Race is a cultural construction that relies on tropes and narratives to shape the hierarchical organization of societies. Despite the disappearance of state sponsored racism from today’s world, racism continues to affect the distribution of resources, both material and symbolic, along the lines of racialized groups. Our research team looks at how racial tropes contribute to social marginalization in the premodern and postmodern Mediterranean in a comparative perspective with North American societies from the precolonial era to the present. Recognizing that racism did not disappear with the disappearance of the racial regimes of the 20th century (such as Nazi Germany, Jim Crow U.S. South, and Apartheid South Africa), we look at the premodern and postmodern forms of racialization from below. From manuscript illuminations to literary texts, our goal is to collect sources that can effectively represent how processes of racialization circulate across different cultures. Our work will allow future generations of scholars to look at racialization from a truly multinational perspective.