Emphasising that racialisation is far from simply an event, John Powell explores the history of racial segregation in the United States and the evolution of understandings around racism’s persistence and effects on day-to-day life. Just as racialisation reinvented itself in the shape of the Jim Crow laws following the end of slavery in the 19th century, today’s race-neutral approaches to issues of social and economic inequality can in reality simply compound racial disparities, Powell contends. In an Obama age, the author argues, tackling structural racialisation can only be achieved through ‘targeted universalism’: approaches and policies true to the individual circumstances that different social groups face.