The murder of George Floyd at the hands of Minnesota police officers in June 2020 revealed the painful persistence of systems of racial injustice not just in the United States, but across the Western world. This lecture will trace the evolution of race and racism as major structural forces in US and British history from the rise of the transatlantic slave trade to the current moment. The aim is to show that race was anything but a static cultural construct invented to oppress human beings based on phenotypic markers such as skin color, hair texture or eye shape. Rather, taking the long view will allow us to comprehend that race and racism are powerful yet remarkably malleable social fictions and political ideologies that have time and again managed to adapt to the shifting demands of various nationalist and imperialist regimes. To be sure, such regimes have always met resistance, starting with early slave rebellions and the abolitionists of the late-eighteenth and early- nineteenth centuries to today’s Black Lives Matter activists. This lecture will contextualize and historicize these movements as well.