Theory of Race and Iberian Christendom, part 4

Lessons From CRT

Du Bois’ gift theory emphasizes the special contributions each race can give to human culture (Farmer & Farmer, 2020). In contrast, Jennings’ depiction of race doesn’t seem open to such a positive potential. Du Bois attributes these gifts to the common experiences of a race of people, which generate characteristics that can be life-giving to global humanity. Jennings’ ORS theory doesn’t seem open to this type of redemptive vision because the modern concept of race is essentially flawed and harmful.

Du Bois’ description of white supremacy as positing that whites are not negatively affected by race in comparison to other races (Farmer & Farmer, 2020) is intriguing. If the white race is burdened with the task of leading the lost non-white cultures of the world to the “lily-white ‘heaven’ of humanity” (Farmer & Farmer, 2020), this is a deeply negative view of human cultures. It is as if the cultures of Europe up to the 3rd century were wiped away as they were baptized into the gospel. This means that whites should reject any part of their culture before the dawn of Christendom. This seems like a good starting point for convincing white European Christians of the terrible implications of white supremacy. 

Bell’s concept of an “idolatrous faith” that sees whiteness as a “property right” to protect is a powerful concept (Golden, 2022). The primordial human instinct of protecting one’s individual and collective status is something hard to deny. Bell describes Christianity as becoming “divorced from its implementation” through this idolatrous faith (Golden, 2022). This is a helpful description of what happened with the advent of supersessionism in Europe which led to the co-opting of the gospel as a pretext for racial domination. 

Bell’s concept of the enduring challenge of racism seems to agree with Jenning’s (2010) notion of the white-black binary. It can be debated whether the white-black binary applies across all cultures in today’s globalized world. But it seems reasonable that the white-black binary is a harmful reality existing in some parts of the world and influencing others. The black-white binary should be recognized if not necessarily eradicated, a la Bell’s racial realism. Bell’s concept of idolatrous faith depicts the “deep cognitive structure” of racism. And his critique of Enlightenment approaches to eradicate racism through reason is compelling (Golden, 2022). Bell’s commentary on the relation between racism and religious structure can convince Christians already wary of the evils of institutionalized religion. 

Williams’ argues convincingly that white US-Americans hold a deep fear of blacks, but the same fear cannot be expected globally to wherever whites and blacks coexist (Scholar, 2006). That said, Willams’ motif of racial fear can be used as a point of reference in dialogues about xenophobic and discriminatory phenomena in other cultures. Her argument for the greater influence of structural factors rather than personal factors as explanation for crime has merit. But caution is needed to avoid using such a notion to relieve individuals of their personal responsibility (Scholar, 2006).

Williams seems more hopeful than Bell in the possibility of real racial justice in the US-American context. She accepts that the color-blind society desired by liberals is impossible without addressing racism (Scholar, 2006). While color-blindness may be a vision to inspire us, in the present Williams argues for putting away fear, seeking accountability, and creatively finding solutions to racial injustice (Scholar, 2006). 

Evaluation of CRT Applied to European Context

Morley (2022) analyzed applications and reactions to CRT in global contexts related to issues such as migration and the environment. She states that “global crises such as migration and climate change are laying bare the persistent impacts of structural racism and colonial subordination around the world”. She sees CRT as offering valuable insights for people involved practically and academically on human rights issues that cross borders. Morley contends that “racial and colonial logics (…) pervade international law and its application”. She sees much benefit in practitioners and scholars working on human rights “centering race, and its connection with empire, in their work” (Morley, 2022). 

Indeed, recent protests of anti-black racism and police brutality in the U.S. have reverberated across the globe. Many groups around the world, including US-Americans, turned to the United Nations Human Rights Council and other international bodies to “seek justice and hold the state accountable for racial justice” (Morley, 2022). The US-American leaders of the Black Lives Matter movement aligned themselves with other “racialized and marginalized” groups around the world, such as Palestinians. Black migrants stranded in Tijuana trying to cross over into the U.S. adopted the phrase “No puedo respirar” (“I can’t breathe”) associating themselves with the “racial logics oppressing black Americans” (Morley, 2022). 

Morley (2020) uses the example of Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) which convened in 2019 and 2020 to uncover, “‘how international law originated in and still perpetuates empire,’ a term that encompasses the European colonial powers of the past and the settler- and neo-colonialism of the present day”. The impetus for TWAIL was the Asian-African Bandung Conference convened in 1955 to address “the role of the Third World in the Cold War, economic development, and decolonization”. Questions addressed included: 

whether the decolonization period, and the international law and institutions that have arisen from it, has actually led to the sovereign equality of formerly-colonized states within the international system.! Or is the sovereignty of these Third World states contingent on whether it serves the interests of First World nation-states?. 

One powerful example is as follows: 

The international community legitimized foreign intervention into Libya in part because the Arab League had endorsed it. Yet, the African Union, with which Libya aligned itself, had been advocating for a non-military solution instead of intervention. By reframing Libya as Arab and not African, the international community was able to characterize its intervention as legitimate. Subsequently, when the European Union’s focus shifted to preventing unauthorized African migration, the narrative was again racialized. The migrants were framed as Black Africans moving through Libya, an Arab transit country, to reach Europe. In this context, Europe now sought to partner with Libya to ensure that it enforced its borders and prevented Africans from transiting through the country. (Morley, 2020)  

Moschel (2007) states that CRT has had little attention in the continental European legal world, which up till the early 1990s was under the illusion that racism “belonged to history”. But starting in the 1990s racist or xenophobic events began to occur almost daily in every state within the European Union. Spain and Portugal, not considered to that time as “immigrant nations” were not an exception. This new phenomenon has been termed “new racism”, coinciding with the collapse of Communism and the influx of immigrants from Eastern Europe. The end of communism also meant that liberal, deregulated market economics now spread across the globe initiating the era of globalization. As a result, poorer countries’ economies and societal structures were disrupted leading to increased immigration to Europe. The European nations as well were thrown into a crisis stemming from the breakdown of traditional societal and political structures” which led to insuring and isolation which “transformed into scapegoating of ‘other’ groups” (Moschel, 2007). 

But analysts have posited that Europe and US-America have a measure of difference related to perceptions and histories of race and racism (Moschel, 2007). The concept of racism consisting of a dominant majority that targets other minority groups as being biologically inferior and consolidating this posture into social and political structures is common to both Europe and US-America. Some research posits that racism in the United States is based on the historical construction of discrimination based on skin color in hostility towards Africans, Native Americans, and Asians, applied in the modes of slavery, segregation, and miscegenation (Moschel, 2007).

In Europe, on the other hand, “social fault lines and mechanisms of oppression were often defined in religious terms” (Rubin, 1999). The history of Europe is full of religious holy wars, pogroms, and persecution in which Jews, Protestants, Catholics, Muslims and other religious “others” were discriminated against (Moschel, 2007). In other words, while in US-America color of skin was primordial to racism, in Europe it was mainly connected to the Holocaust and antisemitism. The rejection in Europe of scientific racism during the 1950s and 1960s explains in part why the discourse on racism preferred terms such as “prejudice, intolerance, antisemitism, of xenophobia”. From this perspective, the grounds for explaining racism are cultural differences instead of biological ones (Moschel, 2007). 

In addition to this, Europeans tend to “distance themselves from laws concerning slavery, segregation, miscegenation and the related one-drop of blood rule” (Moschel, 2007). The rationale is that particularly after World War II such racial laws were abolished in Europe, if they ever existed at all. As such, the problems that American racial laws address don’t apply in Europe. As a result, it has been argued that dealing with racism in Europe is harder because there is no “clear legal symbol to fight against”. On the international level, three institutions address legal approaches to racism in Europe: the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and the European Union. Then each individual member nation has its own provisions prohibiting racial discrimination in their constitutions. As is the case with many critical legal movements, CRT is focused on national systems resulting in a predominantly internal domestic critique (Moschel, 2007). 

The rigid structure of the law studies in Universities in Europe also represents an obstacle to CRT development (Moschel, 2007). The system is more rigid under strict government control, therefore changes in curriculum and introduction of new courses is much more difficult. Affirmative action in Europe is very underdeveloped, only France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands have significant projects aimed at certain categories of immigrants. Affirmative action is often seen as “positive discrimination” which would violate the principle of equality (Moschel, 2007). 

In Europe, topics of nationality and citizenship generally dominate discussions on race, ethnicity, and immigration because of the European Union (Moschel, 2007). At the core of the vision of the European Union is the notion of equality between citizens of member states. Therefore, what emerges is a bifurcated system with two separate groups with different status based on citizenship within the European Union. Ironically this means that the EU fosters racism in some ways even as it seeks to combat it. One group can travel and work freely while the other need entry and residence visas (Moschel 2007, Levaeau, 2002). 

Analysis of the Spanish Development of Concept of Race

While my context of service is the Iberian diaspora, I will limit a specific national inquiry in this paper to Spain. The combination of political unification and imperial expansion in the 15th century under the patronage of the Catholic Spanish obligated the peoples of Iberia and to face “troubling and enduring questions about national and racial identity” (Feros, 2017). From that time until now, the unification of Spain continues to be provisional with Catalonia still seeking to reaffirm its sovereignty. Therefore, debates about the meaning of the Spanish nation and the identity of its citizens remain constant in the early 21st century, exacerbated by the presence of “foreign” populations such as Jews, Muslims, and Latin Americans. Research into Spanish race relations emphasizes the need to understand how Spanish identity emerged as well as notions of human and cultural diversity in what came to be Spain (Feros, 2017). 

Historically, it has been generally established that Spain was first settled by peoples from the Mediterranean, North Africa, and later by Northern European Celts (Feros, 2017). The impetus for unification came from foreign arrivals – Greeks, Phoenicians, Carthaginians, Romans, and Visigoths – drawn by the peninsula’s maritime ports, resources, and climate. As the first to gain control of the entire peninsula, the Romans left a profound mark on what they termed “Hispania” – in the form of language, culture, and politics. The invasions of Moors in the early 8th century began a Muslim presence of almost 800 years in Iberia and one ended in 1492 with the complete conquest of Granada by the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabela. The result was the imposition of Catholicism as the single religion on the entire Iberian Peninsula, seen as the “bond that would force all its inhabitants to see themselves as members of one community” (Feros, 2017).

Nevertheless, for all the history of the Iberian Peninsula, there has been a “prolonged contest between distinct visions of the nation and the patria” (Feros, 2017). In Spain, the controversy was whether the monarch’s subjects should view it as their fatherland or Catalonia, Valencia, or Castile. This contestation was contested during the entire early modern period and into the nineteenth century. However, whereas in Britain and much of the rest of Europe the dispute was over different forms of Christianity, in Spain Catholicism reigned supreme, politics and culture being the point of contestation there (Feros, 2017). 

Some Spanish historians agree with the ORS hypothesis that the definition of race emerged through the invention of the Spain as the “ideal nation or race, with laudable origins and exemplary physical and mental characteristics, preserved immaculately across time and space” (Feros, 2017). Spanish-ness was composed of traits and qualities that separated the Spanish from other nations – Europeans but most of all Jews, Arabs, American natives, and Africans who lived in Spain’s colonies (Feros, 2017). 

Sociological research into Spanish identity today points to the fact that all the identities or nations of the Iberian Peninsula were invented – Catalan, Castilian, Basque, and Portuguese. The construction of the Spanish nation was based on the “collaboration between the elites and peoples of the various kingdoms and provinces, a shared quest for those elements that unified rather than differentiated” (Feros, 2017). It was this conception that motivated the constitution of Cádiz in 1812, where all regional differences were subsumed in an “all-encompassing Spanish identity and nation”. But today this idea is questioned with the rise in the 1990s of xenophobic attacks against immigrants of Arab and Latin American origin. Whereas until the 1980s Spain was more an exporter than recipient of immigrants, thereafter it came to have similar numbers to that of France, Italy, and the United Kingdom, all countries with larger overall populations (Feros, 2017). 

Considering debates regarding racism in Spain, as well as Catalan independence, most scholars and journalists invoke the absence of racialist theories during the early modern period in the country (Feros, 2017). Both Spanish and foreign scholars have sought to reinvent Spain as a “racial paradise for Jews and Muslims, (…) Native Americans and Africans”. This has been the predominant discourse of Spaniards from the 18th to 20th centuries, a national identity as “religiously and racially universalist”. But recent sociological research indicates that such interpretations “go against the weight of historical evidence”, showing the early modern Spaniards did not believe in “the equality of distinct peoples” nor did they defend the need of “uniting all of these peoples through racial mixture”. The ideal of “Convivencia between Christians, Jews, and Moriscos” didn’t exist during the Medieval period nor the early modern. The way forward for racial unity in Spain has been posited as substitution the “imposition of uniformity” with the recognition and acceptance of ethnic and cultural difference” (Feros, 2017). 

References