Racism - A Short History - George M Fredrickson.pdf - WNLibrary

eing constructed in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries,
limpieza de sangre was a way of excluding those who did
not meet the requirements for a new and more exacting
conception of what it meant to be Spanish. The context
was the Reconquista, a heightened emphasis on Spain as the
champion of the True Church, and the growth of an empire
that would serve as an arena to demonstrate Spanish heroism
and piety. 45
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. One factor that makes
the Iberian case different is the role that religion played.
National identity and a universalistic religious commitment
were made synonymous, and national unfitness was defined
as an inherited inability to believe in the One True
Faith as defined by the Inquisition. 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. (It would take the Enlightenment and reactions
against it to make this possible.) The more benevolent
official attitude that the Spanish adopted in regard to the
Indians was consistent with a belief that Jewish or Muslim
infidelity did not taint the blood of the American natives. 46
Nevertheless, Indians and Mestizos were not purely
Spanish, and the attitude of Las Casas and the church did
not prevent conquistadores and colonists from treating them
on many occasions as if they were subhuman. Although it
was a propagandistic exaggeration, the “black legend” of
Spanish cruelty toward the Indians propagated by the English
had more than a grain of truth in it. One way to un-
41