The Racial Turn: Frayed Fabric and Dissimulating Danger

Chapter 2 examines the origins of a political language of “race” through the image of a frayed or strained fabric that metaphorically expresses a dangerous hidden defect in a population. This meaning, which emerged at the Iberian threshold between the medieval and the early modern periods, would first be linked to formerly Jewish conversos and ex-Muslim Moriscos, members of the Spanish population whose imputed heretical threat to church, society, and the state could be tied to an inner defect correlated with their non-Christian ancestry. The momentous future importance of “race” derives from how this political concept was exported and translated to the Iberian American colonies, where it became a technology for organizing and securing colonial populations against probable threats to colonial power ensouled within communities or individuals defined by African or Indigenous ancestry. Color-line racism emerged through fusing the respective Spanish colonial concepts of caste and race.