain positioned further from the ‘top’ and are more consistently subject to exclusion, suspicion or control. This dynamic is sometimes described as proximity to whiteness; not whiteness purely as skin tone, but whiteness as the constructed category placed at the top of the hierarchy (white-skinned, European, Christian, male, property-holding, and educated within the forms of knowledge associated with rationality).

Understanding race as a systemic spectrum, in which people are situated closer to or further from what is deemed most fully human, helps reveal patterns that might otherwise remain invisible.

Racism is not simply a collection of individual prejudices. It is a historical system for organising human value in ways that justified control over people, land, and resources, and whose logics continue to shape how societies distribute power, safety and belonging today.

Racism and the Global Polycrisis

The world is currently experiencing what many describe as a polycrisis: overlapping crises of war, ecological destruction, displacement, widening economic inequality and weakening democratic institutions.

For many people in the UK this may be felt through rising living costs, political polarisation, housing pressure, or anxieties about belonging and security. At first glance these crises can appear separate. But if we look more closely, they are shaped by the same underlying organising logic that the Sharpeville massacre exposed, a logic that determines

• Whose land and resources can be taken
• Whose movement must be controlled
• Whose suffering is considered tolerable
• Whose lives are treated as expendable

This logic appears in many places:

• In migration regimes that treat some people’s movement as normal and legitimate, while treating others as threats to be contained.
• In a global arms trade that profits from wars disproportionately fought in the Global South, while those displaced by those conflicts are dehumanised or treated primarily as security problems.
• In the vastly unequal attention and value placed on human life across different conflicts around the world: the destruction of Gaza; the escalating military confrontations across the wider Middle East; the war in Sudan and the vast humanitarian crisis it has created; the ongoing war in Ukraine, on the edges of the European order; and many other conflicts and crises - from Myanmar and Yemen to Ethiopia, the Sahel, Haiti and the Democratic Republic of Congo - that rarely receive sustained global attention.
• It is also visible in ecocide and environmental destruction, where ecosystems are treated as expendable and the consequences fall most heavily on communities who have contributed least to climate change.
• In widening global economic inequality, where wealth and resources remain profoundly unevenly distributed across the world.

None of these crises can be fully understood without recognising the deeper historical systems that organised the modern world. The structures that justified colonial domination shape the global political and economic systems we still live within.

Seeing the Pattern and Choosing What Comes Next

Recognising racism as a system does not mean making every injustice in the world about race. It does not mean focusing only on culture or skin colour, nor does it mean competing over whose suffering matters most. What it asks of us is something more demanding.

It asks us to recognise racialisation: the historical process through which human beings were classified and ranked into hierarchies of value. The classifications that, over time, became embedded not only in laws or policies, but in the deeper organising logics through which the modern world came to understand itself.

Although overt racial hierarchy is no longer openly defended in most parts of the world, the deeper organising logics that produced it have never been fully undone. They are often questioned at the level of behaviours - discriminatory acts, offensive language, unequal treatment - but much more rarely at the level of the underlying assumptions about how the world is organised. 

Recognising this means looking at how these same organising logics, often normalised and operating below the level of conscious awareness, continue to shape the world around us. They appear not only in states and global systems, but in the everyday places where we organise life together: in ourselves, in our groups, in our events and meetings, in recruitment and hiring, in neighbourhoods and institutions, in who leads, who belongs, whose voice carries weight and, most dangerously, what we come to believe is inevitable.

If we want to understand the crises shaping our world today, we have to be willing to look honestly at their foundations.

For those of us committed to democracy, progressive politics, peace and justice today, this recognition carries a challenge. It asks us not only to oppose violences and injustices where they are visible, but also to examine the deeper organising logics that shape what we recognise as violence, whose suffering feels immediate to us, and what the world quietly teaches us to participate in. 

A commitment to change and progress in the contemporary world requires more than condemning injustice when it becomes visible. It asks us to question the assumptions, institutions, and habits through which domination continues to organise our societies, including those embedded in our own groups, communities, movements, and ways of working. 

Peace, justice and change require the patient work of rebuilding ways of living together that no longer depend on hierarchy, exclusion or the ranking of human and more-than-human life.

Questions for Reflection and Inquiry

You might reflect on these questions yourself, or discuss them with friends, colleagues, or community groups:

1. What did you first learn about racism? For example,

• Was it explained mainly as individual prejudice, or as something structural?
• What did that explanation make visible, and what did it leave out?
• Where did that understanding come from -family, school, media, or lived experience?
• Did it appear as a past problem, a personal behaviour, or a system that still shapes the present?

2. Where do you see the legacy of colonial racial hierarchies shaping the world today? For example, 

• In the patterns of attention, concern, and urgency that shape how suffering is recognised
• In the things that feel normal, inevitable, or unquestioned in the way our world is organised

3. Where do you see proximity to whiteness operating - including within your own groups, communities or wider society? For example,

• In whose voices are trusted, whose norms are treated as neutral, and whose ways of being set the standard
• In whose perspectives feel familiar or credible, whose presence feels 'normal', and whose difference is treated as exciting and exotic or a problem to manage

4. What would it mean to rebuild identity around relational belonging rather than purity? For example,

• Seeing identity less as a fixed category and more as something shaped through relationships, responsibilities and interdependent life
• Belonging that grows through participation, care, and contribution rather than ancestry, bloodline or purity
• Communities organised around mutual responsibility rather than boundaries of who is 'in' and who is 'out'
• Recognising that people can belong in multiple places, cultures, and communities at once, and that belonging can expand and be fluid
• Valuing difference as something that strengthens shared life rather than something that threatens it

5. If racism helped organise the modern world, what would it take to reorganise it around dignity and interdependence instead? For example,

• Rethinking borders, belonging, and movement around responsibility and care rather than inherited hierarchy
• Organising economies and institutions around meeting human needs, sustaining life and repairing historical injustice rather than extraction and accumulation
• Redefining security in terms of wellbeing, safety and ecological stability rather than military power
• Recognising that dignity is inherent and that the wellbeing of any group is inseparable from the wellbeing of others
• Shifting from competition for dominance toward mutual responsibility for the conditions that allow life to flourish

Further reading and voices to learn from

The following thinkers and practitioners offer powerful insights into racism, coloniality, and the systems shaping our world:

• Frantz Fanon – on colonial violence and racial hierarchy
• Sylvia Wynter – on the invention of “Man” as a racialised category of humanity
• Cedric Robinson – on racial capitalism
• Angela Davis – on abolition and systemic racism
• Achille Mbembe – on necropolitics and power over life and death
• Ruth Wilson Gilmore – on structural racism and abolition geography
• Gargi Bhattacharyya – on structural violence and collective responsibility
• Harsha Walia – on borders, migration justice, and imperialism
• Nandita Sharma – on migration and the nation-state system
• Robin D. G. Kelley – on radical imagination and freedom struggles

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About the Author

Sarri Bater is a peace practitioner and scholar working at the intersection of nonviolence, conflict transformation, and systemic justice. For nearly three decades she has worked with communities, movements, institutions and armed actors, developing and accompanying practices that help people navigate conflict without reproducing the deeper systems of domination, separation and inherited violence that sustain it. Through her work with OpenEdge, she explores how the organising logics of domination continue to shape contemporary crises and their responses, while working alongside communities and institutions to prototype practices and forms of organising grounded in co-liberation, relational responsibility and new ways of living and deciding together across difference.