In becoming an instrument of racial exclusion, in a world increasingly characterised by the mobility of migration and mobilisations for political rights, the literacy test consolidated understandings of ‘race’ in terms of a dichotomy of whiteness and non-whiteness across the world, so that not only in the United States, as John Higham has argued in Strangers in the Land, but in southern Africa, northern America and Australasia, ‘the Negro, the Oriental and the southern European appeared more and more in a common light’.^[66] In Higham’s account of American ‘nativism’ ‘race’, however, belongs to others. What Du Bois saw so clearly was that the same historical processes that worked to place ‘the Negro, the Oriental and the southern European’ ‘in a common light’ were also producing ‘whiteness’, as both global in its power and personal in its meaning, at once the basis of transnational political identifications and a subjective sense of self. As a modern technology, the literacy test was the instrument of whiteness par excellence.