Stop Calling It Supremacy — It’s Terrorism | Part 4: Racism as the Operating System.
In part 4 of this series, Chisom examines racism as the operating system built to sustain white terrorism. She traces the historical construction of race through colonial law, religion, and pseudoscience, while distinguishing personal prejudice from systemic power. The episode connects these histories to present-day realities—from policing and border violence to maternal health disparities and anti-Black racism across the globe.
With Chisom Udeze, Solo
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Show Notes
In part 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names that Leo did the specific thing his predecessors refused to do, and notes that the bulls have still not been rescinded.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 colourism. 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.