Earlier historical permutations of racialization are addressed by Amon Saba Saakana in Conceptualizing colour representation in antiquity: from Kmt and the Greco-Roman world to the Middle Ages. Here, the research reveals that Kemites defined themselves in their iconography through a range of representations, not limited to the dichotomous blackness and whiteness paradigms which came to dominate modern forms of racism. Instead, reddish-brown seemed to dominate and, at the same time, ' $[f]$ or the Kemites, the colour black expressed goodness, fertility and beauty, and the colour red related to the desert and the foreigner. White represented spiritual purity, not ethnic purity; for the purpose of depicting clothing, it was the colour which best represented transparency'. Capturing a later historical period, Jesse Benjamin's North Africa and the origins of epistemic blackness actually pinpoints the origins of the meanings of race and blackness in and around Northern Africa and continuing into the present. Significantly, for Benjamin, 'categories of blackness clearly already existed in Jewish, Muslim, and Christian cultural, theological and juridical thinking, well before the Atlantic passage. However, blackness was not yet regularized as having negative connotations, though it may have been trending in that direction in some of the Mediterranean regions; nor was blackness a fixed category with a stable meaning or definite geographic ascription'.  
This brings us then to what happened in the Americas following transatlantic slavery. Agustín Laó-Montes, in What's in a name? Complications of blackness and Afrodescendant definitions in Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, uses a category he refers to as 'ethnic-racial' to 'conceptualize the entanglement of the cultural and phenotypical dimensions of racial classifications and stratifications', and hence the 'necessary, yet complex, relationship between race and ethnicity as historical categories and as markers of identity and difference'.