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.

The religious bigot condemns and persecutes others for what they believe, not for what they intrinsically are.

It is when differences that might otherwise be considered ethnocultural are regarded as innate, indelible, and unchangeable that a racist attitude or ideology can be said to exist. It finds its clearest expression when the kind of ethnic differences that are firmly rooted in language, customs, and kinship are overridden in the name of an imagined

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

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

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

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,

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.

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