Europeans might seek to affirm their status and self-worth through the allegation that the blood in their veins was superior to that of people descended from Jews,

himself to be a member of the nobility of the country.”

A white, even if he rides barefoot on horseback, considers

Hispanidad was being 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.

But it remains true that limpieza de sangre proscribed Moorish as well as Jewish ancestry, and that to be truly Spanish in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one had to claim to be of pure Christian descent.35

It is uniquely in the West that we find the dialectical interaction between a premise of equality and an intense prejudice toward certain groups that would seem to be a precondition for the full flowering of racism as an ideology or worldview.

In all manifestations of racism from the mildest to the most severe, what is being denied is the possibility that the racializers and the racialized can coexist in the same society, except perhaps on the basis of domination and subordination.

My theory or conception of racism, therefore, has two components: difference and power.

originally articulated in the idioms of religion more than in those of natural science.