Racism is a world-defining byproduct of capitalism. It is the scientistic justification for the violent accretion of the Earth's abundant natural resources in the coffers of European nations and white North Americans after centuries of their enslavement of Black Africans and after their imperial conquest and colonial oppression of Africa, Asia and the Americas, that is, the 80% of the world that is non-white. Racism is not merely a stratifying ideology that is based on the presumption of white supremacy, the reverse claim of Black inferiority, and the relative inferiority/superiority of other people of colour. It did not originate in the realm of poorly framed, impious, prejudicial, hierarchical thoughts but in the concrete motives of European imperialism and the failed intention to establish, in perpetuity, chattel slavery as its means of wealth production.

Racial violence characterised the founding of North America and the colonisers’ structuring of the social order, labour force and police powers to advantage themselves; therefore, race, socioeconomic class and the nature of the justice system are linked in the lived experiences of Black, Indigenous and citizens of colour. In the USA, racist policies drive discriminatory practices in all its institutions of socialisation: the economy, government, education, religion and family, where the quirks of colourism allot each member metrics of worth based on degrees of brownness. Conscious and unconscious racism, especially the inclination to preserve its privileges (and, for some, the determination to defeat it), remains at the epistemological centre of all social relations in the postmodern era.

Racism has been sustained by the European colonisers wresting control of religious ideas, discourses and imagery from the peoples of colour who produced both the principles and principals of many of the world's religions and by religious supremacy accorded to white, Western versions of Christianity.