Pre-colonial Anti-Blackness: The Taproot of BIPOC Struggles
Racial and gender minorities have made fantastic progress in the United States. Consequently, some observers wonder why they still have complaints. And some feel that the racialized gender minorities - BIPOC trans people - have been granted sufficient tolerance and should have no more complaints about anything.
Unfortunately, these observers neither understand nor recognize how persistently BIPOC communities have faced different versions and facets of the same problems of racialized gender for 500 years and more. Even their claim that they are still harmed by things that happened 500 years ago is dismissed as nonsense.
But one's community can suffer the distant past. Harmful ideas and practices once dying out can recirculate. People who value unjust customary beliefs and behaviors only need power (status, authority, and force) and the means to rejuvenate and enforce their harmful beliefs. This project suggests that claims for the legitimacy of racism (with its roots in anti-blackness), religious intolerance and anti-LGBTQIA discrimination are ideas that have been recycled since 1478.
Consider that on June 2, 2023, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sent out this text to alert its subscribers:
Trans healthcare bans.
Trans sports bans.
Trans bathroom bans.
Drag bans.
Politicians are trying to stop trans and gender-nonconforming people from making decisions about our bodies, futures, and lives. We need to fight back.
This warning indicates that far right Christians are demanding trans bans at the same time that today's BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders are seeking greater spiritual freedom for their communities.
On the one hand, this is an era of greater spiritual freedom. On the other hand, the BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders contend with a growing spirit of anti-transness colored by anti-blackness.
Anti-trans and anti-black people demonstrate their rage about the gains BIPOC trans people are making. A glance into how trans people are doing revealed 2021 as one of the deadliest years featuring 375 transgender murders globally. Latin America reported the most trans murders, with 30% in Brazil and 70% in Central and South America. In the United States, fifty-seven trans people were murdered. Among all trans murders most killed were black trans women.
Janet Ho locates white supremacy at the root of American racial violence. The ACLU concurs in finding that racialized and gender-based violence are closely linked. So the trend towards anti-racial and anti-trans violence is a strong one. This trend culminates in anti-trans and anti-black activist organizing and political violence. An increasing lack of trans safety is one factor driving many BIPOC people into spirituality, and some, into religion.
Are such incidents merely episodic? Or do they reflect a historical pattern? BIPOC organizers and scholars observe that anti-trans violence reflects a habitual cultural legacy laid down during the anti-blackness of the colonial and pre-colonial eras, and it is still being reproduced in the United States. All BIPOC people are involved because anti-blackness stands against everyone who is not white, or at least those who do not subscribe to whiteness.
What if the repetitive resurgence of repressive policy and practice aiming to keep BIPOC trans people in their assigned places has roots in the inquisitional culture of New Spain? Indeed, other European nations and their colonies contributed similar and different cultural practices, but there is a sensitive dependence on initial conditions when it comes to the impact of Spanish colonial traditions on the United States. It appears that Spain's inquisitional practice made a fierce impact on BIPOC communities, and most of all on indigenous communities, that has endured a long time because it made an indelible mark on American religious, political, and popular culture.
The Anti-Black Terror of Limpieza de Sangre
It all began when the Berber general Taariq ibn-Ziyaad led the Moors to conquer Iberia in 711 and established their empire, Al Andalus. In that rather liberal society Jews prospered for a century.
In late medieval Spain, outsiders and people of another race, even if they were not Christian but had status, could enjoy full respect. There is ample evidence of Jews and Muslims of the elite being treated on equal terms by Christians; and Christian writers accepted this equality without hesitation. Intermarriage between Christians and non-Christians could even be contemplated with pride.
The Moors (from the Greek maures, the Roman maurus for 'dark') did not all have dark complexions, but many did. As viewed then by the 15th century Spaniards, the Jews and Moors were "tainted by Semitic blood" (understood as African blackness). This stain of blackness distinguished them from most inhabitants of the European subcontinent. Their Islamic culture also was obviously distinct. So they physically were seen as darker and their religion also seemed darker since it was seen as being opposed to Christianity. The question that arose for the Castillian crown regarding the Muslims and Jews was: can they fit in?
The answer was a resounding no! As a result, the reconquista (anti-Islamic Iberian Crusades) was completed on January 2, 1492 when the Spaniards' capture of Granada ended 800 years of Islamic rule.
Eight months later, Columbus sailed on August 3, 1492. His three ships were financed not by an impoverished Crown, as legend has it, but by Jewish financiers. Two wealthy Jews (Luis de Santangel and Don Isaac Abravanel) bankrolled the Columbian expedition during the final days of the Reconquista. Some scholars have identified evidence suggesting that that Columbus, himself, may have been a Marrano or secret Jew.
Represented in school books only as a religious conflict, the Reconquista is regarded as a war of faith against infidels, a holy war. Few scholars recognize the Crown's reliance on racial identity politics - expressed in religious terminology - to provoke conflict and accrue wealth.
Inquisitors legitimized their actions by claiming only to expunge heresy from Spain. The official and popular discourse of the day discussed the inquisition in purely religious terms. But the actual objective became apparent when the Spaniards enslaved Jews in 694 and seized all their possessions. They freed the enslaved Christians some Jews owned and divided the confiscated Jewish wealth between the formerly enslaved Christians and the Crown.
Conflicts caused by Spain's Christians trying to subordinate and rob its non-Christians sparsely were recorded during the Iberian crusades (1043-1148). In some cases, Spaniards tried to protect Jews from mistreatment. Consider, for example, this Decree of 1199 when Pope Innocent III tried to defuse the conflict by declaring,
No Christian shall do the Jews any personal injury, except in executing the judgments of a judge, or deprive them of their possessions, or change the rights and privileges which they have been accustomed to have. During the celebration of their festivals, no one shall disturb them by beating them with clubs or by throwing stones at them. No one shall compel them to render any services except those which they have been accustomed to render. And to prevent the baseness and avarice of wicked men we forbid anyone to deface or damage their cemeteries or to extort money from them by threatening to exhume the bodies of their dead.
Still, ethnic conflict intensified in Spain, ostensibly, in the name of religion. For instance, in 1215, Pope Innocent III required Jews to wear a yellow badge and distinguishable clothing. That was one of the first attempts to marginalize the less white Jews and to establish a competitive economic edge for white Christians to exploit. The idea was enforced that the Christians were entitled to business opportunities and property rights that the Jews were not entitled to possess or enact. Given phenotypical similarities between many Chrisitians and Jews, it was hard to tell simply by religion who should be repressed. So it became expedient to use the yellow badge or a similar sign as a race-marker "to inhibit social contact between Jews and Christians." Such a marker would gradually become the rule in all of Christendom.
In 1346 the race marker was amplified by racial stereotyping in the name of religion. The Spaniards joined other European Christians in scapegoating Jews. Some accused them of poisoning the wells to cause the Black Death that decimated Europe. Others claimed Jews used human blood to bake their Passover matzo. Stereotyping Jewas was a tactic to dehumanize them as a religiously distinct group, but did not yet clearly mark them as a different species. Their humanity shone through the stereotypes.
Consequently, the church was divided; it was not yet entirely behind excluding the Jews from Spanish prosperity. For example, consider Pope Martin V who issued a Bull that "forbade the bishops and members of religious orders" from making such claims about Jews.
When white Christians killed Jews (more often seen as non-whites) across Spain in 1391, thousands of Jews willingly converted to ease the conflict. Many who would not agree to convert were forcibly baptized. But had the oppression of Jews just been a religious conflict, mass conversion should have solved the problem of religious difference, but it didn't.
That is because the number of Hispanic conversos rapidly grew. An escalating conflict involved not so much the number of unconverted Jews but the growing number of conversos - called New Christians. They were prospering, so to keep a competitive edge, the Spaniard's popular discourse dabbled in race and with racialzing language floating around, the Crown cracked down on Jews in 1396. It banned the racialized Jews from public office, decreed they could not ride mules, required them to wear badges, and forbade them to bear arms and sell weapons.
The notion of racial difference became a popular conception in the minds of Christian Spaniards that divided them sharply from the Jews. Calling Jews 'Jesus killers' was a religious way to stereotype them and heighten a felt need to discredit Jews as morally bankrupt racial inferiors no matter how well they economically did in Spain. White Christians who sought to suppress Jewish success pushed for sharper political economic differentiation on top of symbolic religious differentiation. Now there were two conflated reasons for resentment: religious and racial difference.
Desiring greater power, the Crown scoffed at the 13th century's paltry medieval inquisitions. The Monarchs saw the Church's initial inquisitions as having been too regional, too religious, and too focused on witchcraft to be effective. Those inquisitions amounted to decentralized trial-by-accusation. They entailed a process of surveillance and subordination targeting white women and men as heretics whereas in Spain the Crown and its allies now desired to whiten a Christian kingdom and thus saw value in racializing Jews (and later Muslims), their new inquisitional targets.
The Crown, desiring a stronger economic buffer between Old Christians ('white' Spaniards) and New Christians ('non-white' Jews) sought to create the structural authority to launch, an institutional inquisition. This new endeavor was grounded more in Spain's system of governance than it was in the Roman Church and this new legal apparatus relied on the legalization of Spain's racializing concept of limpieza de sangre (blood purity).
Between 1414 and 1418, the first munincipal blood purity statues were written, and a school - the Colegio de San Bartolome el Viejo – was the first institution to issue one of them in Salamanca. Things seemed to quiet down for a while and then in 1435, the Spain's mediterranean island of Majorca saw bloody race riots.
The term limpieza de sangre referred to notions of some Spaniards having racially pure versus racially stained blood. Establishing such statutes served to legitimate Spain's efforts to minimize, delegitimate, remove, or eradicate economically competitive populations of Jews and Muslims associated with the Spaniards' racializing notions of Hispanic blackness.
This desire for legitimating the white Christian Spaniard's efforts to reclaim territory from the Jews and Muslims and end the growing economic competition with racialized others was structurally implemented. One way this was done was through "statute communities" that one author describes as being:
...limited to six halls of residence in Castilla, to certain religious orders (Dominicans, Franciscans and Jerónimos), to the Inquisition and to certain cathedrals (Córdoba, Jaén, León, Osma, Oviedo, Seville , Toledo and Valencia), the military orders (such as the order of Santiago that obtained its statute in 1555), certain brotherhoods and municipalities.
Despite conversos embracing Christianity over Judaism, they were seen as polluting Christiandom. The blackness that the Spaniards ascribed to the Jews subjected the latter to charges of heresy and moral corruption. For instance, the Spaniards were concerned that under Muslim control, Al Andalus allowed too much sexual and gender tolerance for the non-white elites to enjoy. This sacriligious privilege did not openly exist in Old Christian white society.
The gulf was so great between sexually conservative Catholic fundamentalists and liberal Islamic cultural values that the sexual liberality of the caliphate "unnerved Iberian Christians." Consider, for example, an incident chronicled by a Cordoban priest, Raguel, who writes of Abd Al-Rahman III, the caliph, by claiming he sexually approached a 13-year-old Christian boy. The boy rebuffed the gesture by saying, "Get back, you dog! Do you think I am effeminate like yourselves?"
If Raguel's story is accurate, the Caliph likely was viewed by white Christians as a non-white queer person propositioning or grooming the boy. Even if not, then it certainly would have provoked Christian ire when the Caliph, resenting the boy's condescending tone, had the boy, Pelagius, "ripped limb from limb and disposed of in the river." Here, writes the author, is "the story of a disenfranchised Christian standing up to a Muslim majority."
A good illustration of recoded gender or sexuality were the ghumaliyyat, or cross-dressers. These young women masculinized themselves for the sexual pleasure of men or these young men feminized their appearance, dress, hygiene, and comportment to attract men. Were they merely seeking favor as enslaved people by satisfying Islamic elite male desires? Or did their adopted gender roles also reflect their actual sexual orientations and deeply felt gender variant expression? At minimum it likely was some of both.
It was still the era of eunuchs in the Islamic world. Some where queer and some were not. Some who were queer were content to be men and others castrated themselves or were castrated after battle. Yet, the Muslim elites knew the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) did not allow self-castration nor anyone to castrate others, but eunuchs were desirable. So, the Caliphs imported Slavic eunuchs as useful advisors and good entertainers. Some Africans enslaved under Islam also likely were eunuchs.
"The unfree elite" were comprised of the eunuchs and women of royal Islamic courts who, according to Glaire Anderson, were patrons of the arts in Al Andalus. Women allowed expression in the fine and devorative arts were either the enslaved or freed concubines. Royal concubines commissioned artistic creations from eunuchs who directed or worked in state workshops for art and architecture. Some of these women collaborated with eunuchs on elaborate design projects. Another role of eunuchs as assistants to the Caliph were so vital that any eunuch who served well under a dying caliphate could become a political leader in the newly emergent caliphate.
Another illustration of Spain's white Christian concern for the moral discrepancy between non-white Islamicists and themselves, was the homoerotic and women's poetry in Al-Andalus. Consider one woman's poem about a love lost who notes her former male lover's preference for male homosexuality.
As with the Muslims, homosexuality and religious devotion were combined; Israel’s love of God was sometimes expressed as the love of a male. The influence of Sephardic homosexuality has yet to be traced, but it is hard not to see it in the poetry of San Juan de la Cruz.
Not only did Spain's white Christians think that the populations they said had stained blood crossed the line morally. It also seemed that when converted non-whites gained Christian rights and achieved greater success in Spain, the outcome was a growing mass of conversos occupying the skills and professions. Yet, the increase of educated and converted stained-blood Jews (and Muslims) upset the Spaniards’ sense of morality and proper distribution of wealth.
So the white Catholic Spaniards drew a line. They set out more sharply to distinguish between their pure blood, with its presumed entitlement to wealth, and what racial others would be allowed (or not allowed) to possess in the Iberian territories that the Spaniards were reclaiming from the Muslims.
Thus, Coppersmith notes how the Jews' willingness to convert solved the problem of religious difference but produced an economic problem for the Christian Spaniards who started wondering how to make the Spaniard's Catholic Kingdoms great again.
Christian Spaniards feared the growing power of the educated conversos and felt nostalgia for when the distinction was clear between the entitled pure-blood Christians and the blood-stained Jews who in their eyes did not deserve success. In other words, the white Christians sought to make Spain great again by racializing Jews (and Muslims) and undermining their success. Their goal was to form a more discriminatory society in defense and in favor of white Christian privilege.
Hence, Toledo saw a violent outbreak in 1449 when the Limpieza de Sangre laws were enacted there. Conversos were barred from holding Church and secular offices, guilds, and professions and marrying Old Christians. New Christians (conversos) were forbidden in 1452 to settle in Vizcaya and a converso militia defended their communities from white Christians in the Toledo riots of 1467.
To justify their violent reactions, the white Christian Spaniards began using the term marranos, pigs or piggish to describe the blackened cultural practices of the conversos. Or just to accuse the converso of not really converting (sometimes true). In 1473, there were Anti-Jewish pograms in Cordoba and Valladolid, and in Segovia, mostly conversos were attacked in 1474.
Eradicate Blackness to Uphold White Supremacy
When in 1478 the Catholic monarchs established the Tribunal of the Holy Office of the Inquisition to investigate growing claims of Converso heresies, limpieza de sangre no longer was just a municipal statute. It had become the law of the land and would be enforced by the Crown. The Spanish inquisition was now empowered by the monarchy to prosecute more consistently and efficiently than had the medieval Church of Rome.
Other European nations had similar feelings about Jews and mistreated them, but for the first time in world history, Spain's Inquisition acquired its authority from limpieza de sangre, encoded as a racial law in 1449. It was this law that later birthed the long lasting Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834). Enforced by the Crown and its inquisitors, this law shifted an old way of talking about culturally different peoples towards the new practice of distinguishing people according to "a taxonomic system based on biology."
This new racist way of talking about people's blood or ancestry enabled Old Christians to mark themselves pure-blood, or white (without using that term), and to consolidate their power against the Moors and Jews who they saw as religious and racial outsiders.
So it neither was justice the royals were seeking nor religious harmony. Instead, their primary goal was to obtain racialized legal control to secure their own economic ascendancy by accruing power to the monarch and Spanish state. They accomplished this by means of secret accusations, imprisoning innocents, and seeking to eradicate economically competitive blackness by executing 13,000 Jews and eventually reconquering Al Andalus.
This was an unprecedented effort to religiously and racially homogenize white Christendom in Spain by racializing or blackening Jews. Making Christian Spain white required seizing control over knowledge production so that only white Christian ideas would predominate. One illustration was the effort to block, says Jerome Friedman, the donation of Jewish linquistic and exegetal contributions to the study of Christian literature. According to Mohamad Ballan, two other reasons include expansion of the Ottoman Empire, and the religious belief that Iberian Christianization was establishing God's Kingdom on earth.
So Spain's new inquisition was all about rigging political economic conditions. They aimed to have the power that the elites of Al Andalus enjoyed pass only into the hands of white Christians. In this manner they sought to solidify Spanish Christendom as a white polity. They repressed non-white competition by declaring who was and was not to be serviced by Spain's economy. Subsequently, the racialized Jews were not allowed to own land, were confined to ghettos reserved just for them, and were banned from joining Christian guilds (such affiliation would boost their success). This also is when the Crown started to expel the black (Sephardic) Jews from Spain, and eventually would expel the Muslims.
Continuous war in Muslim Iberia economically drained the Crown. By 1484 it relied so much on its inquisitional authority to bolster its wealth and power that the monarchy began to perform like a religious institution. The royals’ exercized control over the inquisitional inquiries. They did this to such an extent that their efforts blurred the distinction between Church and the consolidating white Christian state of Spain.
A year later, the Crown’s Inquisitioners authorized kidnapping 2000 Jewish children (ages 2-12), forcibly converted them, and shipped them to São Tomé Island (off the coast of West Africa) to work the sugar plantations. Only 600 of those children survived.
When the pressure that the Crown and its functionaries placed on Jewish bodies was not fast enough subordinating the Conversos, Marranos, and unconverted Jews, the Crown resorted to culturicidal practices - the systematic destruction of a culture, one unique to a specific group.
Between 1485 and 1492, for instance – during Spain’s final thrust to disempower the Muslims - things took a macabre turn. Spaniards knew that the most effective way to defile Jewish culture was to exhume the Hebrew corpse. Pope Innocent III ruled against it. Yet, the city of Toledo granted the Inquisitor's authority to burn 40 conversos alive in 1488 along with 100 exhumed converso corpses. In 1490, the bones of 400 conversos were exhumed and burnt. These maccabre acts were intended to humiliate and break the Jews.
After the monarchs reclaimed Granada in 1492, the head Inquisitor, himself a converso, advised the Crown to issue the Alhambra Decree, an Edict of Expulsion. It required conversion or expulsion if no conversion in three months.
Steadfast Jews who left Spain refusing to convert were required to leave behind their young children to be Christianized and used as the state saw fit. A total of 300,000 Jews left Spain on August 2, 1492. The next day, Columbus sailed, and some Jews facing expulsion, such as Luis de Torres, Alfonso de la Calle, Rodrigo Sanchez, and the ships doctor, Maestre Bernal, sailed along with Clolumbus and his 90 men.
Jews who remained in Spain were among 125,000 (half conversos and half unconverted Jews) willing or unwilling to convert. Most conversos listed themselves as loyal to the Crown in the Green Book (Libro Verde de Aragon). They thought this would make them safe and yet they were convicted. They were not charged with practicing Judaism but were charged for their black (blood-stained) ethnic practices (how they dressed, what food they ate, their musical practices).
As to the condition of the remaining Jews, they enjoyed no protection, converso or not. For the Crown was to seize their wealth and enslave them, and in 1694, the 17th Council of Toledo declared it so: [Jews] shall be deprived of their property for the benefit of the exchequer, and shall be made slaves forever.
After arranging this winfall of wealth from the Jews into the hands of the monarchy, the Crown's wrath against Moors intensified. Between 1492 and 1619, 3,000,000 converted Moors, called Moriscos, were compelled to leave their homes in Spanish villages where their people had lived for a thousand years. The capitulations (a treaty-like agreement between Moors and the Crown) stipulated that the remaining Muslims could retain their faith and ethnic customs if they paid a tax and refrained from threatening the Crown of Castile.
The Archbishop of Toledo, who began tossing his weight around with the royals, had no desire to uphold the capitulations. It soon became clear that Archbishop Cisneros "was prepared to use extreme force to assimilate and eliminate the Jewish and Muslim communities of Iberia."
Subsequently, the Crown criminalized Islam between 1501 and 1526. Muslims who had not yet fled Spain were required to convert to Christianity. Any remaining Moriscos continuing to practice Islam were burned at the stake, (the fate of a few thousand). But here is the key point: tremendous Muslim and Jewish wealth was confiscated or sold for a pittance, and Muslims unwilling to convert fled to North Africa between 1609 and 1614, and some of them also fled to America.
So, the conflict in Al-Andalus reflected how the Christian Spaniard's conflated their presumed racial superiority with justifications for their cultural imperialism. Their attacks on Marranos and Moriscos were less about religion and were more aimed at blocking the threatening economic empowerment of the Conversos. They also feared that the educated racialized minorities were capable of forming alliances with foreign powers.
Luis Fernando Bernabé-Pons describes the Crown's intention to engage in ethnic cleansing and epistemicide when he writes:
Frequently, the authorities complemented evangelization processes with coercive measures that sought to eliminate all traces of Arabo-Islamic culture, whether they concerned religion or not.
Thus, it angered the Spaniards whenever they found the Moriscos who they were trying to suppress, busy propagating their Islamic spiritual views and scholarly knowledge in communities where the Crown had relocated them from Granada to white Christian areas like Castile and Aragon. Marranos also were accused of Judaizing, not just the spreading of the Jewish religion, but also of propagating the philosophical and technical knowledge of Hebrew scholars. So the Crown strove to keep Christendom culturally white by ending all communication between the white Old Christians and the black non-Christians, and epecially the New Christians.
Judaizing became a charge because some Christians (intrigued by the cultural knowledge of the Marranos and Moriscos) started to rethink their own religious allegiance to Christendom. So, the Spanish elites were not content to convert, kill, rob, and expel Conversos. Such a wall of anti-blackness had solidified that they resorted to book burning, a Christian practice also used in Jerusalem to eradicate heretical texts during the biblical era (Book of Acts). In one muninciple incident, Spanish authorities burned five thousand books, including the Qu'ran, and every book written in Arabic except the medical texts.
Summary
Spain's Reconquista was more than a religious crusade. It was an economic conquest and a culture war over how the race, gender, and sexual practices of Al Andalus were redistributing Iberian wealth from Christian whites to non-whites whose cultural vibrancy and presence catalyzed white Christian apostasy. Culturicide, epistemicide, and enslavement worked even better than did genocide. Following the nearly complete suppression of the Jews, large Muslim communities by such means were finally subordinate to the Crown.
Creating a new balance of power, the limpieza de sangre statutes enabled a systematic policy of cultural control. The Spaniards used their growing control to gain wealth from successful Jews and Muslim elites. The monarchy and Spanish elites created the conditions under which white Spaniards could voice fear and resentment about the cost of non-Christian and Christian non-white success to white Christians.
Application of the blood stain law was rigorous. By 1530 the Chapel of New Kings decreed no one could be admitted as a Christian partner unless they presented proof and testimony of blood cleanliness (whiteness). The decree emphasized that anyone found to be in the generation of Moors or Jews "or having race of them" could be fired. Regardless of religion, writes Luis Fernando Bernabé-Pons, anyone wishing to enter certain professions or universities or to obtain certain positions had to prove that his lineage was free of any admixture of Jewish or Muslim blood.
All of the Spaniards' acquisition through confiscation satisfied the major part of their mission: using stolen wealth to build their racial concept of God's (white) Kingdom on earth. This idea led into the belief that America was where other white Christian men would steal indigenous land and African labor to build that God-ordained kingdom for themselves. This belief later would blossom into the very popular concept of Manifest Destiny.
The ethnic cleansing of Spain continued long after Columbus sailed. Around 1566-1567, Spanish legislation banned the non-white cultural practices of the Moriscos, including their dress, names, traditional festivals, and even dances, while their speaking or writing Arabic was officially criminalized. This action fueled a Morisco rebellion in Granada in 1568, spreading into the nearby hills until 1571.
Thousands of Old Christians and Moriscos died; 80,000 Moriscos were deported or diffused into Castile. Tens of thousands left Spain for North Africa. And the Crown issued a 1609 Edict of Expulsion to eliminate the rest of the Moriscos. Over the next five years, hundreds of thousands were deported and many thousands died.
So, the Reconquista was not simply a conflict over religious belief and affiliation. Spaniards kept moving the goal post whenever Muslims or Jews tried to co-exist peacefully by converting. Their willingness to adopt Christianity became problematic not necessarily because they were continuing their former spiritual practices. More significantly, converting gave them access to wealth and status the Old Christians wanted them not to obtain.
Non-Catholic religious beliefs, sexual behavior, gender identity, and other non-white cultural practices, were stigmatized and refused. Cultural technologies of spiritual domination included: methods of evangelization, conversion, torture, murder, and expelling prevailed.
The Church split into pro and anti-Converso factions forging no religious consensus on its taken for granted anti-blackness policy. When a Pope dared to have a Converso appointed to a vacancy in the Toledo Cathedral, an influential white churchman wrote a letter compelling the Pope to revoke that appointment. The statutes encoded the white Christian's anti-blackness into Spanish law and not even the Pope, a religious authority, could override political authority.
Spaniards viewed Muslims, Jews, and new Christians (Conversos, Moriscos, and Marranos) "as one people with a tainted lineage," as Coppersmith observes. The limpieza de sangre laws upheld Catholicism, but stigmatized blackness (such as liberal sexual and gender behavior) and sanctioned white Christians' right to usurp the wealth of blackness.
Legalizing anti-blackness, persecuting racialized people, and criminalizing their cultural practices meant no longer recognizing Muslims and Jews simply as people from different places practicing different religions. The new classification created a bi-polar racial caste structure. In Spain it elevated the 'pure blood' of a white Christian majority over the inferior status ascribed to the 'stained blood' of a minority racialized as non-white, and viewed in Spanish eyes as too black to be white. One version of it would re-emerge in New Spain in a new form María Elena Martínez describes as, "Mexico's sistema de castas, a hierarchical system of social classification based primarily on ancestry." A later version would be known and defended in America as indian-killing and anti-blackness in the interest of white supremacy.
