The Church Invented Race and Spread Structural Racism
On December 27, 1512, the Church formally introduced the legal construction of race into the “Americas” by promulgating the Laws of Burgos. Championed and defended by Spain, a self-identifying Christian nation loyal to the Pope, these laws established two racial categories: Spaniards and Indians. As Robert Chao Romero writes:
[The Laws of Burgos] created the racial categories of Spanish and “Indian” and shaped their social meanings in such a way as to justify the privilege of Spaniards and the exploitation of the native populations. We’ve felt the effects for five hundred years.
For the Spanish, “Indian” is an umbrella term: they use it to group diverse Indigenous peoples including the Tainos, Guanahatabeys, and Island-Caribs. And as time passed, Spain and other colonizing empires wedged more Indigenous peoples under this umbrella. “This same racial designation of ‘Indian’ would later be applied to tens of millions of diverse indigenous peoples throughout the Americas,” Romero writes,” such as the Nahuas, Mexica, Maya, Inca, Tongva, Chumash, Hopi, Navajo, and so on.”
As with later uses of “Indian,” the conception the Laws of Burgos champion is racist. Consider this line: “By nature they [Indians] are inclined to idleness and vice, and have no manner of virtue or doctrine.” These laws racialize virtue and vice, Christian doctrine and formation. From the Spanish colonizers’ perspective, Christian life and doctrine is color-coded—it’s “white.”
But there’s more. Critical race theorists have demonstrated that laws materialize the racist ideologies they carry. Thus laws are a constitutive part of structural racism. In this case, the Laws of Burgos materialize an explicitly Christian form of “benevolent” structural racism within the oppressive Spanish encomienda. Consider this extended quotation:
Also, because I have been informed that the Spaniards and Indians who live on the estates go for a long time without hearing Mass, and since it is right that they should hear it, at least on feast days and Sundays, and since it is impossible for each estate to maintain a priest to say Mass, we order and command that where four or five estates, more or less, are within distance of a league, on that estate which is nearest the others a church shall be built, and in this church an image of Our Lady and a bell shall be placed, so that every Sunday and obligatory feast day they may come there to pray and hear Mass, and also to hear the good advice that the priests who say Mass shall give them; and the priests who say Mass shall teach them the Commandments and the Articles of the Faith, and the other things of the Christian doctrine.
Therefore, in order that they be instructed in the things of the Faith and become accustomed to pray and hear Mass, we command that the Spaniards who are on the estates with the said Indians and have charge of them shall be obliged to bring them all together to the said church in the morning and remain with them until after Mass is said; and after Mass they shall bring them back to the estates and give them their pots of cooked meat, in such wise that they eat on that day better than on any other day of the week, and, although the priest who says Mass will sometimes be absent, nevertheless they shall bring them even so to the church to pray and receive good advice. If, however, the other estates are in places where the Indians can easily come to hear Mass, the said citizens shall be obliged to bring them thither, on pain that any person who has charge of the said Indians and fails to bring them [to Mass] shall incur a penalty of ten gold pesos: six pesos as prescribed in the preceding article, and of the four remaining, two shall be for the erection of the said church and two for the priest who teaches the Indians.
Notice the linking of ecclesiastical buildings, calendars, offices, practices, and symbols to Spanish colonial rule. The Spanish use the breadth of the Church’s resources to spread and sustain imperial power. And they’re race-conscious about it. Notice who the Laws presume serve as priests, citizens, and governing encomenderos? It’s the self-identified white Spaniards. They are the Christian educators and benevolent masters of the vicious, ignorant Indians. They are the bearers of faith and civilization. They are Christ’s hands and feet to savage peoples wandering in darkness.
The Laws of Burgos, then, are a token example of sixteenth-century law-and-order, where, as Kenneth Nunn writes, “[l]aw organizes white society; then it helps maintain that society through both physical and ideological coercion.” These laws weaponized Christianity to establish and maintain Spain’s genocide-perpetuating, white-supremacy suffused, colonial pigmentocracies “benevolently” run by self-identifying Christians.
The Laws of Burgos are also part of Church history. More personally for Christians they’re part of family history. Some of the cloud of witnesses that have gone before legally constructed race to organize racist governments, thus turning “ justice into poison and the fruit of righteousness into bitterness” (Amos 6:12).
How should Christians respond to this history? I answer in the tongue that colonized my Taino ancestors: ¡Dios nos perdona! Y haganos personas de justicia que recuerda nuestra historia.
