The author distinguishes between a racism of exploitation and inequality and a racism of cultural difference and exclusion or separation. He draws an analytical map featuring two logics and four pure cases. The first logic sets the individual's participation to modernity against the requirements of membership in collective identities. The second logic opposes a view of the world dominated by universalism to a perspective based on particularism. In one case, associated with the triumphal rise of modernity and European colonialism, racism defines itself in reference to universal progress, the higher welfare of humankind, or the dissemination of religious truth.
Resistance is interpreted as evidence of racial deficiencies.
In another case, racism is articulated by downwardly mobile groups targeting nearby others. In the third case, racism forms when an actor's own religious, national, or ethnic identity is set against modernity and trained on a particular group construed in racial terms and denounced as a privileged, unfair, or otherwise nefarious carrier of modernity. Finally, racism may exist in the form of the defence of cultural identity without any clear reference to modernity or its control. In this case, racism may exist in the absence of actual inter-racial contacts. Wieviorka cites the examples of the rural supporters of the Front National in Alsace, where immigrants and their descendants are few, and of the Jew-less antisemitism in contemporary Poland.