Abstract: Why has race in North Africa and the Middle East become such an active zone of theory? Which concepts and frameworks dominate the scholarly debates, and with what political effects? These are consequential questions that the Moroccan case can help answer. A decolonial ethics should begin with the vibrant debates already taking place in Morocco. Moroccans’ engagement with the question of race preceded its discovery as a new field for generating expertise by Western-based scholars and journalists. To decolonize the debate about race and racism in North Africa we need to be both critical about the violences of racism and attentive to the contexts in which knowledge about it is produced and circulated. Without being apologists for anti-Black racism we need to reckon with the diversity of experiences and the specificities of histories of mixing in North Africa, and begin by acknowledging and learning from local initiatives and debates. Can we be cautious about transposing onto North Africa racial binaries and histories of racial segregation in the wake of Atlantic slavery, assuming that whiteness defines North Africa’s racial fabric and denying the region’s roots in Africa? Caution must be exercised when interpreting the complex racial situation in Morocco so as not to impose traveling theories or conceptual paradigms derived from different histories of racialization, especially from the US or Europe. Not only might they distort North African histories and social realities but could be politically consequential because of the geopolitical stakes, whether playing into hegemonic forms of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim racism or producing dangerous consequences for precarious contemporary migrants whose “bare life” circumstances (and the reasons for it) could get swept aside when lumped together in discussions about anti-Black racism of other sorts.