Green-Mercado, Mayte. "Race-making and the preservation of power." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/race-making-and-the-preservation-of-power. [Date accessed].

Race-making and the preservation of power

How a 15th-century Spain racial caste system influenced far-right politics today

Download the transcript

The language of racialization was tied to religious difference in premodern Spain. After the forced conversion of Muslims and Jews in the 15th century, Spain needed a way to distinguish so-called “new” Christians, or conversos, from “pure” Christians. This division was reified in an early Spanish dictionary from Sebastian de Covarrubias. His definition of words such as "raza" and "casta" reflected the growing system of racial caste across the Iberian Peninsula, and eventually the globe. This rhetoric of racialization, with the assumed superiority of white Christians, lives on in modern day Spain’s far-right political discourse.

Further learning

Recommended

Video

Race in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene

The genre of epic has significantly defined what Muslims are in the white European imagination. Spenser’s allegory helps make racist tropes “stick” to Muslim bodies. 

Dennis Britton
Activity

Tracing tropes

Ambereen Dadabhoy’s semester-long sequence of assignments aims to support students in their own knowledge production through the interpretations of primary texts.

Ambereen Dadabhoy
Video

Islam and the West

Guiding students through early modern texts, Ambereen Dadabhoy reveals the entangled relationship between Christian Europe and Muslim culture.

Ambereen Dadabhoy