European descendants in South Africa, the United States, and Brazil established early legacies of racial discrimination against African descendants, despite dramatic differences in population mix and mixing. Slavery in all three countries reinforced pervasive images of inequality. By the time slavery ended, such discrimination was often buttressed by pseudo-science and encoded in varying forms of legislation, evident even in Brazil, where later interpretations of Portuguese rule, Catholicism, slavery, and miscegenation were purposefully shaped to deny this inheritance and to project an image of racial tolerance. But Brazil's self-image as an exception to the discourse, culture, and practice of racial discrimination was more creative than historical.

Historical legacies of discrimination were not automatically or thoughtlessly brought forward into the modern era. All three countries came to junctures at which the preexisting social order and relations between blacks and whites had to be consciously reconfigured. Of course, the resolution of race relations would not be fully decided at any single moment, and was instead elaborated over decades of conflict, political and economic competition, and varying policies. But the establishment of the post-abolition, formally unified nation-state in all three countries did crystallize the issue of race relations, forcing decisions that set the course of those relations for generations.

In South Africa and the United States, the conflict-ridden process of nation-state consolidation set the terms of official racial domination.