(One in a series of posts on George Fredrickson’s 2002 book, Racism: A Short History.)
If there’s a time and place that signals the start of the current human era, it’s the first four months of 1492 on the Iberian peninsula when in quick succession, Los Reyes Católicos (The Catholic Monarchs) Isabella of Castile and her husband, Ferdinand of Aragon, 1) oversaw the end of the Reconquista on Jan. 2 when the capital city of the last Muslim kingdom in Iberia, Granada, capitulated; 2) issued the Edict of Expulsion on March 31, exiling all Jews from the Kingdom; and 3) signed an agreement on April 17 with Christopher Columbus authorizing him to set sail to the west on behalf of the Crown.
Fredrickson’s primary interest in this is the treatment of the conversos, the hundreds of thousands of Jews who converted to Christianity rather than leave Spain. The rise of the doctrine of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) and its inclusion in the laws and regulations of numerous institutions and local governments—under which only those of “pure” Christian ancestry could hold certain jobs (including the ranks of the conquistadores and missionaries settling the Americas)—is, he argues, a key moment in the development of Western racism.
“To the extent that it was enforced, the Spanish doctrine of purity of blood was undoubtedly racist. It represented the stigmatization of an entire ethnic group on the basis of deficiencies that allegedly could not be eradicated by conversion or assimilation…. when the status of large numbers of people was depressed purely and simply because of their derivation from a denigrated ethnos, a line had been crossed that gave “race” a new and more comprehensive significance.”
In the Americas, 16th century Spaniards ultimately decided that the newly conquered peoples “possessed reason” and “therefore could be converted to Christianity and made useful subjects of the Spanish crown through peaceful persuasion“. (p. 38) (They also could be brutally oppressed in the encomienda system, but that’s another issue.)
Fredrickson argues that “the Spanish authorization of black slavery proceeded primarily from the differing legal status of conquered peoples and those obtained as merchandise from areas outside of Spanish jurisdiction“. In other words, because the Spaniards and Portuguese (largely because of their inability to survive there) couldn’t conquer west and central African peoples but bought them through pre-existing slave markets, Africans could be kept as slaves. Conquered peoples in the Americas were in a different category; they could be mistreated and discriminated against, but not enslaved.
Some other points Fredrickson makes about the critical role played by 16th and 17th century Iberians in the development of Western racism:
- “It is paradoxical to find that Spain and Portugal were in the forefront of European racism or protoracism in their discrimination against converted Jews and Muslims,, but that the Iberian colonies manifested a greater acceptance of intermarriage and more fluidity of racial categories and identities than the colonies of other European nations.” (p. 39)
- “Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Spain is critical to the history of Western racism because its attitudes and practices served as a kind of segue between the religious intolerance of the Middle Ages and the naturalistic racism of the modern era.” (p. 40)
- “One might be tempted to draw a parallel with the relation of German national identity to racial antisemitism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but such an analogy should not be pressed too far…. What we have here, therefore, is a quasi-racialized religious nationalism and not a fully racialized secular nationalism of the kind that arose in Germany.” (p. 41)
- “One can therefore trace the origins of the two main forms of modern racism—the color-coded white supremacist variety and the essentialist version of antisemitism—to the late medieval and early modern periods.” (p. 46)
Fredrickson ends—in a passage that’s worth quoting at length—this chapter with a pivot to the crucial role played by the Enlightenment in the rise of modern racism:
“…to achieve its full potential as an ideology, racism had to be emancipated from Christian universalism. To become the ideological basis of a social order, it also had to be clearly disassociated from traditionalist conceptions of social hierarchy. In a society in which inequality based on birth was the norm for everyone from king down to peasant, ethnic slavery and ghettoization were special cases of a general pattern—very special in some ways—but still not radical exceptions tot he hierarchical premise. Paradoxical as it may seem, the rejection of hierarchy as the governing principle of social and political organization, and its replacement by the aspiration for equality in this world as well as in the eyes of God, had to occur before racism could come to full flower.” (p. 47)
Crossposted at: masscommons.wordpress.com
