Today, every country in the region shows evidence of deep manifestations of Wynter's 'bourgeois mode of being' $(1979,1995)$, which is inherently race- and class- based. Every country exhibits substantial degrees of racialized behaviour toward peoples living to the (real or figurative) south, both within their national borders, and between their borders and neighbours in the Sahara and in West and southern Africa. Phenotype and regional perception, language and culture play major roles in these manifestations of racialized hierarchy - formulations of North/South unevenness are far from being abstractions here. Each of these countries have citizens and non-citizens who are almost universally racialized to varying but almost inescapable degrees, by the vast majority of those living to their (real and/or figurative) north, both within their territories in most cases, and especially between their national borders and those of Europe as a whole. Across centuries of structured political-economic inequality and epistemic colonization are laid the incendiary contemporary racial realities and discourses surrounding forced and coerced migrations, statelessness, refugees fleeing wars, transborder flows of people - what the language of Western epistemology juridically fashions on a transatlantic basis as 'illegal aliens', 'illegals', 'terrorists', 'non-citizens', with an endless linguistic litany of dehumanizing racial terminologies across all idioms and vernaculars. Race and anti-blackness remain central 500 years later with an alarming degree of consistency, even when account is taken of the constant variations, spatio-temporal re-articulations and seemingly omnipresent resistances.