Definition
Race hierarchy is the ranking of people by socially constructed racial categories. Harari treats race itself as an imagined order: the biological clustering of human populations is real but does not match the sharp tiered categories ('white,' 'black,' 'Asian,' etc.) used in racial systems. The hierarchy attached to those categories is a separate, additional fiction, layered on top.
The classic case study is the American racial system that emerged from Atlantic slavery. Once the hierarchy was set up — slaves as a legally distinct, racially defined caste — it began to perpetuate itself through laws, schools, neighbourhoods, religion, and family wealth long after the original legal scaffolding came down.
Why it matters
How it works
A race hierarchy works through a feedback loop. The initial inequality — legal, military, economic — gives the dominant group control of resources. Schools, jobs, housing, and policing then channel those resources unevenly. A generation later, the resulting differences in outcomes are pointed to as evidence that the hierarchy reflected real differences all along. The next generation inherits the gap and the explanation simultaneously.
Harari's broader point is that this is the general shape of imagined hierarchies, not a special pathology of race. Any ranked imagined order — caste, class, gender — uses the same machinery to convert past power into present 'nature.' Recognising the machinery is the first move in dismantling it.