Racism in Spain

Racism in Spain can be traced to any historical era, whereby social, economic and political conflict has efficiently been justified through racial difference, be it in the sense of racism as an ideology or as simple attitudes or behaviors towards those perceived as different.

The difficulty in defining a "Spanish race" has not acted as an obstacle to racist attitudes, yet more common than racism per se have been attitudes linked to racism such as xenophobia or religious hatred.

Historical roots

During the Spanish inquisition, descendants of Jews and Muslims were targeted the most. This policy was called Limpieza de sangre (Blood Cleansing). Even after a Jew or Muslim (Muladi, Arab or Berber) converted to Christianity, Spanish authorities during that time referred to them and their descent as New Christians, which were the target of popular and institutional discrimination and of suspicion by the Spanish Inquisition.[1] New Christians of Muslim heritage were referred to as moriscos, meaning Moor-like.[2] Those of Jewish heritage were termed Conversos and those who secretly continued to practice Judaism were referred to as marranos (either from Spanish marrar to err/deviate or from marrano meaning "swine".).[3] After the Reconquista, many Mudéjars (individual Moors, who remained in Iberia after the Christian Reconquista but were not converted to Christianity) remained in Spain as practicing Muslims and Sephardic Jews were required to convert to Catholicism or leave the country in 1492. Attitudes towards Moriscos varied in different regions, although they were never the main target of the Inquisition. A few decades after the War of the Alpujarras, during which the Muslim-majority population of Granada rebelled, the King of Spain ordered the Expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain, which was implemented successfully in the eastern region of Valencia and less so in the rest of Spain. While Medieval anti-Semitism and persecution of Muslims intended the conversion or elimination of non-Christians, limpieza de sangre was linked to the ancestry, no matter the fervor of the new Christians.

Slavery of Africans

During the late Middle Ages and the Modern era, a trickle of African people were captured or bought and hold as slaves. The slaves born in Africa were named bozales. Their descendants who had a better command of the Spanish language were the Black Ladinos. During the Spanish colonization of the Americas, there was a massive depopulation of Indians due to Old World illnesses and the hardships of the conquest and exploitation. African slaves were taken to the Indies as laborers, initially from Spain and later directly from Africa. today the descendants of enslaved Africans still populate the former Spanish colonies.

Gitanos

The Gitanos are the Romani people that arrived to Spain in the late Middle Ages from Northern Africa. They led a nomadic life until the 20th century and were associated to crime by the sedentary population. The authorities varied between persecution and forced assimilation.

The arrival of Scientific Racism

According to Gonzalo Álvarez Chillida, European scientific racism prevalent in the 19th and 20th century can be understood as a doctrine which "affirmed the inherited biological determinism of the moral and intellectual capacities of an individual, and the division of groups of humans into races differentiated by physical traits associated to inmutable, inherited moral and intellectual traits" and which "affirms the superiority of certain races over others, protected by racial purity and ruined through racial mixing", which "leads to the national right of superior races to impose themselves over the inferior". According to Chillida, such an ideology had difficulties in penetrating Spain due to the concept of "casticismo" vert ingrained in Spanish society, whereby Spanish castes where understood, not as races, but as religious lineages, in contraposition to the "Moor" and the "Jew". In the Spanish psyche, the Christian-Jewish dichotomy remained predominant over the more modern and racialized arian-semite dichotomy, developed in northern Europe. Álvarez Chillida (2002), p. 216; 222

Eugenic ideas were slow to enter the country; the First Eugenic Spanish Conferences took place in 1928, and the second ones in 1933. Recasens Siches defended racist stances in those conferences.[4] Jurist Quintiliano Saldaña got to defend a national policy of sterilizations although he gathered a paltry support in the country.[4]

See also

References
  1. Susan Schroeder, Stafford Poole (2007). Religion in New Spain. University of New Mexico Press. p. 198. ISBN 978-0-8263-3978-2.
  2. Michael C. Thomsett (2010). The Inquisition: A History. McFarland. p. 152. ISBN 978-0-7864-4409-0.
  3. Michael Brenner, Jeremiah Riemer (2010). A Short History of the Jews. Princeton University Press. p. 122. ISBN 978-0-691-14351-4.
  4. Álvarez Chillida, Gonzalo (2002). El antisemitismo en España: la imagen del judío, 1812-2002. Madrid: Marcial Pons Historia. p. 224. ISBN 84-95379-44-9.
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