Mapping Race: Historicizing the History of the Color-Line

This study examines scholarship about the global color‐line. It unfolds in two sections. The first traces how understandings of race and racism were encoded within university environments in the mid‐twentieth century. The second shows how this epistemology influenced early academic comparisons of the United States and South Africa in the 1980s and why the literature diversified in the post‐apartheid era.