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Racial Hierarchies Globalized: From Colonialism to Informal 
Empire 

Taryn Bates and Rubén Huerta 
Department of Sociology; Department of Latin American Studies 

California State University, Los Angeles 
 
ABSTRACT 
Modern society projects a belief that humanity is in a post-racial age 
(Goldberg 2016). However, many events of the 21st century across the 
world, such as Black Lives Matter and the genocide in Gaza, contradict 
this. What causes such a disjunction between the supposed post-racial 
belief, compared to the reality shown through the lived experience of 
continued domination? We posit this stems from issues of empires 
engineering control strategies and tactics since the emergence of modern 
civilization. The societal construction of stratification between oppressor 
and oppressed persists by perpetuating worldwide systemic subjugation 
via power-based hierarchies. Our macro theoretical framework seeks to 
explain that the process through which the system of racial inequality 
became globalized is still fueled by the evolution of formal empire into 
a more informal, and therefore less perceptible, version of dominance. 
Ideology based on a ‘rule of colonial difference’ (Chatterjee 1993) has 
created an insistent racial hierarchy stemming from modes of oppression 
through stratification by categories, with other pivotal variations of 
hierarchies around the globe continuing through the ages in various 
forms of class-type systems. The current actions of informal empire to 
maintain a ‘global apartheid’ (Besteman 2019) has been deeply 
successful under tactics of ‘liberal white supremacy’ (Beeman 2022), 
‘racial liberalism’ (Abrego and Villalpando 2021) and psychological 
warfare (Osgood 2008). This framework focuses on the U.S. as an 
imperial force through its legacy as a settler-colonial state and 
hegemonic world power. 
 
INTRODUCTION 

Through the ages, struggles for power and domination 
have plagued humankind. Those in power have persistently 
advanced the form through which hierarchical domination is 
executed, by enforcing stratification of differences through 
societal constructs, such as race, ethnicity, caste, and class. These 
societal constructs employ power to mask stratification, as if it is 
a natural phenomenon of humanity. However, stratification does 
not naturally occur but is a form of systemic exploitation, often 



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CALIFORNIA SOCIOLOGY FORUM VOL. 6 

using stigmatization to reinforce hierarchy by asserting the norms 
of dominant forces throughout the entire globe. The contention for 
this theoretical framework is that the practice currently known as 
globalization is a project engineered by empire and that this model 
is the focal point at which empire, informal empire, and race 
intersect. The expansion of hierarchies through globalization has 
two phases: the first involves colonialism, where the stratification 
of humans by race through a rule of difference (Chatterjee 1993) 
is central to the facilitation of empire; the second involves the 
ways more informal methods of imperialism utilize knowledge 
production to facilitate domination within a post-colonial 
globalized society including liberal white supremacy (Beeman 
2022), racial liberalism (Abrego and Villalpando 2021), and what 
we argue are forms of psychological warfare. Additionally, the 
sociological theory of world-systems (Wallerstein 1974) analyzes 
the way capitalism has had massive effects worldwide as it has 
become a global system. Both phases perpetuate social norms that 
maintain human-enforced roles of oppressor and oppressed, 
mainly through racial hierarchies that establish those who can 
approximate whiteness as superior while stigmatizing Black, 
Indigenous, and other people of color (BIPOC) as inferior.  

This theoretical framework will emphasize the empiric 
forces pioneered by the United States in the form of ideological 
globalization. The U.S. is an illustration of a state apparatus 
positioning itself as the main global power through domination 
techniques which have encoded racial hierarchies into standard 
societal practices. The U.S. empire was able to establish itself as 
the richest nation and world superpower within its first two 
hundred years of nationhood (Gonzalez 2022:378), a feat which 
no other nation, “whether in ancient or modern times, ever saw its 
influence spread so far or determined the thoughts and actions of 
so many people around the world as our nation does today.” This 
success was largely due to the endless American quest to realize 
“Manifest Destiny” (2022:378) through subjugating others, 
specifically targeting Indigenous and Latin Americans as well as 
enslaving Africans, and subsequently claiming as much territory 
as possible. As further noted by Juan Gonzalez (2022:378), “that 
expansion transformed the entire hemisphere into an economic 
satellite and sphere of influence of the United States.” Therefore, 



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CALIFORNIA SOCIOLOGY FORUM VOL. 6 

the U.S. empire is the primary perpetrator of world domination 
through white supremacist racial inequality and capitalism on a 
global scale.  

 
EVOLUTIONS OF EMPIRE: ENGINEERED HIERARCHIES 

The rise and decline of empires are important in 
understanding how structures of domination function. 
Historically, the origins of empire (Darwin 2008) coincided with 
the emergence of modern civilization and the state – or a society 
with organized political elements – where it continues to function 
essentially as people ruling over other people. Empires are defined 
by their hierarchical structure utilizing conquest to occupy foreign 
lands and reinforcing marked disparities between the occupied 
and occupiers. According to sociologist Julian Go (2020:83), 
“Empire, definitionally, requires the management, regulation, or 
even eradication of alterity; the imperial episteme was born from 
a near feverish obsession over civilizational, cultural, racial, 
ethnic, and sexual difference.” This stratification positions one 
society to dominate another as a separate entity. Sociologist 
George Steinmetz (2014) notes that the various evolutions of 
societal hierarchies in history are derivative forms of empire. As 
civilization evolved under more intricate social structures, the 
practice of empire developed further through the state as a more 
complex territorially expansive organization with more elaborate 
structures of power. Imperialism – the process of enforcing empire 
– is where changes in social structures are most visible. When 
looking at how these structures of domination evolve, a noticeable 
change emerges in the recounting of Western European history 
where previous imperial strategies of exercising control over 
societies transform into our modern understanding of colonialism. 
 
Class Society with Global Dimensions 

The two phases of globalization – empiric colonization 
and informal empire – both have a class structure as the basis for 
structural domination to facilitate other modes of control. 
Economic domination is just one aspect of empire (Heinrich 
2012:13), where colonialism is a specific form of control with 
historically distinct processes. The products of colonial labor took 
on global dimensions, with the first iteration involving the 



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continents of the Americas, Africa, and Europe. The Transatlantic 
slave trade was a major factor that gave rise to a global capitalist 
society in these continents, where labor production outside Europe 
was being transformed into capital and shipped back to Europe 
(2012:17). This imperial transformation of society into a global 
economy of empire came to be known as globalization.  

 
Globalization and the State 

Globalization can be defined as the expansion of capitalist 
society into the global production of capital in a world market and 
results from the constantly evolving imperial structures of 
domination. To better understand this form of empire, one must 
understand its relationship to the state. Steinmetz (2014:80) 
explains that empire “can be pictured as a solar system in which 
the colonized peripheries circulate around the metropolitan core,” 
and that these “planets in this imperial solar system also all 
possess states of their own.” In essence, the state acts 
simultaneously as both the mother country in which the resources 
and capital produced by labor production are sent, as well as the 
colonies themselves. These colonial states are either directly ruled 
by the metropole or are given autonomy to some extent as a form 
of indirect rule “by proxy through indigenous elites” (2014:81). 
The world-systems perspective created by sociologist Immanuel 
Wallerstein (1974) frames the “global periphery as being 
condemned to produce raw materials for processing by the core” 
(Steinmetz 2014:87). 
 
GLOBALIZATION PHASE 1: EMPIRE AND COLONIALISM 

The pretext for globalization is colonialism, a recent 
practice of formal empire. A defining feature of colonialism 
(Steinmetz 2014:79) “involves the arrogation of sovereignty by a 
conquering power.” Settler-colonialism is the unwarranted 
territorial conquest over an indigenous people by a conquering 
metropole followed by their presumptuous claim of supreme 
power in the new land (2014:79), as well as the transformation of 
the society through the implementation of power structures that 
situate the conquered population as inferior to their colonizers in 
“legal, administrative, social, cultural, and/or biological terms.” 
This practice was the driving force in the formation of what is now 



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known as the United States, through the seizure of land and 
subjugation of the Indigenous peoples. The era of formal colonial 
domination marked a paradigm shift in how empire functions, 
defined by the transformation of labor production and control into 
a global economy based on a system of converting resources and 
labor production into capital and the inception of the idea of race 
as a power structure. 

 
Rule of Difference 

Historian Partha Chatterjee (1993) developed the term a 
‘rule of difference’ to explain the construction (Steinmetz 
2014:80) where “All colonial states divide their subjects into 
different tribal or racial groups in an effort to enhance control, but 
at the same time the colonized are subsumed by the colonial state 
under a single, overarching category.” The rule of difference 
enforces superiority and inferiority of stratification by creating a 
hierarchy among people with resources unequally distributed. 
Colonizing practices used in the establishment of the U.S. 
included the aforementioned relegation of Indigenous people to 
reservations as well as the Transatlantic slave trade enslaving 
African people against their will as hard laborers. Such tactics of 
power and domination focus on conquering people by 
destabilizing sources of community support practices through 
redirecting reliance of needs being met solely under those who 
have seized control.  

 
The Invention of Race  

The stratification of humans through the societal 
construction of race was fueled by Eurocentric capitalism 
colonizing the globe to increase power domination. Sociologist 
Anibal Quijano (2021:533) states explicitly that one of the 
fundamental characteristics of globalization is “the social 
classification of the world’s population around the idea of race.” 
This shift produced a control axis (2000:533-534) that socially 
stratified people from power based on a purported biological 
factor of race intersecting with class-based labor roles. The use of 
the race concept created an immediately identifiable hierarchy 
with skin tone as a signifier of power. This proved an effective 
distinction (2000:535), allowing race to become “the fundamental 



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criterion for the distribution of the world population into ranks, 
places, and roles in the new society’s structure of power.” Since 
the conception of race began under the globalization force of 
capitalism, class-based labor roles were strongly linked to the 
visual appearance of skin tone due to the strength of the power 
domination occurring. This meant that even though race and class 
are not mutually dependent, the circumstances under which 
racism and capitalism developed did create a division of labor 
(2000:536) that systemically reinforced inferiority of race. As 
capitalism gained control of labor under globalization, the race-
class association was further strengthened through white 
colonizers establishing paid labor as exclusive to their own race 
while assigning colonized races unpaid labor (2000:539) in the 
forms of serfdom for Indigenous populations and slavery for 
Africans who were sold as part of the slave trade. 

 
Eurocentric Colonialism Erasure of Cultures 
The establishment of colonial capitalism served to strip 

diverse people groups with a multitude of cultural varieties into 
singular racial identities with strong negative associations. In the 
span of just three hundred years (2000:551-552), the “Aztecs, 
Mayas, Chimus, Aymaras, Incas, Chibchas, and so on. . . had 
become . . . Indians” while “the people forcefully brought from 
Africa as slaves: Ashantis, Yorubas, Zulus, Congos, Bacongos, 
and others . . . were Negroes or blacks.” By overriding unique 
cultural identities, the power of colonial empire set the standard 
for what was considered modern and what was considered 
outdated through a rule of difference. This has continued into the 
practices of informal empire, where the concept of the Global 
South reinforces Eurocentrism through setting a status quo of 
idealistic modernity, which stigmatizes any cultures that deviate 
from the achievement of capitalistic profits. This marked 
distinction between the valued behavior of whiteness and the 
stigmatization of supposed negatively deviant non-white cultures 
further serves the adjusted narrative of white supremacy.  

 
Approximation of Whiteness and Eugenics 
As time went on, descendants of what became known as 

mixed-race relationships were often able to approximate 



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whiteness due to the external presentation of their genetic 
phenotype. An example of this was in Latin America, through the 
documentation of mestizos during the colonial American period 
(Quijano 2000:536), most notably that “the more ‘whitened’ 
among the mestizos of Black women and Spanish or Portuguese 
had an opportunity to work. But they were late in legitimizing 
their new roles, since their mothers were slaves.” The existence of 
mestizos with genetic phenotypes creating a stratification of visual 
appearance from dark to light reinforced the errant belief of 
division by race being a natural phenomenon. This led to the 
pseudo-scientific practices of eugenics producing new excuses for 
the societal construction of race as a natural factor of genetic 
attributes, particularly to justify the subjugation of those with 
darker skin tones. In fact, in the U.S., the serfdom of Indigenous 
people and the enslavement of Africans (2000:550) were 
“deliberately established and organized as a commodity in order 
to produce goods for the world market and to serve the purposes 
and needs of capitalism.”  

Although colonial rule, and therefore formal empire, has 
technically ended, both the process of global capital production 
through globalization and stratification through racism have 
persisted in modern times under more informal modes of 
imperialism. Colonial empires were essentially dismantled upon 
reaching the twentieth century (Go 2020:87), but the “U.S. empire 
maintained colonial relations with Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin 
Islands, and Guam, for instance; and around the world, formal 
empire dissipated only to give way to new forms of imperial 
domination.” 
 
GLOBALIZATION PHASE 2: INFORMAL EMPIRE 

According to environmentalists and economists Fred 
Magdoff and John Bellamy Foster (2012:13), the process of 
decolonization was seen as inevitable for colonial empire. To 
adapt to such radically new conditions of a postcolonial globalized 
society, preparations were made for the transition from formal 
controls of empire to “informal imperialism,” or “imperialism 
without colonies.” This mode of empire (Steinmetz 2014:84-85) 
is referred to as “informal nonterritorial empire” in which 
“international control is exercised through military, economic, and 



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other means, but there is no conquest or permanent seizure of 
political sovereignty and therefore no possibility of systematically 
enforcing a rule of difference.” Informal empire is deemed such 
because this form uses more subtle methods and technologies as 
employed by a state-organization that wishes to dominate another, 
instead of utilizing outright physical occupation to replace local 
sovereign powers, effectively acting as a disguised form of 
dominance. The abundance of U.S. military bases globally is one 
example of subliminal dominance, posited as universal allyship 
but these bases can easily become a way for the U.S. government 
to subdue any activity deemed as uprisings. Additionally, in the 
pursuit of globalization, the U.S. government has utilized tools 
(Steinmetz 2014:85) such as: “manipulated market exchanges, 
extraterritoriality arrangements, black sites and extraordinary 
rendition, drone strikes, and unequal military alliances and status 
of forces agreements.”  
 
Controlling the Narrative through Capitalism 
 The U.S. empire has been the prime example of informal 
modes of control (Magdoff and Foster 2012:11) which is 
understood as the “continuous reality of economic expansion in 
modern times.” The economic domination within the world 
market and the changing landscape of the global economy was 
marked by the emergence of multinational corporations. Informal 
imperialism then functions (2012:15) as not only occurring 
“through the policies of states but also through the actions of 
corporations and the mechanisms of trade finance and 
investment.” This involved class structures both within countries 
of the periphery (Prebisch 1950) and the core imperial metropoles 
dominating them. These actions of multinational corporations 
(Magdoff and Foster 2012:15) included “the nurturing of local 
collaborators or comprador elements in the dependent societies.” 
The installation of puppet regime dictatorships within these 
peripheral countries rich in resources and cheap labor was done so 
to secure imperial interests of capital accumulation.  
 

Freedom and the American Dream 
Capitalism ignores societal needs in favor of being profit-

oriented (Heinrich 2004:18), which creates major power 



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differentials among citizens, pointing to the informal empiric 
practices of enforced hierarchy. This is an example of control by 
manipulation: a subtle method that seeks to make individuals 
comply with domination through non-coercive means. Once the 
emancipation of Americans who were enslaved was successful 
(Quijano 2000:567), “freedom was not a transformation of labor 
relations, but a reason to substitute slaves with immigrant workers 
from other countries.” This shift lures immigrants to the U.S. 
through the attractive ideal of achieving economic and familial 
freedom via the ‘American Dream’ based on the social belief that 
hard work leads to upward mobilization. The U.S. investment in 
capitalism has manufactured the narrative that one can pull 
themselves up by their bootstraps to achieve wealth and power. 
However, this American Dream is not universally accessible or 
genuinely attainable due to the maintained rule of difference 
through systemic racism. A major “problem with the American 
Dream,” as it plays out in reality (Abdurraqib 2022:184), “is that 
it manifests itself in different times and places and ways for 
different people, depending on any number of identity factors.” 
White supremacist practices baked into the inception of the U.S. 
only serve to reinforce the inequality of power domination through 
the informal imperial practice of approximation to whiteness.  

The true nature of coercion occurring under capitalism in 
the form of workforce reliance is disguised by those in power: 

The obscene transfers of wealth over the past 
forty years from … bottom to a privileged few at 
the top – and from much of the Global South to 
financial elites in the West – were all excused as 
the natural evolution of the market, when, in fact, 
they are products of unparalleled greed by those 
who dominate and direct the market. (Gonzalez 
2022:382) 

The stratification maintained by capitalists owning the means of 
production prevents workers from truly being in control of their 
own survival. Instead, workers are manipulated into accepting that 
alienation of the self from one’s work production is a norm within 
society, causing most to believe that the low wages paid are the 
true worth of their labor. Stratification of wages is even more 
pronounced through the white supremacist enforcement of racial 



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domination further devaluing those who cannot approximate 
whiteness. Even the U.S. empire outsourcing work to other 
countries under the supposed efficiency of cost savings is an 
exploitative labor practice (Benjamin 2019:29) that paradoxically 
reinforces “indispensable disposability of those whose labor 
enables innovation . . . [failing] to account for the social costs of 
a technology in which global forms of racism, caste, class, sex, 
and gender exploitation are the nuts and bolts of development.”  
 

Western Exceptionalism and Liberal White Supremacy 
The concept of ‘Western exceptionalism’ is a repeated 

rhetoric the U.S. government has utilized to further its covert 
empire, attempting to disguise systemic practices of white 
supremacy that continue to employ a rule of difference as a means 
of unquestioned control through repeatedly asserting the standard 
of freedom. Yet, the supposed free market that the U.S. promises 
through capitalism is controlled by exploitive elements that 
employ a modern form of stratified subjugation. The explicit 
forms of racial hierarchy established during colonial rule became 
unprofitable as racism began to be formally recognized, to a 
certain extent, due to evolving social mores. Race began to 
function through more indirect forms of empire within a new set 
of ideas such as ‘liberal white supremacy’ (Beeman 2022). This 
concept refers to the belief that the ideas and institutionalization 
of freedom, human rights, and democracy originate in Western 
cultures and philosophies and suggests a moral superiority of 
Western societies. The latter part of this idea implies that the 
system of government based on these ideas and institutions can 
self-correct and self-perfect itself. In other words, it is the idea of 
‘a few bad apples’ within a system of government as opposed to 
the reality where governments are perpetuating institutionalized 
structures of control such as racism.  

 
Racial Liberalism and Neoliberal Multiculturalism 
As the Cold War began after World War II, the U.S. 

government utilized its recognition and condemnation of racism 
to justify informal expansion of its empire. Latin American 
Studies scholars Leisy Abrego and Alejandro Villalpando 
(2021:51) refer to this period of U.S. government policy as ‘racial 



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liberalism,’ in which the goal was to “mask racialized inequities 
by promoting the idea of an ‘abstract equality’ predicated on 
market-driven individualism and the promise of inclusion into the 
national project.” Racialized individuals have had to adapt to 
capitalist and individualistic modes of thinking and production as 
a prerequisite for being formally considered full citizens in the 
U.S. Race was still an essential factor in facilitating class 
structures, although class dimensions are less readily perceivable, 
while capitalism evolved into its contemporary framework of 
neoliberalism. The end of the Cold War marked another necessity 
for empire to adapt its informal modes of control to a globalized 
society without the perceived global threat that communism 
assumed. With communism considered under control, one method 
informal imperialism utilized to maintain its power structures was 
to combine racial liberalism and neoliberalism into what scholar 
Jodi Melamed established in 2006 as the model of ‘neoliberal 
multiculturalism.’ This was due to the U.S. government no “longer 
relying on an abstract sense of equality across race, the 
transnational capitalist regime [U.S. informal empire] now 
required nation-states, businesses, and key social institutions to 
include multiculturalism as a policy goal” (2021:52). The idea of 
multiculturalism here refers to a “generalized mainstream 
understanding that progress requires a (usually superficial) 
centering of race,” but only so far as to acknowledge and celebrate 
the cultures of BIPOC if they are willing to adapt to capitalist and 
individualistic modes of labor production. Such initiatives of 
multiculturalism as a matter of policy by the U.S. government 
revolved around ideas of diversity as well as using metrics to 
measure one’s social status outside of race based on one’s work 
performance. The fallacy, however, is that because the power 
structures of race did not end with colonialism but instead proved 
more durable and merely adapted to the social mores of the 
environment, an imbalance of power still existed in these 
neoliberal modes of social control. The goal of neoliberal 
multiculturalism was to obscure “the ways global capitalist 
expansion in fact exacerbates and amplifies racialized inequity, 
the way it reproduces precarity and mobility for racialized groups” 
(2021:52). A historical example of this was in Central America, 
where, for the first time, Indigenous peoples and cultures were 



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formally recognized by their respective governments as a matter 
of policy. The end of civil wars in Central America was marked 
by neoliberal multiculturalism through calls for peace and 
nationwide initiatives to respect and celebrate historically 
oppressed groups, including Indigenous and Black Central 
Americans. These initiatives failed to address the structural 
imbalances of power that were facilitating the struggles of these 
groups, as is the nature of this ideology (2021:52), to promote 
“cultural acceptance of Indigenous and other racialized 
communities while materially advancing their political and 
economic marginalization.” This ideology, as a matter of policy, 
can also be considered a form of psychological warfare. 

 
Psychological Warfare 

 The strategy of psychological warfare utilizes globalized 
interactions, which are colonial in origin, to still retain the same 
imbalance of power between post-colonial third-world countries 
and “imperial centers” (Magdoff and Foster 2012:18). The origins 
of psychological warfare as a matter of policy for U.S. empire 
came about during President Eisenhower’s administration at the 
beginning of the Cold War. Eisenhower’s understanding of the 
success of psychological warfare as a military tactic during World 
War II (Osgood 2008:47) led him to conclude that “the battle for 
hearts and minds was one of the most critical dimensions of the 
Cold War struggle.” This is best understood within a globalized 
society (Abrego and Villalpando 2021:52) as a “fight to secure the 
United States’ ability to continue to extract wealth 
transnationally.” Alongside this new strategy of establishing and 
maintaining global hegemony came the necessity of implementing 
the idea of plausible deniability that Eisenhower and other 
succeeding administrations would only internally acknowledge 
during and after the Cold War. Magdoff and Foster (2012:9) 
contend that “the existence of an American empire is no secret. It 
is widely, even universally, recognized in most parts of the world, 
though traditionally denied by the powers that be in the United 
States.” This plausible deniability, or formal denial of existence, 
implies the tactic of control through psychological warfare by 
manipulating peoples’ understanding of how a globalized 



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postcolonial society functions by obfuscating any discussion of 
empires existing after the period of decolonization.  
 

Utilization of Globalization for Knowledge Production 
 One effective method of psychological warfare was 
knowledge production. During the Cold War, the U.S. empire 
utilized knowledge production as a technology of control. The 
goal of knowledge production as psychological warfare was to 
maintain control of a country’s political, cultural, and economic 
landscape within the U.S. sphere of influence to ensure U.S. 
interests in that country. This strategy employs an informal and 
covert network (Simpson 1996:60) involving U.S. intelligence 
agencies, philanthropic organizations, and university programs. 
U.S. scholars are sent to universities in countries of the Global 
South to teach the local scholars the methods of particular 
programs, such as social sciences and communication studies, to 
inject Western capitalist modes of thinking into the academia of 
these universities. Knowledge production utilized the mechanisms 
of globalization channeled through already established global 
communication networks originating during the era of formal 
empire. One of the most prominent historical examples of this 
network was of the Ford Foundation in Indonesia (Parmar 
2014:148), where “Ford intervened in and intellectually 
penetrated Indonesia principally because of its economic 
resources and strategic position as well as its political-ideological 
attraction to communism and socialism and desire to carve out a 
specifically Indonesian path to development.”  

Knowledge production as utilizing information to 
promote a particular interest was also conducted in developing 
countries by U.S. intelligence agencies through covert and overt 
propaganda campaigns utilizing films, images, and leaflets, 
amongst other tactics. In this case it promoted Western capitalist 
values while demonizing communist and socialist ideals in 
peripheral countries the U.S. empire deemed particularly 
vulnerable to communist influence. A historical example of this is 
when the U.S. Information Agency carried out propaganda 
campaigns where U.S. anti-communist operations were most 
prominent in Southeast Asia “to reach rural areas where 
communications were poor, trucks labeled ‘USIS’ brought 



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loudspeakers, film projectors, and movie screens to show 
propaganda films to villagers” and “teams of operatives traveled 
by boats and jeeps to bring leaflets, posters, magazines, and books 
to the countryside” (Osgood 2008:120-121). 
 
CONCLUSION  
 Though it has morphed in appearance over the ages, the 
societal construction of empire persists in its present form through 
projects of stratification and globalization continuing to engineer 
structures of power. Historically, stratification played a crucial 
role in the first phase of globalization by colonialism perpetuating 
empire through a rule of difference allowing dynamics of control 
to stem from the Eurocentric invention of race. A self-sustaining 
system of domination spread worldwide by equating power access 
with approximation to whiteness through the visible marker of 
skin tone. As modernization forced formal empire to adapt the 
way it manifested, informal empire ushered in the second phase 
of globalization. The U.S. used capitalism and systemic racism to 
establish a narrative of Western exceptionalism by way of liberal 
white supremacy, racial liberalism, neoliberal multiculturalism, 
and psychological warfare. All of these forms of propaganda 
supporting the U.S. government on its rise to the forefront of 
global power fuel the social norms calculated to maintain roles of 
oppressor and oppressed at global, national, and even subnational 
scales. Psychological warfare was a key to convincing the world 
that society had moved beyond empire and colonization into a 
supposedly more advanced, post-racial global civilization.  
 

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Taryn Bates (She/Her) enrolled during the Fall 2023 semester in the cross-
listed course Knowledge, Power, Community, and University under 
sociology professor Wai Kit Choi, PhD., who prompted this piece. Joining 
forces with classmate Rubén, the pair co-wrote a piece for publication in 
CSF and to present with a panel at Cal State LA’s 9th Annual Social Theory 
Symposium. 
 
 
Rubén Huerta (He/Him/El) is graduating in 2024 with a B.A. in Latin 
American Studies from Cal State LA and is proud to have made the Dean’s 
List for Fall 2023 under the College of Natural and Social Sciences. For the 
Spring 2024 semester, he has taken part in playing intramural soccer. His 
other passions include composing original tracks as a music producer which 
he curates into his DJ sets. In Fall 2023, the LAS Department advised Rubén 
to enroll in Dr. Wai Kit Choi’s cross-listed course Knowledge, Power, 
Community, and University. In preparation for both publication in CSF and 
panel at Cal State LA’s 9th Annual Social Theory Symposium, he worked 
alongside Taryn to synthesize their perspectives into a joint theoretical 
framework. 


	Racial Hierarchies Globalized: From Colonialism to Informal Empire - Taryn Bates and Rubén Huerta



