The research distinguishes carefully between individual prejudice and structural racism, drawing on work by psychologists and sociologists who have mapped how discrimination becomes embedded in institutions. Individual prejudice typically occurs face to face, through microaggressions, hate speech or overt hostility. Structural racism, by contrast, is a web of interconnected elements embedded in legislation, policies and institutional practices that perpetually disadvantage racial minorities, even when individuals working within those systems hold no personal racist beliefs. The study cites evidence that structural racism manifests notoriously in housing, employment and the justice system, and it argues that supremacist attitudes also hide behind distancing strategies such as claims of color-blindness, whereby many white people detach themselves from responsibility and avoid discussing racism altogether. Philosopher Charles Mills describes this as a self-shielding tactic, in which pretending not to know functions as a channel that dismisses the oppressive realities of white supremacism.

Recent survey data underscore the scale of the gap between perception and reality. A 2025 Pew Research Centre survey of more than 5,000 respondents in the United States found that optimism about racial reform, which stood at 52 percent of US adults after the murder of George Floyd in 2020, had dwindled to 27 percent by 2025. Among Black respondents, 67 percent believed that meaningful reform remained a pipe dream. Ironically, 58 percent of white Americans believed racial equality had been restored. The study also points to a Gallup finding that 64 percent of US citizens consider racism against Black people to be widespread, and to research by the German Centre for Integration and Migration, which found in 2022 that 90 percent of respondents in Germany believed racism existed there. United Nations expert reports on the United Kingdom have concluded that discrimination against people of African descent is structural, institutional and systemic, while the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights has reported that four out of ten Black people in Europe are stopped by police allegedly because of their skin color.

Central to the study is a genealogy of how racial ideology has adapted across economic eras, from mercantilism to industrial capitalism, imperialism and contemporary neoliberal globalization. Race, the author emphasizes, has no biological cogency: humans share roughly 99 percent of their DNA, and modern scholarship treats racial categories as political inventions created to grant power to white people and legitimize the subjugation of people of color. Racial hierarchies emerged historically around the fifteenth century and gained momentum alongside the transatlantic slave trade, colonial expansion and capitalist accumulation. The study documents how religion, culture, pseudo-science and economics were each mobilized to justify racial classification, from cherry-picked Christian doctrines that framed Black people as a cursed race, to Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The White Man’s Burden,’ to distortions of Darwinian evolution that recast imperial domination as ‘survival of the fittest.’ Legal instruments such as the Jim Crow laws and South Africa’s apartheid pass laws then entrenched segregation long after slavery’s formal abolition.

One of the study’s most detailed case studies concerns education and academic publishing, arenas the author describes as supposed champions of open inquiry that have themselves been captured by supremacist gatekeeping. Article 26 of the Universal Declaration proclaims that education shall strengthen respect for human rights and promote tolerance and friendship among racial groups, yet the study argues that Western curricula continue to elevate whiteness at the expense of other races, teaching slavery and colonialism in sanitized versions while concealing colonial atrocities such as German genocide in Namibia and British torture of Kenyan freedom fighters. In publishing, the author describes subtle gatekeeping coded in routine rejection reasons, including demands to tone down criticism of imperialism, reduce word counts that would otherwise cut off criticism, or conform to Western-prescribed methodology. Empirical studies corroborate the pattern: research on geoscience found that only about 30 percent of papers on African topics were written by African authors, while studies during the COVID-19 pandemic and in global oncology documented persistent under-representation of sub-Saharan African authorship.

The study links these knowledge hierarchies to global capitalism, arguing that supremacism sustains a Western hegemonic system in which might is treated as right. Through trade ploys described as colonial-based commodity racism, including control of plants and seeds, and through raced markets, capitalism is said to manufacture poverty in the Global South while marginalizing it in economic relations. The author invokes Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics, in which radical disparities in wealth distribution are purposely reproduced as small doses of death in the daily lives of subaltern populations. Trade frameworks such as the African Growth and Opportunity Act are criticized for tying market access to US-defined benchmarks of liberal governance, and the funding dependence of African institutions, with the African Union receiving nearly 70 percent of its operational funding from Europe, is presented as a mechanism of quiet capture that erodes institutional independence.

International human rights law offers little shelter from these dynamics, the study finds, because laws enacted in good faith are subverted by institutional practice. The United Kingdom’s Equality Act 2010 and the Treaty of Lisbon, which made the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union legally binding, are cited as milestone legislation that nonetheless coexists with pervasive, well-documented racism. The now-defunct Rwanda Asylum Plan, struck down by four separate courts as a breach of the UK’s international treaty obligations, is presented as an example of how governments persist with policies widely denounced as racist even after legal defeat. The paradox, the author argues, is devastating for the credibility of universal rights: it seems implausible that universal rights can be attained in environments that condone supremacism, prejudice and racial stereotyping, and many in the Global South consequently view the human rights agenda as an extension of disguised colonialism.

The study also engages critically with psychological theories of racism’s origins, including Frances Welsing’s Cress theory of color-confrontation, which posits that white supremacy is driven by a fear of genetic annihilation in a world where most people are non-white. The author reviews objections from scholars such as Bernard De Montellano, who found the albinism claim scientifically baseless, and from critics who argue the theory distracts from the political economy of racism, exemplified by historian Barbara Fields’s warning that slavery’s chief business was the production of cotton, sugar, rice and tobacco rather than white supremacy. The study concludes that the real drivers of supremacism are historical capitalist economic factors, profit accumulation through cheap labor and the fear of losing unearned imperial and neocolonial privileges, rather than genetics.

Resistance, the study insists, must come from both sides of the racial divide, because complicity sustains the system. Philosopher Iris Marion Young’s social connection model holds that people are responsible for structural discrimination by virtue of participating in the institutions they condemn, through employment, volunteering or funding. The author cites Steve Biko’s call for Black people to reclaim agency and Nelson Mandela’s reminder that no one is born hating another person because of the color of their skin, since racism is a taught behavior. At the same time, the study argues that white complicity persists through color-blindness, white fragility and tokenism, the perfunctory hiring of minority members to create a false impression of inclusiveness while denying them real influence over policy. Emerging counter-currents, including South-South cooperation through BRICS and the decolonial drive toward delinking from the colonial matrix, are flagged as signs that the cycle of coloniality may be nearing its end.

The study’s conclusion is blunt: universal human rights and global justice cannot be attained when certain groups believe themselves above the structures of international governance, and the greatest threat to international peace and security may not be armed conflict but white supremacism itself, which fuels conflict through capitalism’s profit-maximizing contempt for African lives. Unless there is a proactive policy shift, the author warns, polarization between the West and Africa will deepen, making sustainable global security harder to achieve. Invoking an African proverb that when you shoot a zebra in the black stripe, the white stripe dies too, the study frames racism as a self-defeating scheme in a world where all human beings are enmeshed in the same social fabric, sharing 99 percent of their DNA and, by the terms of every major human rights covenant, the same equal and inalienable rights.

Subject of Research: How white supremacism undermines the universal human rights agenda through structural racism and global capitalism

Article Title: How white supremacy undermines the universal human rights agenda

Article References: Simuziya, N. J. (2026). How white supremacy undermines the universal human rights agenda. Discover Global Society, 4(1), Article 233. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44282-026-00544-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44282-026-00544-x

Keywords: white supremacy, human rights, UN Charter, structural racism, capitalism, Global South, colonialism, academic publishing, racial discrimination, institutional racism, necropolitics, decoloniality

Milbank begins from what he calls capitalism’s “paradoxical oscillation between stasis and flow.” The modern market economy, he writes, must constantly increase its static accumulation of wealth while simultaneously risking that accumulation through continuous circulation. He illustrates this with two contrasting images: the privileged economic enclave such as the City of London, a bounded physical site where the normal writ of the state scarcely runs, and the ceaseless day-and-night circulation of global transport, both real and virtual. Flows require hubs, but flows alone secure the power and permanence of the hubs—much as medieval castles housed troops, yet depended on those troops’ forays for their own security.

From this tension the paper derives a threefold account of what capital consists in. First is the “geographic” ownership of terrain and equipment, which in modernity has become more absolute because it is decoupled from the relationships between people that once delimited ownership through conditional obligation. Second is the “mathematical” ownership of money in abstracted forms such as shares and dividends. Third—and most polemically—is what Milbank describes as the effective ownership of people. Although slavery has been commuted into wage and salary dependency supplemented by welfare, he argues that for the vast majority who own few assets, a mode of semi-serfdom persists: people have been “capitalised,” treated as economic resources rather than as spiritual creatures or citizens, stored in precariously owned housing and constantly retrained and redeployed lest they escape into what he calls enclaves of neo-primitive anarchy.

The paper’s central theoretical move comes in its treatment of money. Against the classical picture—shared, Milbank argues, even by Marx—of money as a neutral mirror or representation of exchange value generated by labour, he aligns himself with a minority tradition in the sociological and Keynesian camps, drawing on eighteenth-century figures such as George Berkeley and Sir James Steuart and on modern writers including Philip Grierson and Geoffrey Ingham. On this “unit of account” view, money is before all else the attribution of an abstract, free-floating quantity of number to people: a register of credit and debt relationships, and therefore of unequal power and ultimately coercion. This tradition is sometimes called the “Cambridge” theory of money in the paper.

It is this credit–debt register, Milbank contends, that makes financialisation primary rather than secondary to capitalism. The conversion of people into capital is not only a matter of exploiting their labour or their consumer desires; it is the reduction of persons to docketed numbers standing in relation to finance capital as borrowers and lenders, to the state as taxpayers, and to landed capital as rent payers—a nexus in which financial and landed capital secure each other, and whose instability was exposed by the 2008 financial crash. Historically, he argues, the decisive “shift at the top” was not the creation of a wage-earning class at the bottom, which was only partial in early modern England and in proto-factory islands of Italy and the Netherlands, but the emergence from around 1300 onwards—and at a new pitch in eighteenth-century Britain around the Bank of England—of a complex relationship between extended state debt, private banks and the tax-paying landed class. Banks began to create money out of nothing through speculative loans backed by central banks and Crown debt, which in turn was underwritten by the tax returns that such speculative investment itself generated.

On this reading, contemporary phenomena that look like capitalist decline are nothing of the sort. Milbank invokes Robert Brenner and others on slowing profits, rentiership and the shift to services, but insists that capitalism has never been interested in physical wealth, innovation or even profit in isolation from class domination. A quasi-feudal, “vectoral” extraction of surplus information is not an anomaly but the revelation of capitalism’s financial core, which from its English Whig outset was about maintaining the power of a political, banking and landed elite. He even suggests this reframes populism: rather than an aberration beside class struggle, populism is the assertion of petty producers and workers against elite financiers, as with the Trump constituency in the United States or the Peronist regime in Argentina, undone by capital flight and consequent inflation.

Yet the paper does not rest in this grim diagnosis. Milbank notes that the same German sociologists and Cambridge theorists who established money’s debt-based origins—Georg Simmel, Max Weber, Grierson, Ingham—still, in his view, share one classical assumption: that earlier tribal economies were barter economies. Against this he appeals to Marcel Mauss’s account of gift-exchange, in which economic exchange is also a symbolic mutual binding, carrying a triple obligation to give, receive and give again. Even David Graeber, who invoked the gift, is criticised for reducing it to spontaneous communist sharing and treating the “indebted” dimension of gift-exchange—the owing of a counter-gift—as an anachronistic economistic projection on Mauss’s part, when Milbank takes that dimension to be empirically well attested and inseparable from gift-exchange’s ritual symbolism.

Reading money through the gift allows the paper to mediate the old debate between money as commodity and money as unit of account. Unlike a bartered object, a gift is at once a thing, a value, and a participatory stand-in for the giver—quasi-personal, as persons themselves can be exchanged as gifts in marriage. Very early token money, in Mauss’s account, arose in symbolic and religious contexts and was both a representative commodity and a recorder of social credit and debt, but debt in that context was largely positive and binding. Drawing on Lewis Hyde, Milbank observes that a gift creates a relationship one did not already have and increases the giver’s power—strangely akin to a modern bank inventing money through credit it does not really possess. Token gifts were even “usurious” in an old sense: through circulation a gift’s value increased, part of which returned to the original giver, though the increase could itself be passed on further. In Latin, usura long meant precisely this positive increase of things through use—the barley seed that grows into a bushel, the ancestral ring that acquires meaning. Modern usury, by contrast, lets the increase accrue only through foreclosure and repossession.

This yields the paper’s most striking reinterpretation: modern financialised capitalism is a parody of gift-exchange, not an escape from it. Mauss’s “total social fact”—the inescapable obligation of reciprocity—cannot be exited, so late capitalism remains within it, distorted. Its reduction of money to pure credit returns money, perversely, to direct power relations between people; its insertion of debt into every corner of life binds persons together, however etiolatedly; and its fiat money, dependent wholly on trust, promotes once more the truth that human beings endlessly create meanings and things out of nothing. Even paying a restaurant bill, Milbank suggests, is a constrained counter-gift, and the possibility of general defaulting reveals an element of free spontaneity in everyday consent.

From here the paper turns to policy and what Milbank calls the choice between the “infinite line” and the “infinite spiral.” The infinite line is the straight, asymmetrical accumulation of abstract capital by a few; the spiral is infinitisation bent back into regional, national or local circuits of mutual support, where gain is endlessly passed on under a mutual-insurance principle and debt guarantees a promised reversal into credit. Examples he offers include strictly local currencies not exchangeable beyond certain limits, and rethought banks and building societies in which borrowing is reconceived as taking shares in ventures, with the bank sharing in the risk of lending—a mode of non-usurious investment. He cites precedents ranging from leaving the gold standard, which enabled the New Deal and the Keynesian era, to mutual-protective arrangements like Bretton Woods. Conversely, he argues that the infinite line must police its own limits—the gold standard, then the dollar-gold link, then the dollar, euro and yen, and today international bankers’ demands for fiscal prudence—to prevent illegitimate exits into the spiral. He points to the rapid fall of British Prime Minister Liz Truss as a dramatic illustration of finance’s power over democratic economic choices, and to more than five thousand special economic zones worldwide, joined by deregulating states such as Javier Milei’s Argentina and Donald Trump’s America, as castellated enclaves hollowing out the national “spirals.”

The limitations of the piece are evident and, in a sense, acknowledged: it is a philosophical and historical essay, not an empirical study, and its prescriptions are sketched rather than modelled. Milbank concedes there is no inevitable good synthesis; things can grow darker, with land rendered uninhabitable and human capacities—knowing, willing, being able, in the triad he borrows from Tommaso Campanella—eroded. He also notes that a genuinely reforming British government would likely have to compromise with current global financial circumstances. The proposed “new sort of socio-political action” is candidly described as yet to be invented.

Still, the implications are considerable. If money’s anarchic, created quality can be interfused with social, ethical and religious value in spiralling, gift-exchanging forms, then the contemporary dominance of debtor–creditor relations unmoored from production might be reinfused with generosity, with all lending becoming real investment in physical, cultural and personal processes. Milbank ends on a deliberately expansive note: ours is not, as many suppose, an age of rediscovered limits but of the infinitely open—renewable energy replacing exhaustible fuels, money freed from gold—and this infinity offers either a Faustian power for elites, as Goethe’s Faust Part Two intimated through the creation of paper money, or an “infinite-finite spiral” of reciprocal recognition and encouragement. His final claim is that only such a spiral, not the infinite line of consolidation and extraction, can be forever sustainable—an argument likely to provoke economists, though one grounded, unusually, in theology, gift theory and the long history of money itself.