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This essay aims to highlight Étienne Balibar’s philosophical position on the issue of racism in Race, Nation, Class and to question the current relevance of these analyses. Using as a starting point the observation of the expansion of racism in the contemporary world, Balibar contends that racism is universal. He denies any essentialist approach and he attempts to understand racism as a multidimensional historical reality whose forms are updated through the memory of previous racisms. He qualifies current racism as differential. Born after colonialism, it replaces “culture” with biological races and their hierarchization. In order to understand the expansion of racism in the contemporary world, one must analyze its relations with nationalism and the class struggle. According to Balibar, racism offers an interior and excessive supplement to nationalism, and he claims that racist violence is authorized by the institutions of the national state. Founded on the difference between natives and foreigners, modern states are universalist in theory, but racist in practice. He justifies the link between racism and the class struggle by the simple fact that race is but another term for class. Whenever individuals are plunged into social indifferentiation by proletarianization, a racist crisis is triggered. Finally, if racism is universal, it is because it introduces, within the human species, differences between man and animal, and between superhuman and subhuman.