PS: Political Science & Politics
The Afro-Asiatic Resilience to the Global Color Line: Revisiting Du Bois and Pearson in the Context of BRICS and the Alliance of Sahel States
2025-07-25
In the complex landscape of early twenty-first-century geopolitics, racial ideologies and the concept of the “color line” continue to shape international relations. Charles Henry Pearson, in his seminal work National Life and Character: A Forecast (1893), introduced the idea of “unchangeable limits of the higher races,” theorizing that European “higher races” are bound by natural and climatic constraints that prevent them from fully dominating regions populated by “lower races,” such as Africans, Chinese, Indians, and Indigenous peoples. Pearson predicted that these lower races would eventually outnumber and challenge European dominance, reflecting a deterministic view of global racial dynamics.