Modern anti-Black racism is not an inherent, natural force in human society. It was deliberately constructed across the Atlantic world over centuries – and if it was built by human hands and institutions, it can also be dismantled. This opinion piece comes from Professor C. Justin Robinson, Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal of The UWI Five Islands Campus.
The 2026 FIFA World Cup has reignited urgent global conversations about race and pigment-based prejudice, and one name has been at the center of that discourse: Vinícius Júnior. The Champions League-winning football star, a global icon whose talent draws the attention of millions of fans worldwide, has been targeted repeatedly with dehumanizing anti-Black abuse across European stadiums. Monkey chants, thrown bananas, and crowds mimicking apes have followed him match after match, a stark reminder that even immense wealth and worldwide fame cannot shield a Black man from systemic anti-Black racism. Across Spain, France, and the core of European football, a dark-skinned athlete at the peak of his career is still reduced to a subhuman caricature by thousands acting on a centuries-old inherited reflex.
If one of the most visible, privileged Black athletes in the world cannot escape this degradation, Robinson argues, it is impossible to ignore the far worse fate of millions of less visible Black people. That includes the dark-skinned child growing up in a Brazilian favela, the African migrant dying at Europe’s borders, and the Black man targeted by police simply for existing while Black. Millions have no access to Vinícius’s platform, legal resources, or personal fortune; their suffering never makes global headlines, and they remain collateral damage in a system whose rules were written long before they were born.
Robinson traces his own first encounter with this systemic programming back to his childhood in St Vincent and the Grenadines. As a boy watching global football, athletics, and cricket outside the West Indies, he found himself instinctively drawn to teams with Black players – a feeling that arose spontaneously, without instruction, but was not evidence that race is a biological destiny. Instead, it was solidarity forged by shared history, and the fact that even a child could inherit that reflex proves that skin color has long been weaponized for political and social work. It raises a fundamental question: why does the melanin in a stranger’s skin, thousands of miles away, spark a sense of kinship? Why has color become the most defining fact of identity for so many, across every corner of the globe?
Biologically speaking, skin pigmentation is one of the most superficial human differences. The vast majority of the human genome is shared across all populations, and variation in melanin is simply an evolutionary adaptation to different levels of ultraviolet radiation: more melanin provides protection in regions with intense sunlight, while less melanin facilitates vitamin D production in sun-scarce areas. In short, skin color is nothing more than a biological sunscreen adjustment, and it tells us nothing meaningful about a person’s intelligence, character, or inherent worth. So how did this minor biological adaptation become a permanent social caste?
While slavery, conquest, and prejudice against dark-skinned people existed in many ancient societies, European colonial empires created a historically unprecedented system that fused African ancestry, dark skin, hereditary chattel slavery, formal law, Christian theology, global commerce, and later pseudoscience into a massive transatlantic racial hierarchy. Modern, global anti-Black racism is one of the most consequential and shameful legacies the Atlantic West has given the modern world.
Ancient Greek and Roman societies enslaved outsiders and held harsh prejudices against marginalized groups, but their divisions were based on legal status, citizenship, and culture – not a universal racial caste ranked by skin color. A dark-skinned free citizen could hold higher social standing than a pale enslaved captive; these ancient brutal societies never constructed the modern color line. Similarly, medieval European societies were focused on faith and lineage, not pigment. The so-called “Curse of Ham”, later used to justify African slavery, was a later invention: the Book of Genesis curses Canaan, not Ham, and never mentions Black skin. The association between the curse and dark skin was added centuries later to weaponize scripture for racial exploitation.
A critical turning point came in 15th-century Iberia, where “purity of blood” laws framed Jewish or Muslim ancestry as an inherited, indelible stain that even conversion could not erase. This development coincided with Portuguese imperial expansion, which turned the capture and trade of African people into a massive Atlantic commercial enterprise. For the first time, religious difference became tied to ancestry, physical appearance, and skin color, laying the groundwork for modern racial hierarchy.
The decisive legal development of this system happened in the Caribbean. In 1661, the Barbados Assembly passed the first comprehensive English slave code, a coercive regime governing enslaved African people that became the template for slave systems across Jamaica, South Carolina, and the entire Americas. It was crafted by English colonial planters explicitly to maximize plantation profit, not by the people it enslaved. The colony of Virginia later added two foundational refinements that cemented racial chattel: in 1662, the principle of partus sequitur ventrem declared that a child’s enslaved status followed their mother, ensuring that children born to enslaved women were born into bondage, turning enslaved women’s bodies into permanent plantation capital. Then in 1667, colonial law declared that baptism could not grant freedom to an enslaved person, closing the last loophole out of chattel slavery. With these changes, bondage became visible, hereditary, and permanent, with skin color as its immediate identifier.
As historian Eric Williams famously argued: “Slavery was not born of racism, rather, racism was the consequence of slavery.” Plantation economies required a workforce that could be identified at a glance, whose children could be legally claimed as property, and whose status could not be changed by conversion or personal achievement. Skin color was the perfect marker: it is visible, heritable, and inescapable. Racism became the moral and ideological technology that justified the violent extraction of labor and wealth from Black bodies.
The Enlightenment later gave this system a veneer of scientific respectability: taxonomist Carl Linnaeus assigned inherent personality traits to different supposed human “races”, and fields like craniometry, ethnology, and eugenics reworked raw prejudice into seemingly objective scientific measurement. Domination was rebranded as scholarly discovery. The United States later became the most powerful architect of this racial order: its 1790 naturalization law restricted citizenship exclusively to “free white persons”, and Jim Crow segregation, one-drop racial classification rules, and racial integrity laws cemented ancestry as a permanent legal fate. Europe built the foundational architecture of the Atlantic racial system, while the U.S. reinforced it through law and embedded it into global mass culture.
Robinson emphasizes that this historical accounting does not assign collective inherited guilt to every individual European or American. Abolitionist movements emerged in Europe, Black resistance reshaped American society from the civil rights movement to today, and some African rulers and merchants also participated in the slave trade. But responsibility for the system rests with the institutions, powerful interests, and deliberate political choices that built it, not with individual bloodlines, and acknowledging other participants does not erase the central role of colonial states and planter regimes that constructed the system and profited the most from it.
This history leads to an unavoidable question: what responsibility do modern inheritors of the nations that built this racial system hold today? Robinson draws a clear line between individual guilt and collective obligation: a modern Briton, French person, Spaniard, Portuguese person, or American is not morally guilty of drafting the 1661 Barbados Slave Code, but they are inheritors of the compounded wealth generated by that system. They benefit from economies whose foundational capital was extracted from Black bodies classified as legal property, and from legal and fiscal infrastructures deliberately designed to privilege their ancestors and dispossess Black communities. Only the inheritors of these imperial treasuries have the capacity to repay what their legal systems stole, and to take concrete action to address the ongoing harm that Black people face solely because of their skin color.
The Caribbean, the region where the modern racial system was first legally codified, does not only hold the legacy of the wound – it also holds the tools to heal it. The Haitian Revolution destroyed the brutal slave regime of Saint-Domingue, and Haiti’s 1804 constitution declared all Haitians would be known by the “generic appellation of Blacks”, reclaimed the oppressive category of race as a marker of collective dignity. Caribbean thinkers including Eric Williams, C. L. R. James, Elsa Goveia, Frantz Fanon, and Sylvia Wynter were the first to explain the machinery of modern race to the world. What began as a laboratory of racial domination also became a global center of emancipatory thought and struggle.
This legacy demands ongoing work from Caribbean communities themselves: teach the 1661 Barbados Slave Code as core Caribbean and world history, frame the Haitian Revolution as a defining turning point in global human freedom, confront colorism in schools, hiring practices, media, romantic norms, and beauty standards, replace the celebration of colonial planters in public spaces with recognition of maroons, insurgents, Black educators, and Black writers, use racial categories to expose inequality where necessary but never mistake social categories for natural fact, and pair cultural reckoning with demands for material reparations that can finally close the colonial ledger of exploitation.
At its core, Robinson’s argument is clear: skin color is a natural biological adaptation, but racial hierarchy is a human-made artifact. It was constructed by specific institutions, in specific places, for specific exploitative purposes. This fact is not cause for fatalism – it is proof that the system can be unmade. The boy who instinctively rooted for Black players inherited a historical wound, but also a tradition of collective recognition. The Vinícius Júniors of the world, for all their wealth and fame, inherit that same wound, a reminder that no individual success can outrun systemic racial failure.
Our collective task is not to pretend we do not see color. It is to see color without mistaking it for an inherent destiny, to remember which powers taught the modern world this harmful mistake, to do our own work of dismantling harmful cultural and institutional structures, and to insist that the nations that built the racial cage contribute to the cost of taking it down. The monkey chants targeting Black athletes will not end with individual therapy or goodwill gestures. They will only end when the global community decides that the cost of perpetuating racism is higher than the cost of finally settling the historical account.
