develop me :Tapiwa Gomo ISSUES of race and discrimination are rearing their ugly head at a critical time in our history. They re-emerge when supremacism and protectionism are rife, when the world is confronted by the COVID-19 pandemic and shrinking economies with some plunging into depression. All these factors are converging to invoke identity consciousness in relation to racial equality. This realisation is brought to the fore by an invertible competition for dwindling opportunities. Tackling racism is not as easy as defining it or advocacy efforts to address it. This is simply because its definitions are based on false classification of people by their complexion and not based on accurate biological or scientific facts. This is also because the real hidden racial distinction people make are basically political constructs — generated by people who allocate themselves power and superiority over others based purportedly on physical outlooks. The current concept of race as the world understands it today was established as a mode of classifying human beings with the purpose of giving power to white people and to legitimise their dominance over other races. The first stage of racism is de-humanising other races. During the reformation era in the 16th and 17th centuries, the dominant question among Christian organisations was whether dark people such as Africans and Indians had a soul to qualify and classify them as humans. This questioning did not arise out of scientific or biological inquiry but social prejudice which could not accept other races as human because they feared doing so would mean competition for power, space and opportunities. History tells us the Catholics in America were among the first Christian organisations to admit that dark people had souls and but insisting that dark people were not yet equal to the white race, therefore, required domestication. It was, partly, religion that supplied the narratives that legitimised racism. Words and phrases such as pagan, dark continent and others provided the justification for colonisation, external intervention and domestication — that later manifested into repentance — including the widespread social change and cultural reorientation global thrust aimed at making everyone behave like white people. That combined with the rise of Industrial revolution which spawned colonisation in search of raw materials reinforced and maintained that racial hierarchy where white people are now seen as superior over other races without acknowledging the damage and impact their historical and current oppressive tendencies has on other races. That hierarchy is now embedded, institutionalised and accepted in all global norms and practices that define today’s world. As long as the global economic status quo is accepted as given without analysing and exposing its hidden ills and how it has perpetually sustained racism, there is no amount of protest that will overturn the racial imbalances in the immediate future. The current global economic structure is an outcome of historical abuse