# Sankofa/resistance: the persistence of blackness and Islam as definitive of Otherness  
These conflicts, proliferating in almost all countries as the nation-State structure itself wavers and is challenged (as in the Arab Spring and African Spring movements), continue to call into question the efficacy and legitimacy of the West as a concept. The resulting population transfers, coupled with  
historically unprecedented extremes of inequality and impoverishment, and the broader issue of African and Asian refugees and migratory displacements into Europe that have undeniably reached full-blown crisis levels for the world system all reveal the continued centrality and importance of these regions as border zones, and as primary sites of relational identity formation for white imperial subjects in various locations and for the whole Western order writ large. This region's ancient and illustrious Judeo-Islamic tradition remains largely suppressed, almost tacitly illicit in the racialized Western epistemological order of the past half millennium, even though it is of far greater global historical consequence than the now vaunted Judeo-Christian edifice upon which current world powers claim to stand. Though universalized as ancient and natural, the recently hegemonic Judeo-Christian concept can be traced to post-World-War-II American geopolitics and empire building, with minor, earlier origins in nineteenth-century British and French oriental/imperial politics and discourse.