In The Global Journey of Racism, Michelle Christian provides a unified narrative of how the world's racial hierarchies came to be. Christian's story begins before the Ku Klux Klan, Nazi Germany, and South African Apartheid, tracing the historical lineage of white supremacy to the expansion of western, European empire. She uncovers the vast network of legal, political, economic, and social mechanisms—most potently, enslavement—that made up the original design for racialized knowledge, capitalist systems, and colonial management. Contemporary manifestations of this design may have new rhythms, beats, and faces, but they are all rooted in the pre-modern hierarchy of global white supremacy and global anti-Blackness.

Christian brings imperial history into conversation with the present, and places the racial mechanisms at work in distinct nations alongside each other, advancing a novel analysis of the global racial system. In doing so, she responds to scholarship on race and racism that emphasizes cultural specificity, and asserts the dominance of a modern world that, despite appeals to the contrary, remains brazenly, and without question, racist.