Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 4: Racism as the Operating System.

In episode 4 of the series, Chisom turns to the operating system that white terrorism built: racism. The chapter opens with the precise distinction between racial prejudice and racism: prejudice is what individuals carry, racism is what happens when racial prejudice meets systemic power. The chapter traces the construction of race itself across the papal bulls, the Iberian casta system, the English colonial slave codes, the French Code Noir, and the nineteenth-century scientific racism whose biological dressing has been settled as fiction while the political category continues to operate.

It marks the May 25, 2026 Pope Leo XIV encyclical apologising for the Holy See’s role in legitimizing slavery, names that Leo did the specific thing his predecessors refused to do, and notes that the bulls have still not been rescinded. It makes the case for anti-Black racism as the foundational case the operating system was built around through three arguments: the economic, the global export, and the intra-racial reproduction in colorism. It names the family of racisms (anti-Indigenous, anti-Arab, anti-Asian, anti-Jewish, anti-Roma) as variants of the same technology, each with its own history and present.

It documents anti-Black racism in 2026 globally: Black maternal mortality in the U.S., in the U.K., in Norway; police violence disproportionately of Black Americans, Nahel Merzouk in France, U.K. stop-and-search disparities, and the 6,243 Brazilian police killings in 2024 with 82 percent of victims Black; the Mediterranean border regime and its more than 30,000 dead since 2014; the Dominican Republic’s mass deportations of Haitian-descended people, more than 276,000 in 2024 and more than 379,000 in 2025; and the post-2023 corporate DEI rollback.

The episode names five predictable critiques, including the “we have moved on” deflection among many people across continents and racialised groups who claim we live in post-racial, post-sexist, post-homophobic, post-Islamophobic, post-colonial worlds we do not actually live in. The episode locates Chisom as a woman whose children will encounter the operating system in a different form than she did.

Transcript

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the instrument and essentially the technology that white terrorism built to make this whole mess of a system run is racism. be precise here because the word is used loosely and the loose use is part of how the system continues to protect itself. Racism is not the same thing as prejudice. Scholars have named this in many different ways and this is the position that makes the most sense to me. Racism is not prejudice. Prejudice is what individuals carry in form of their beliefs, their assumptions, the biases that they hold. It could be this gut feeling that people get when a particular kind of person walks into a room that they have a preconceived or unconscious bias against. That is racial prejudice. It is real and it can do real interpersonal harm, but it is not yet of the systemic kind. Racism is what happens when racial prejudice meets systemic power. For example, a Black American person holding prejudice against a white American person probably does not cost the white American much of anything because from the context of what we see systematically happening in the United States, the Black person has little to no structural power to convert that prejudice into systemic factors like denied housing, denied loans, denied health care or even denied protection from the police. Conversely, white police officer in Minneapolis or in Paris or in Sao Paulo, basically holding the same kind of prejudice against a Black person or Black people or racialized people can produce a body in the streets. Both are prejudice absolutely, but only one is racism. The distinction is what separates the structural analysis from the false equivalence game. And this distinction is specifically what I want to hold in this episode. I'm Chisom Udeze and this is Overnight Wisdom. If you're new to this series, I essentially try to make each episode a complete argument. uh And you can return to the earlier versions or the earlier episodes whenever you like. episode one made a case for calling the system white terrorism rather than white supremacy. Episode two traced colonialism on the African continent. Episode three trace settler colonialism and how it shows up in 2026. And this episode is really about looking at the operating system that runs through all of them. So in this episode, I'm going to be talking about how race itself was constructed, by whom, when, and why. I will also talk about other major forms of racism and I will try to name them in their structural specificity. So things like anti-Indigenous racism, anti-Arab racism, anti-Asian, anti-Jewish, anti-Roma. Basically, each is a variant of the same technology and the same instruments and each has its own history, past and present. I will also talk a little bit about what anti-Black racism is doing in 2026 globally and also where we have live evidence. As usual, I will anticipate and touch on some critics and I will also evaluate myself within the context of what I am critiquing. I think this topic in and of itself within the series is quite expansive so I might have to do it in two parts. So if I can't cover it in this episode, in the next episode, I want to examine what the operating system does when it compounds with systems like patriarchy, gender, and sexuality. Let's jump in. So first, let's talk definitions. Racism equals racial prejudice plus systemic power. Racial prejudice is universal in the sense that humans across every population are of holding it. East Asians hold prejudice against Asians. South Asians hold prejudice about South Asians hold prejudice about other South Asians and about Africans. South Americans hold prejudice that map onto their own colonial racial hierarchies. White Europeans hold prejudice against each other. English about the Irish, Germans about the Slavic, Western Europeans about Eastern Europeans before they ever get to the racialized others outside of Europe. Prejudice is human. It is also almost always learned. It is taught by the media. It is taught by family members. It is taught by school, by the structures of the society the person grows up in. And it can also be unlearned, although the unlearning is harder than most people are willing to admit. Systemic power is what basically transforms or converts prejudice into a global operating condition. It is the legal system that arrests one group at higher rates and convicts that group with harsher sentences. It is the healthcare system that takes one group's pain less seriously, that gives that group worse maternal care that closes hospitals in that group's neighborhood. It is the labor market that pays one group less for the same work and promotes one group more slowly. It is also the labor market that fires one group first when companies decide that they need to be lean. It is the housing market that denies one group's mortgages and confines one group to particular neighborhoods. It is the same process that builds highways through one group's communities. It is the media that shows one group's in stories about crime and another group in stories about innovation. It is the immigration system that admits one kind of person quickly and detains another at the borders for years. It's in the school that tracks one group to prison and the other group to university. Systemic power is what makes prejudice into a life expectancy gap, a wealth gap, a maternal mortality gap, an incarceration gap. systemic power is one of the core structures that white terrorism built Many prolific scholars have researched this and the equation is quite simple. Without systemic power, prejudice is just prejudice. With systemic power, prejudice becomes the operating condition of someone else's life and someone else's opportunity and someone else's access. This distinction is the difference between an interpersonal offense and a structural fact. almost every defense of racism, including the defense that presents themselves as defenses against racism, it depends on collapsing that distinction. if you can pretend that a Black person being rude to a white person is the same thing as a white controlled legal system, disproportionately incarcerating Black people, you have erased the structural fact that collapse is the insidious move. in this episode, I am not creating any kind of room for that move. So let's talk about the construction of race itself. Race is made, found. Human variation is real. People have different skin tones, different hair textures, different bone structures, different averages of every measurable thing. the visible variation that we see when we look at the global population. None of that variation, however, sorts into the categories that the modern racial system uses. Research shows that the genetic variation between two randomly selected Yoruba people in Nigeria, for example, is on average greater than the genetic variation between, a Yoruba person and a Norwegian person. Human variation is continuous. Race is discrete. The continuous reality of biology was forced into discrete political categories by specific institutions across specific centuries. and the discrete political categories were the technology. The purple bulls of 1452, 1455 and 1493 that I spoke about in earlier episodes in the series are part of that construction. inter caetera in particular created the legal premise that Christians and non-Christians were a meaningful global distinctions with rights of conquest flowing from that distinction. Within decades, the distinctions would be racialized. Christian and non-Christian became European and non-European. And that also became people racialized as whites and people racialized as not whites. And that also became people who were treated as human. and people who we are treated as not quite human. On May 25th, 2026, the day I'm recording this, the Pope Leo issued his first encyclical and use it to make a historic apology for the Holy See's role in legitimizing slavery calling the Vatican's record a wound in Christian memory. have apologized for Christians involvement in the transatlantic trade. No pope had ever acknowledged the role past popes played in giving European sovereignty explicit authority to enslave "infidels". Leo did the specific thing his predecessors refused to do. The bulls have still not been rescinded, but credits where it's due. That said, the structure is what we are still dismantling. And you know what? The dismantling is the work The Iberian Casta system that the Spanish built in the Americas beginning in the 16th century was one of the first systematic attempts to convert human variation into legal categories. and those categories were Spanish, metiszo mulatto, zambo, indio, negro, and the proliferation of more granular categories were assigned rights, obligation, taxation rates, and access to professions. system was a technology for managing a colonial population whose mixing the colonizers had them self-produced and now needed to discipline. English colonial slave codes built a different version. Virginia's uh slave codes from the 17th century uh and forward gradually consolidated a category called whites that did not previously exist as a legal identity. Irish indentured servants, English freemen, German, Lutherans, and Scottish Presbyterians were merged into white in part because the system needed a category that excluded the enslaved Africans. whiteness in the Anglo-American English tradition is in origin the category constructed to oppose blackness. It was not there first, it was made in response. Noir codified the legal treatment of enslaved Africans in the French Caribbean and Louisiana. It established what enslaved people could not do, who could free them, who could marry them, and what punishments could be inflicted. The code was the legal architecture of a particular kind of dehumanization. and he traveled with the French Empire wherever he went. By the 19th century, when the political construction of race was already two or three centuries old, race was given a fake biological designation. Samuel Morton in Philadelphia measured skulls. Louis Agasiz at Harvard taught polygenism, the theory that the races were separate species. Francis Galton in England invented eugenics. Eugen Fischer conducted his anthropometric research on Herero corpses during the genocide and went on to direct the Institute whose work informed the Nuremberg laws. None of the science survived And all of it was published in the mainstream scientific journals and taught in universities for decades. The science was always wrong. political category of race operated regardless of the science because the political category was the point The science was basically just a dressing still operates. It operates in policing, operates in healthcare, it operates in lending, it operates in hiring, it operates in immigration, it operates in education, it operates in who is treated as a citizen and who is treated as a guest in their own birth country. Race is a fiction with structural consequences. fiction was invented for a reason and the reason has not yet retired it is still operating in broad daylight Now I want to talk about anti-black racism as a foundational case for the operating system. It's not the only case. It is, I believe, the foundational one. The case the system was built around, the case that it tested most fully, and the case that it exported most globally. My first reason for framing it like this is that anti-blackness was the racism around which the modern global economy was built. half million Africans across the ocean across 400 years. And the wealth that the system extracted from those bodies financed the Industrial Revolution, the great banking houses of London, the merchant fleets of Liverpool and Bristol and Nantes and Lisbon. Eric William established the link in 1944. Walter Rodney extended it in 1972. named the broader system in racial capitalism. the argument that the capitalism Marx analyzed was already racialized. That capitalism cannot be understood as a class system that happens to have racism layered on top of it. Because the original capitalist accumulation was racial accumulation. The plantation was the lab of the industrial discipline. and the enslaved African body was the original capital. Anti-blackness is not one racism among many. It is the racism that the modern world is built on. My second rational for this is that anti-blackness was exported globally in a way that no other racism was. The skin lightening industry is one of the largest beauty markets in the world with major presence across South Asia, East Asia, the Gulf States, South America and Africa itself. Organization has issued repeated warnings about the mercury content of lightning products. used by women across continents who have never encountered a substantial Black community. in their daily lives but who have absorbed through global media saturation the message that lighter is closer to legitimate. Anti-Black sentiment is common in countries with few Black residents, drawn from imagery and stereotypes that traveled through Hollywood, through European colonial media, through the global circulation of whiteness as an unmarked default. Black Brazilians, Afro Cubans, Afro Colombians, Afro Mexicans, and the African descendant population on every Latin American country face anti-Blackness inside their own nations with police forces and labor markets and political systems that operates to their disadvantage in ways that are documented and quantified and ignored. Anti-Blackness traveled where other racisms did not, because anti-Blackness was the operating system being exported, not just one local racism among others. third rationale for this is that anti-blackness also operates interracially within the African diaspora itself in form of colorism. Lighter skin is privileged in the dating market, in the hiring market, in political representation, and the media of every Black community on every continent. colonial system that taught Black people that whiteness was the standard installed the standard inside the Black community And the community is still working through what to do with it. This shows up in African mothers who told their daughters not to play in the sun or Caribbean families that prefer, you know, their lighter skinned cousin in the photograph. It shows up as Black American advertising that over represents lighter skinned Black women. Nollywood, which is basically the movie industry in Nigeria and Bollywood, which is the movie industry in India and the Korean drama industry that all converge on a similar standard of lighter skin as protagonist material. This is not a defect of Black communities. This is the system reproducing itself inside the very communities it harms. Naming colorism isn't letting white terrorism of the hook. It is showing how completely the technology penetrated The repair work is also the Black communities work and that work is being done in different contexts, in different nations, in different ways. But the system is what installed the standard and the system is what will have to be dismantled to remove it at the roots. The other racisms are real and horrifying, So let's talk quickly about some of the families of racism. The operating system produced multiple forms of racism. Each has its own technology with uh its own history and its own present emergence. uh And each is a variant of the same underlying logic that's white terrorism essentially installed. I want to name the major ones briefly, but also hopefully accurately. Anti-indigenous racism is a racism that says that the people who lived on the land before the settlers arrived are not fully sovereign, not fully human, not fully entitled to the place they have inhabited for thousands of years. It produces the doctrine of discovery, the broken treaty, the residential schools, the forced contraception campaigns, the missing and murdered indigenous women. It operates from Patagonia to the Arctic, from Sapmi to Aboriginal Australia, from the Mapuche to the Ainu. It is the racism most directly tied to land and the politics of repair are most directly about land return. anti-Arab racism has its own deep lineage traced back to the European Orientalism that Edward Said named in 1978 in orientalism. the system of European representation of the Arab and Muslim world that converted a diverse civilization into a flat object of fascination and contempt. the September 11 attacks in 2001. the United States and Western Europe. was weaponized into the architecture of the War on Terror. the surveillance of Arabs and Muslim communities, the bombing of Arab countries from Afghanistan to Iraq to Libya to Syria to Yemen to the immigration restriction and the airport security that converted Arab and Muslim bodies into suspects by default. After October 7, anti-Arab racism has been weaponized again, this time to provide cover for the destruction of Gaza. The conflation of Arab with terrorists, Palestinians with Hamas, Muslims with extremists is the working technology of the present moment and it operates across the entire Western information environment. Next is the anti-Asian racism in the West, which essentially has a different lineage that is traced through the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 in the United States. the Yellow Peril propaganda of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the internment of Japanese Americans during the Second World War, and the post 1965 immigration patterns that produced the model minority myth. The model minority myth is the specific anti-Asian racism that pretends to be compliment or praise. particularly East Asian Americans as the disciplined and successful racial groups and uses that elevation as a wedge against Black communities. with the implicit arguments that if Asians could succeed in the United States, that the Black community's comparative inability to do so is the Black community's fault, rather than the systemic bias and racism that they have to navigate. myth is anti-black before it is anti-Asian and it has been used against Asians whenever the United States need an external enemy. Most recently with the China hawk politics of 2020s. and also the COVID era violence against Asian Americans. Also, anti-Asian racism in the Gulf and in Africa, across South-South migration corridors also has its own forms. Anti-Jewish racism is structurally distinct from other racisms because Jews have been racialized differently in different contexts. In Europe through the Middle Ages and into the modern era, Jews were the internal racialized other were subject to expulsions, to pogroms, to ghettoization, and ultimately the Holocaust. in modern day United States, many Jews are racialized as whites with the privileges and protections that come with that racialization. And at the same time, they still face antisemitism from the political right and from segments of the political left. the other distinguishing feature in 2026 is that antisemitism has been weaponized as a defense of the Israeli settler structure. Legitimate criticism of Israeli state policy is collapsed with anti-Semitism in order to shut down the criticism. This collapse also hurts Jewish people because it cheapens the real category of anti-Semitism and it hurts Palestinians because it shields the state that is destroying them. Both harms are operating at once. Anti-Roma racism is Europe's longest running and least acknowledged racism. The Roma have been in Europe for roughly a thousand years, racialized as the internal nomadic other, subjected to enslavement in some regions of Eastern Europe, well into the 19th century. They were targeted in the Nazi Porajmos that killed between 200,000 and a million alongside the Jewish Holocaust and facing daily structural racism in 2026 across Hungary and Romania, the Czech Republic, Italy, France, and most of the rest of Europe. Roma children are placed in special schools that track them out of opportunity. Roma neighborhoods are demolished in municipal governments. Roma women have been subject to forced sterilization in Czechoslovakia, in the Czech Republic, in Slovakia in the 21st century. So basically the European political consensus that loudly condemns racism elsewhere is largely silent about the Roma. So that silence is essentially racism doing its work. These are major racisms that come to mind in the moment, but they are not the only ones. They are not equivalent to each other in scale, in history, in present-day operation, or in the specific harms they produce. But they are variants of the same operating system, and that operating system is what white terrorism installs. So let's talk about anti-black racism in 2026. I want to give you some light evidence as of today. Let's look at the Black maternal mortality rates in the United States. The most recent CDC data from 2023 puts the maternal mortality rates for Black women at 50.3 deaths per 100,000 live births against 14.5 for white women. For Hispanic women, that number is 12.4. And for Asian women, that number is 10.7. So basically what does this mean in simple English? This means that Black women die in childbirth and in the postpartum period at three and a half times the rates of white women in the wealthiest country in the world. The McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility projects that if current trends continue, the Black maternal mortality rates could nearly double to 94 deaths per 100,000 live births by 2040. So basically placing the United States on par with many low income countries for Black women specifically. the United Kingdom, the most recent MBR RACE uh UK reports, published in January 2026 and covering the period 2022 to 2024 found that Black women died in pregnancy and postpartum period at nearly three times the rate of white women, with the gap now growing again after years of narrowing. It's also worth noting that the overall UK maternal mortality rates has risen by 20 % since the government set the 2010 target of halving the rates by 2025. So basically that target has not been met. And instead, the disparities have widened. Norway, where I live, has one of the lowest aggregates, maternal mortality rates in the world. but it's also worth noting that that excellence in the aggregates hides the differential. Research published in peer review journals over the last two decades, including studies in Birth BMC, public health, and Acta Obstetricia et Gynecologica Scandinavica - and others has consistently shown that African and Asian background women in Norway have significantly elevated rates of adverse obstructive outcome compared to Norwegian born women. including higher cesarean delivery for fetal distress, uh morbidity, higher neonatal mortality, and higher rates of small for gestational age babies. Earlier work focused specifically on Somali immigrant women. In Norway, showed parallel patterns as well. The Norwegian directorates of health acknowledges this disparity, but the disparity has not been closed. essentially runs on the same operating system as the United States and the United Kingdom, but it's just a little bit more subtle and leads to relatively and significantly less deaths for Black women and women of color. And police violence is the second life case I'm pointing to, and it is global. In the United States, police killed at least 1,365 people in 2024. In 2025, they killed over 1,200 people. And this is according to data from the Mapping Police Violence. 14 % of the population accounted for 24 % of those killed in 2025. Black people are killed by police at nearly three times the rate of white people. There is no comprehensive federal database tracking police killings and independent researchers have documented that government data Systematically undercounts the killings. In France, the police killing of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk, who was of Algerian descent at a traffic stop in Nanterre 2023, triggered weeks of riots and reveal the depth of French racism towards both not African and Black population in the Banlieue. The officer charged with voluntary homicide is expected to face trial in 2026. In the United Kingdom, Black people have stopped and searched at roughly 3.7 times the rates of white people across England and Wales, according to the most recent home office data. the disparity reaching as high as 48 times in some London wards research published in 2024 by King's College London. the situation is also quite serious. The 2025 Brazilian Public Security Yearbook, citing 2024 data, documented that Brazilian police killed 6,243 people in 2024. Approximately 82 % of those killed were Black. That is roughly 5,000 Black Brazilians killed by police in a single year. Brazilian police kill more Black people in a single year than the American police of any race in five years. Brazil is also the country with the largest Black population outside of Africa has perfected anti-black violence at industrial scale and the international press largely does not cover it. The Mediterranean is a third life case, According to the International Organization for Migration's Missing Migrants Project, more than 30,000 people have died in the Mediterranean Sea since 2014. with the total migrant deaths globally surpassing 80,000 in the same period. in 2024 alone, over 2,400 people died in the Mediterranean and over 8,900 died globally on migration routes. the highest annual total on record. The European border regime enforced through Frontex, the Italian and Great Coast Guards, and a network of Libyan militias paid by the European Union to intercept migrants before they reach European waters. They produce these numbers as a matter of policy. The bodies washed up on European beaches every summer. In 2024 and 2025, the UK under both conservative and Labour governments pursued an asylum deportation scheme to Rwanda that was eventually scrapped, But only after spending hundreds of millions of pounds. The Italian government under Giorgia Meloni has pioneered offshore processing of asylum seekers in Albania. The French border regime has continued to dismantle the camps at Calais while doing nothing to address why the people are there. the criminalization of African and Middle Eastern migration is the operating system at the architectural level. the fourth live case. And it is the most aggressive anti-black state policy operating in the Western Hemisphere right now. On October 2nd, 2024, Dominican President Luis Abinader announced the plan to deport up to 10,000 Haitians per week. By the end of 2024, the Dominican Republic had deported more than 276,000 people. 2025, the number of expulsions reached at least 379,000 according to NYU Global Justice Clinic and reporting through early 2026. deportations are openly racialized, and yet the Dominican government has framed them as immigration enforcement. Human rights organizations have documented that the enforcement targets people who appear Black regardless of their legal status, including Dominican citizens of Haitian descent, pregnant women, lactating mothers, and unaccompanied children, all of whom are theoretically protected from deportation under Dominican law. The deported are transported in cage-like trucks, across the border into Haiti that is collapsing under armed ganged control, with more than 1.4 million people internally displaced in Haiti itself in 2025. remembering that the Dominican Republic carried out its first openly anti-Black ethnic cleansing campaign in the late 1930s on the Trujillo killing at least 25,000 Haitians. The pattern is not new. The pattern is still in 2026. the fifth life case I want to name is the post-2023 corporate retreats from the marginal racial equity work that has been installed and the years following the murder of George Floyd in 2020. The June, 2023 United States Supreme Court's ruling against affirmative action in university admissions in students for fair admissions versus Harvard set off a cascade of corporate retreats. Boeing Dismantled its Global Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Department in October 2023. Meta cut its DEI team in 2023 and 2024. Harley Davidson ended its DEI initiative in April 2024. Daniels, ended several DEI initiatives in August 2024. Walmart in November 2024. closed the Center for Racial Equity that it had founded in 2020. It eliminated supplier diversity programs and it removed the term DEI from company materials. and it also withdrew from the human rights campaign, corporate equality index. Lowes, Fords, Toyota, Molson Coors McDonald's, Tractor Supply and others followed similar patterns as well. The political rights has framed the rollback as a victory over racism. Basically, in operating system terms, the system removed the marginal repair work that had been installed in 2020 and basically reasserted its baseline. the point I'm making here is that the structure does not need to be in your face or loud to do its work. It needs only the subtle and insidious permission to operate. Each of these systems still operate in 2026. It's not past tense, it's now, we're in it. So some notes on predictable critiques that I anticipate. The first and the largest is that we have moved on deflection. The position takes many forms. The political right says we live in a post-racial world. Liberal commentators or say we uh we live in a post-homophobic world. Western European politics says we live in a post-Islamophobic world. The whole spectrum at various moments say we live in a post-colonial world. None of these positions is true. There is no post to colonialism. There is no post to racism. terrorism installed because none of them have been dismantled. They have been at best in some cases marginally improved, but they have not been removed. A version of this deflection deploys individual exceptions as evidence. Say, for example, a Black conservative party leader in the United Kingdom, or Black mayors of United States, or Black presidents of African countries who run extractive regimes. The Asian heritage prime ministers of European countries in recent years, for example. the names shift with the political movements. political spectrum, across continents and across racialized groups say we live in worlds we do not live in. The we have moved on framing is the system protecting itself by essentially declaring victory so it can continue to extract from the system and from the war it's created. second critique I anticipate is the one about Black people are also racist deflection. This is where the definition I shared in the beginning. stands because Black people can hold racial prejudice absolutely. So can brown people, so can Asians, so can know indigenous people, Arab people and every other racialized group absolutely. Racial prejudice and any form of prejudice is universal, it's human. Racism though, in the precise sense that I have talked about today, requires the systemic power to convert prejudice into structural harm. racism is what happens when racial prejudice meets power. That entire construct about Black people are racist to is a deflection and that deflection collapses this distinction and I'm not having it. the third critique, and I have received quite a few violent comments and also emails since I started this series. on the basis that I am dividing people by race and it is a reactionary move. the racial division is already dead. This episode is not creating it. I'm just naming it so it, so we can see it. can hopefully address it. refusing to name a system is not the same thing as unity or keeping the peace. It is basically a way for the system to continue to protect itself. the fourth is the biological residue move that race must be real because skin color is visible. Skin color is real. Race is not. Race is a political category that was constructed to convert visible difference into legal and economic hierarchy. The categories the system uses do not map onto biology. The genetic variation within any ratio categories is greater than the genetic variation between categories. The science has been settled for decades. The political category operates regardless of the science. the fifth critique is the DEI's reverse racism attack. DEI was never reverse racism. Any policy designed to repair structural harm gets recorded by the people benefiting from the harm as reverse discrimination against them. This recording is itself a structural defense mechanism. It is the systems reasserting its baseline by framing repair as the new form of injustice. The post 2023 corporate DEI I rollback that I talked about earlier captures this. The rollback is not the end of racism. is essentially the structure removing the very, very tiny marginal repair work and reassert in itself. So where do I stand? social construct on race, I am Black. I am a Nigerian citizen. I am also a Norwegian citizen. I am continental African and I have that privilege of having been raised inside a context that did not require me to argue for my belonging in any room that I happen to be in. This is in some sense, the privilege of being Nigerian and being raised with that Nigerian mentality of belonging in any place where we are. This conditioning has carried me through professional environments in nine different countries where I've worked and lived. Even countries like Norway runs on similar operating system, although it's a little bit more subtle than it is in say the US or the UK. For example, Norwegian companies are diverse at entry level to a point. And it's very white at the top with executive teams and boards that look very different from the workforces they manage. The Norwegian media is also overwhelmingly white at the level of leadership, including like presenters, columnists and also editorial decision makers. Norwegian sports, particularly at like elite levels has not produce the kind of like multiracial visibility that is comparable to other European countries, despite the substantial African and South Asian populations who have lived in Norway for two and three generations. Norwegian arts and culture remain heavily centered on whiteness with the curatorial and institutional power - overwhelming held by people who look like a narrow archetype. Norwegian academia has produced fewer professors of color than comparable Nordic countries, the demographic gap widens at the senior ranks. The maternal data I cited earlier is the most measurable end of the system. The rest of the system is harder to quantify because in Norway, like most of the Nordics we don't like to collect data on identity, but it's very much there. I'm also mindful that my children are growing up inside a different version of this. are luckily at an international environment where the explicit messaging is one of celebration of differences. I know that they will encounter the operating system. The form will be different from the one I encountered because they are Norwegian-raised rather than Nigerian-raised. of Western whiteness in a way that I will never be. And they will be outside at the same time. And that navigation of that double position will be their own work to do. I can't do it for them. I wish that I could, but I can't. So my hope is that I'm able to give them the language, the framework and the confidence that the room being for them is not in question, that the room being for them is the foundation. What the room contains is what they will have to work with. As always, I'm recording this from inside a structure that I'm naming and I'm not innocent in this. this position that I hold is also just the only position that I can speak from. The operating system has been named racism is what happens when prejudice means systemic power race was constructed by specific institutions across specific centuries. converts human variation into legal hierarchy. Anti-Black racism is a foundational case. The system builds basically around it. Anti-Indigenous, anti-Arab, anti-Jewish, anti-Roma, anti-Asian racisms are variants of the same technology. The system is operating in 2026 in Black maternal rates mortality in over 6,200 police killings in Brazil, of which 82 % are Black. in more than 30,000 deaths in the Mediterranean since 2014, and in 379,000 racialized deportations from Dominican Republic in 2025. And also in the corporate retreats from DEI work, which is basically marginal repair that they have installed five years earlier. There is no post to anything. We are currently still in it. was chapter four of the series. Future chapters will go deeper. If this chapter challenged you, if it made you see the world differently, Share it with someone who needs the language. Subscribe to Overnight Wisdom wherever you get your podcasts. Join The Weekly Clarity newsletter at chisomudeze.com where I bring the same structural analysis to leadership, power and systems every week. And if there's one thing I want you to take from this episode is that the operating system is still running. There is no post racism. There is no post colonialism. There is no post sexism. Until next week, I'm Chisom Udeze and this is Overnight Wisdom. Thank you for being here.