2.6: A Medieval Anti-Racist: Bartolomé de Las Casas and Christian Anti-Racism
Lead scholar-producer: Terence Sweeney
I. Introduction [0.00-10:49]
Ryan McDermott: Since the May 2020 killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, the national conversation around race and racism has grown more intense… and polarizing. As calls for an end to racism have grown louder, so has the controversy around what is called “anti-racism.”
Terence Sweeney: The term “anti-racism” today is particularly associated with scholar Ibram X. Kendi, whose book How to Be an Antiracist was published in 2019, sales surging all the way up to number one on the New York Times bestseller list. Here Kendi explains anti-racism in a 2019 spot for Waterstones:
Sound: Ibram X. Kendi “When someone says that there’s something wrong with a racial group, they’re being racist. When someone says there’s nothing wrong with any of the racial groups, they’re being anti-racist. When someone supports policies that create and reproduce racial inequity, they’re being racist. When someone supports policies that yield and create racial equity, they’re being an anti-racist. And these aren’t necessarily identities or fixed categories or tattoos. Literally what we’re doing in each moment determines who and what we are in each moment. And people change from moment to moment and from year to year. And I think we should identify people based on what they’re saying and doing.” (0:57-1:42)
Terence Sweeney: The expression “anti-racist” seems, on the face of it, like it should be easy for anyone to identify with. Who wants to identify as pro-racist? And yet the term has become deeply contentious.
Ryan McDermott: Welcome to Genealogies of Modernity. I’m your host, Ryan McDermott. In this series, we trace unexplored and unexpected histories behind key parts of our modern world to unearth overlooked resources in the past that can help us flourish in the present. This is philosopher and episode producer Terence Sweeney, Assistant Teaching Professor in Villanova University’s Honors Program.
Terence Sweeney: People raise a number of concerns about the expression “anti-racist.” Going beyond the most basic idea of being “against racism,” there are certain further framings of anti-racism which commentators worry will lead us to focus more on racial difference. Others worry that the emphasis on race de-emphasizes important matters like class. Finally, some worry about a kind of racial pessimism—especially about the United States—that actually makes it hard to work for racial justice. These debates have played out as figures on the right and left heatedly debate topics like school curriculum and the incorporation of critical race theory into curricula—as Local 12 WKRC reported from Ohio in 2022:
Sound: LOCAL 12 News Report The Forest Hills School board just approved a resolution banning what it calls “anti-racism training and teaching.” The controversial resolution drew a packed house (0:00-0:10).
Now this resolution says that the district declares an opposition to the use of “race-based or identity-based training, curriculum, methodology in public education.” (0:40-0:51)
Terence Sweeney: The debates have produced a lot of noise, but not always a lot of insight. Amidst the rancorous arguments over anti-racism, not everyone has taken the time to ask, “Which anti-racism?” Many people have assumed there is one thing called anti-racism and it is either good or bad—or, for some people, very, very bad. This is Fox and Friends in 2022 with Joe Rogan:
Sound: Fox and Friends Joe Rogan back in the news again by just talking the truth, very similar to things we talk about here. And that is some of the curriculum with their kids’ school. He’s got a nine-year-old, and he came back, and he was talking about why the nine-year-old is being told that basically she was born a racist because she’s white. (0:00-0:15)
“When the whole George Floyd thing happened one of the schools that my kids were going to back in California released this email saying that it’s not enough to not be racist. You now must be anti-racist. (0:30-0:45)
“What are you saying? What exactly are you saying? What is your [bleep] end goal?” (1:57-2:01)
Terence Sweeney: Meanwhile, outside the heated mainstream discussions, an academic debate has picked up around another question: When did racism arise? What is the origin point of racism today? Is it the nineteenth Century? Early modernity? All the way back in the Middle Ages? What fewer people were asking is, what is the genealogy of anti-racism, at least in its broadest sense? When did a theory and a practice opposed to racism arise?
The two questions turn out to be connected—when did racism arise and when did anti-racism arise?—and it’s vital to look at them both. When we don’t learn about the history and genealogies of anti-racism, debates about racism paint a picture of history with little or maybe even no hope for resistance. If we don’t delve into that history, racism seems primordial and pervasive. In contrast, anti-racism seems pretty recent—something that has no hopes of overcoming this ancient and entrenched phenomenon.
[05:19]
When we don’t look at the plurality of anti-racism, we’re unable to broaden and diversify our approaches to anti-racist actions—which means that one political camp ends up promoting that action while the other can only criticize. We’re left unable to examine which forms of anti-racism might be most productive for an actually just society; and how different forms derive from different politics and different beliefs.
Terence Sweeney: If we think of anti-racism as just a singular thing, with barely any history, we can’t, for example, understand a figure like Martin Luther King Jr.—Reverend King, a self avowed Christian extremist for love whose vision was grounded in God’s eternal law. This is King in 1958 giving a sermon on “Paul’s Letter to American Christians”:
Sound: Martin Luther King, Jr. sermon: You must come to see that, America, that your ultimate allegiance is not to the government, not to the state, not to the nation, but your ultimate allegiance is to God, and sometimes it’s necessary to be, to speak out against the state in order to stand up with God. (9:10-9:30)
Ryan McDermott: Without a historical approach to anti-racism, we also cannot understand the rich pluralism in the Black intellectual tradition. It’s hard to recognize the importance, say, of James Baldwin’s departure from Christianity, rejection of Islam, and development of a secular urbane vision of anti-racism that’s quite different from Martin Luther King, Jr.’s. And it means that the discomfort of many intellectuals—White and Black—with some aspects of contemporary anti-racist theory is either inexplicable or merely racist. If we are unable to articulate the difference between King and Angela Davis, if we’re unable to respect the unique visions of Black intellectuals, we are left with singular, simplistic, and distorting accounts and caricatures that dominate our media debates. And that’s why it’s vital to look back to origin points, to the early sources of racism and anti-racism.
Terence Sweeney: Take early colonial racism directed against the Indigenous of the Americas. This racism was different in important ways from the racism that informed the African slave trade. When we consider that origin, we see how the ground was laid for later ideological, personal, and structural racism that was used against Africans. In that same origin point, we also find a counter-movement. We find someone leading a movement to refute ideological racism, convert persons from racism, and resist the development of racist structures.
Ryan McDermott: Now, an origin point doesn’t give us the full development of a phenomenon, but it does give us some necessary starting ingredients. And to examine these origin points, we’ll leave our definition of racism and anti-racism fairly broad, without claiming that either were fully developed in these early periods that we’re gonna now look at. For now, we’ll borrow Winthrop Jordan’s definition of racism from White Over Black, where Jordan defines racism as a system of beliefs and practices claiming the existence of innate, ineradicable differences rooted in the body such that perpetual group differences arise from them. And these differences create a hierarchy of “superior” races and “inferior races”; and they ground structures of racism that make these ineradicable differences permanent by the way they oppress the supposed “inferior” groups.
Terence Sweeney: Starting from this sense of racism, we find that there’s more than one way to oppose racism. There are different theories about how to oppose racism, and different ways of going about it. All of these can be called anti-racist, at least in some kind of broad sense. We’ll be using the term “anti-racist” in that broad sense in this episode, and we’ll be taking seriously one expression of an anti-racist movement that arose to resist one of the earliest origins of racism.
It turns out that early modernity offered an origin point not just for a racist modernity but also for a different anti-racist modernity. This resistance to racial classification and to racist structures is as old if not older than the forms of racism most visibly manifested in contemporary American life. Anti-racism has plural histories, and what some of its critics today might not realize is that one of those histories is Christian.
Ryan McDermott: In this episode, we locate one early modern resource for the struggle against racism, and it’s one that’s born out of medieval Christendom. Recovering this early and perhaps unexpected history might inspire us to see a much wider range of possibilities, of ways to seek justice and do good in the world, than we were able to see before.
So let’s step back in time to meet a figure who was born just before the dawn of the sixteenth century and the era of European exploration.
II. Bartolomé de Las Casas and a Momentous Question [10:50-21:52]
Rolena Adorno: Bartolomé de Las Casas is one of the unusual people of sixteenth century Europe. First off, he lived to the age of 84. He went to the Americas, the New World, in fact, to the island of Hispaniola, at the age of 18.
David Orique: Jurist, theologian, proto-anthropologist, early modern historian, people use the word “activist”... Um, some people call him a proto liberation theologian … he’s either villified or extolled, depending on how you might understand him. He’s a complex figure.
Ryan McDermott: That was Rolena Adorno, Sterling Professor Emerita of Spanish at Yale University, and Father David Orique, Assistant Professor of Latin American, Early Modern Iberian, and Atlantic World History at Providence College. The figure they’re describing is Bartolomé de Las Casas.
Born in Seville, Spain, in the 1480s, Las Casas’s career spanned the medieval and the modern era, the Old World and the New World, and sources of what we know as racism and anti-racism. He would come to be famous for his early, impassioned fight against slavery in the New World—a fight that was motivated most of all by his religious devotion.
The Spanish were just starting to explore and colonize the “New World” when Las Casas was coming of age. In fact, he was closely connected to those explorers. Here’s Professor Orique again:
David Orique: He’s connected to, a friend of, the Columbus’s. … He knew these people … he knew a lot of the early conquistadors, let alone those who were initially exploring for commercial reasons, but later turned into conquest and colonization.
Ryan McDermott: Las Casas’s early career did not foretell a future of fighting for justice.
Terence Sweeney: In 1502, Las Casas sailed to the Americas to be a colonizer himself along with his circle of friends. Already an ordained priest, he was given a small encomienda, or plantation, on the island of Hispaniola, in the West Indies in the Caribbean—and with the land, he was “given” a group of Indigenous people from the island to work. Las Casas arrived in the New World as a holder of slaves himself. Based in Hispaniola, he would not have looked very different from any other settler-colonizers around him—reaping money off of the labor of others.
Ryan McDermott: But during his time in the Americas, two key events would alter the course of his life forever.
First he participated in the conquest of Cuba. He traveled with the conquistadors as a chaplain. During this campaign, Las Casas saw, in his own words, “cruelty on a scale no living being has ever seen or expects to see.” Actor Viggo Mortenson read excerpts from Las Casas’ account, in Spanish and English, at a 2005 event in Los Angeles called “Voices of a People’s History of the United States”:
Sound: Viggo Mortensen at Voices of a People’s History of the United States Los cristianos, con sus caballos y espadas y lanzas comienzan a hacer matanzas y crueldades extrañas en ellos....” (3:43-3:51)
The Christians with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against them. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children, nor the aged, nor pregnant women, nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughterhouse. They made some low wide gallows on which they hanged, victims’ feet almost touched the ground, stringing up their victims in lots of thirteen in memory of our Redeemer and his twelve apostles, then set burning wood at their feet and thus burned them alive. (7:27-8:05)
[14:38]
Ryan McDermott: But perhaps what altered Las Casas’s life most of all wasn’t a scene of conquest—it was a question. In 1511, Las Casas heard a sermon preached by Antonio Montesinos, a Dominican Friar. Montesinos asked his listeners:
Antonio Montesinos voiceover: “Tell me by what right of justice do you hold these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged such detestable wars against these people who dealt quietly and peacefully on their own lands? Why do you keep them so oppressed and exhausted, without giving them enough to eat or curing them of the sicknesses they incur from the excessive labor you give them, and they die, or rather you kill them, to extract and acquire gold.”
Terence Sweeney: Las Casas had no answer, no answer to the question of “By what right?” And he knew it. His livelihood, his lifestyle, all his wealth—all were inextricably bound up with this practice. And he knew he had to change. Montesinos’s sermon, his question, became a pivot point in the life of Las Casas. It became a pivot point in Spanish colonization
Ryan McDermott: This is Maria Cristina Rios Espinosa, researcher and professor at the School of Arts and Culture at the University of Sor Juana’s Cloister in Mexico City.
Maria Cristina Rios Espinosa: He gave up his encomienda and started his social activism in the defense of the Indigenous people rights, opposing and criticizing slavery.
Terence Sweeney: After hearing the sermon, Las Casas reflected more deeply on this question. He realized he had to give up his encomienda and his slaves; he couldn’t continue to be a landholder. However, at this time, it would have been illegal for him to just set the Indigenous free or to end his plantation, and so he had to hand it over to, to another encomienda holder. But he knew he needed to extract himself, and that freeing these enslaved persons would require changing the system itself. And that’s exactly what Las Casas set out to do.
Ryan McDermott: Over the next several years, Las Casas advocated for changes in laws and sought to organize a different, cooperative colonial model in Venezuela. The idea was that Spanish farmers and Indigenous people would work together. Colonization didn’t have to be violent. The attempt went terribly awry as the few farmers who joined the cooperative began trying to gain gold and fighting the Indigenous people. Deeply grieved by the failure of this project, Las Casas turned to the Dominicans—a Catholic religious order who already opposed colonization. He joined the Dominicans, took a vow to the order, and spent several years in prayer, silence, and study. He donned the medieval habit of a monk, he immersed himself in the study of medieval thought.
Terence Sweeney: Within the Dominican order, Las Casas would have steeped himself in the writings of two figures in particular: the North African theologian Augustine and the Dominican friar Thomas Aquinas. In these two thinkers, he found resources to help prepare him for his missionary work and for his tireless and endless opposition to colonization, which could no longer take on the “nicer” form he had tried to arrange in Venezuela. It had to end.
And he knew and warned that there would be serious consequences for the Spanish if they did not stop; the most serious consequence of all, the loss of eternal life, and damnation:
“All the things that have been done throughout the Indies…. have been contrary to all natural law and the law of nations, and also against divine law, and therefore is entirely… deserving of eternal fire.”
For Las Casas and any Catholic of this time, you needed to go to confession and receive absolution from a priest to avoid hell. But Las Casas had been made Bishop of Chiapas in Mexico, and he created a new standard: when you went to confession, in order for the confession to be accepted, you had to in a “free and public act before a notary” free your servants, your slaves. Not only did you have to free them, Las Casas insisted on reparations, reparations to cover the cost of every month, year, and day of labor that had been stolen from these workers. If you didn’t set them free, and you didn’t offer reparations, you couldn’t be absolved.
Ryan McDermott: Just as Montesinos’s words had drastically altered Las Casas’s life, now Las Casas’s words were drastically altering Spanish policy in the New World—at least for a time. The Spanish King, Charles I, actually listened to Las Casas’s warnings.
Maria Cristina Rios Espinosa: Las Casa was successful in the sense that the king heard his claims against genocide and the violent way Indigenous were evangelized by force.
The king sent a new audience, new investigators to see what was happening here in the Indies and created new laws, called New Laws, in 1546 that abolished the encomienda, and they were substituted by repartimientos, which prohibited violence against the Indigenous people and said they were not infidels, but Gentiles, the last Gentiles on Earth, and they should be treated as children in faith.
Ryan McDermott: The king’s “New Laws” phased out the encomienda system and banned the slavery of the Indigenous. The Laws were (unsurprisingly) unpopular amongst the conquistadors, and it led them to refuse to enforce them in Mexico, and it led to civil war in Peru. King Charles eventually backed down from the New Laws. But their impact was real; it led, for instance, to the end of slavery in Mexico. It seemed, for the moment, like Las Casas had won. But this victory actually generated a more insidious counter-move on the part of the colonizers—not just an attempt to restore slave labor, but an attempt to morally justify it.
After 20 years in the “New World,” the Spanish were faced by a demanding question. By what right do you keep them so oppressed? Las Casas had answered: They had no right at all. He wrote,
“Those who cause this war… violently usurp all the good previously mentioned against the will of their individual owners and thus violate the right of human society.”
But when Las Casas’s arguments threatened to wipe out the profitable colonization system for good, the colonizers responded by explaining that they did have a right. They began developing a theory of colonization to justify their seizure of the land and enslavement of the natives. And so, in a strange irony, one of the earliest movements of anti-racism also gave rise to an even more explicitly theorized racism.
III. A Nascent Racism [21:53-28:09]
Ryan McDermott: This new theory, justifying colonization and slavery, was based on the asserted superiority of the colonizers and the inferiority of the colonized.
Rolena Adorno: Everything was a hierarchy. That is, the lesser civilized, the more civilized, the more barbaric, the less barbaric, and so forth.
Terence Sweeney: For the Spanish, their “right” to colonization was grounded in the basic claim that the Indigenous were inferior. The Spanish didn’t deny the Indigenous’s humanity, they just insisted that there was a lower humanity. They didn’t quite level up to the Spanish. And people who were inferior needed to be led, needed to be ruled. Fernandez de Oviedo, an early theorist of colonization, described the Indigenous as “a people whose nature is idle and vicious, of little industry and vile, inclined to evil,” people with “thick skulls and bestial understanding.”
While many Spanish would refer to them as brutes or dogs, one of their favorite terms for the Indigenous, more “advanced” theorizers in legal arguments and philosophical treatises and history texts, said they were more like homunculi, or little humans, half-humans. But they also liked to call them “natural slaves.”
David Orique: Occasionally you’ll hear people—“Oh, they thought they didn’t have a soul, or they weren’t humans.” That’s nonsense. They knew they were humans. Part of it was the debate of what level of humanity.
Terence Sweeney: The greatest theorizer, if you will, of colonization was one Juan Gines de Sepulveda, a Spanish humanist who made his reputation translating classical texts, engaging with other humanists, and writing dialogues. He was thoroughly steeped in this new, modern world of Renaissance scholarship. He saw this new form of scholarship, this new way of thinking, as vastly superior to the tired, medieval way.
Ryan McDermott: As a humanist, Sepulveda represents the modern outlook as we’ve discussed it in this series. To think of yourself as modern is to claim that you live in a time qualitatively different from the past. True, humanists were trying to recover one version of the past—the ancient past. But they did so partly to cut off and separate themselves from their more recent past, the last several centuries of European history. Sepulveda, for example, rejected the old medieval, scholastic modes of thought and regarded medieval philosophy, from the people who Las Casas had studied, like Aquinas, as mere barbarism. If modernity is a way of thinking about the present that subordinates and devalues the past, then Sepulveda embraced modernity.
And from that position, on that cutting edge of his contemporary intellectual world, Sepulveda made clear by what right the Spaniards held the Indian peoples as slaves. He wrote:
“The Spanish have a perfect right to rule these barbarians of the New World who in prudence, skill, virtues, and humanity are as inferior to the Spanish as children to adults, or women to men, for there exists between the two as great a difference as between savage and cruel races and the most merciful, between the most intemperate and temperate and, I might even say, between apes and men.”
Now, Sepulveda wasn’t a colonizer himself, but he devised theories justifying colonization from a purely intellectual position. The Spanish had a right to conquer the native peoples because—so he claimed—the natives lacked the full-fledged humanity that the Spanish possessed. He referred to them as “these half-men (homunculi), in whom you will barely find the vestiges of humanity,” They had neither the rationality nor the self-control to properly govern themselves, and so the Spanish were justified in ruling over them.
Here’s Professor Orique again:
David Orique: Las Casas would say they were fully rational, social, and free, and he has a, he elaborately lays out how he makes that argument. Both in, um, his debate with Sepulveda and others too that are trying to argue that no, somehow the Indigenous are somehow either not fully rational or, you know, other, other sets of reasons why the Spanish had a right to, you know, justify their conquest and justify the colonial system. We’ve seen that argument that, that comes back regularly. It doesn’t go away. When we need to dehumanize another human being, sort of question their intelligence, or their, um, some other level of their sort of basic human rights.
Ryan McDermott: Sepulveda and his fellow theorists changed the nature of the contest. The dispute over colonization was no longer simply a matter of might versus right. The colonial theorists tried to frame it as a question of right versus right—of one set of valid philosophical arguments against another.
[26:53]
Maria Cristina Rios Espinosa: It was a philosophical and political debate. We can see it was the first debate of modernity. Gines’ argument was, based in Aristotle’s argument, that said that the inhabitants of the Indies of America were naturally barbaric and irrational, so they had a nature for obedience. Since the Spaniards as conquerors were rational and Christians, that is to say they were civilized, and the Indigenous were uncivilized and irrational, and they were not really humans—says this argument of Gines de Sepulveda—it was justified to make them work because of their inferiority, and in the case they denied obedience to the Spaniard emperor, you can make war to them.
Ryan McDermott: Las Casas’s critique of colonization led to the development of a full-blown theory of why colonialism was justified, based in claims about natural racial inferiority. And that meant Las Casas had more work to do. He had to develop his own full-blown theory of anti-racism.
IV. A Nascent (Christian) Anti-Racism [28:10-36:48]
Modern racism originates in the contention that there are inferior and superior classifications of humans. It would take further theorization over the centuries to formulate its rigid and supposedly scientific classifications of people into races—a development that would become especially visible in the nineteenth century. But the justification of colonization by hierarchy is an early and key milestone of modern racism—and Las Casas wholeheartedly rejected that idea of hierarchy.
Rolena Adorno: And this, we could say, is the beginning of an answer about his anti-racism. He rejected that hierarchy entirely: there is no natural hierarchy in that regard.
Terence Sweeney: At every turn, Las Casas made the argument that the Indigenous were in no way inferior. They were equal to the Spanish, in fact in some areas he said they were superior. Where the Spanish conquistadors claimed, for example, that the Indigenous were inferior rationally where they, because they lacked governments, they had no cities, they barely had language, Las Casas argued the opposite.
Maria Cristina Rios Espinosa: They were equals because they were rational. He proves the rationality of Indigenous people because Indigenous people had a government, they had pyramids, they had commerce, labor organization, European constructions in their main cities, labor division, agriculture.
David Orique: The way I’ve read him and the way many others read him too, is that he did see the full humanity of them. And as a matter of fact, he’s robust in his, his refutation of Sepulveda. Whereas Sepulveda is saying, No, we need to subjugate them, you know, teach them Spanish ways, and then we’re basically imposing Christianity on them. And that implies, you have to have a sense of your superiority and their inferiority. And I argue that Las Casas saw them as, as the other, as equally, as their other. He is arguing for anthropological continuity, that they are equal in dignity because they’re rational and social and free. And he’s pulling from Thomas, he’s pulling from his other sort of training, St. Thomas Aquinas, philosophically and theologically.
Terence Sweeney: Las Casas wrote, “All humankind is one and all are alike with respect to their origin and nature.”
Ryan McDermott: Well, that sounds kind of... modern. I mean, “All humankind is one” is something we can imagine someone saying in the twenty-first century to oppose racism. Does that explain why Las Casas said it? I mean, is Las Casas “ahead of his time,” is he a “proto-modern”?
Terence Sweeney: I mean, the time that’s coming, uh, in this period of the 1500s is a time of colonization, global imperialism, and the increasing development of racial hierarchies that have pervaded the modern era. The idea that Las Casas opposed colonialism and racism because he was “ahead of his time” is, is pretty hard to justify in light of the times that are coming. Uh, four hundred years of colonization and six hundred years of pervasive white supremacy. So the key thing I think to understand about his own anti-racism and the debate between Las Casas and Sepulveda is that Las Casas is kind of the old-fashioned one. It’s Sepulveda, the kind of modern Renaissance thinker who’s a figure of his time, justifying the modern project of colonization. It’s Las Casas, the guy in a medieval monk’s habit, who’s the one who’s resisting, resisting for pretty medieval principles.
Ryan McDermott: Wow, that’s fascinating! So, Sepulveda is the future; he’s the one that has the best books on his side. He’s the one that has the modern techniques on his side, and he’s coming up with these proposals that are really overturning, it sounds like, traditional Christian morality on slavery and on what is coming to be known as race. How, how, how did that happen?
Terence Sweeney: Yeah, I mean, Sepulveda, he’s, he’s the modern, he’s the one, he’s writing responses to, to Erasmus engaging with the kind of, the big shots of, of that time period. And it’s Las Casas, on the other hand, who’s, you know, stuck we might say—certainly someone like Erasmus or Sepulveda would say, stuck—in scholasticism. Las Casas is constantly turning to canon law, and any of you who have read canon law will know that it’s pretty dry and pretty old-fashioned. So to claim that Las Casas is surprisingly modern is to miss often that the modern is colonial and racial, whereas Las Casas was trying for something else, perhaps a different kind of modernity, certainly a different relationship to the Indigenous, one more based in medieval Catholic theology, in principles of natural law and in principles of dusty old canon law.
[33:11]
Ryan McDermott: So what are some of those most important principles, those most important tenets of, of theology for Las Casas’s arguments against racial hierarchies?
Terence Sweeney: The key for Las Casas is this insistence that all humanity is one, and as he says, it’s grounded in our origin and our nature. The origin, one, is God, who made humanity and made them all one. This is really important for Las Casas in the sense of why the story of Adam and Eve is important. One of Las Casas’s theological heroes, St. Augustine, puts it this way: “Human nature can call upon nothing more appropriate [to heal discord] … than the remembrance of Adam, that first parent of us all.”
Ryan McDermott: And it wasn’t just our origins that made racism unacceptable, it was also our destination.
Terence Sweeney: Exactly. That’s why evangelization was so important for Las Casas’s resistance to racism and racial hierarchies. His medieval training made him a teleological thinker. Teleology means thinking about things in terms of their ultimate purpose. For Las Casas, humanity’s ultimate purpose is to be with God. Not just Europeans’ purpose—everyone’s. This meant Christians had a duty to evangelize, to let the whole world know the Good News that God had come to save us. Las Casas wrote, “It is due to the will and work of Christ… that God’s chosen should be called… from every race… The reason is, they are all human beings.”
Ryan McDermott: But didn’t Sepulveda and others also want the Indigenous to convert to Christianity?
Terence Sweeney: Yes—but not by their own choice. Sepulveda held that the Indigenous could and should be compelled towards Christianity because he believed they were less rational; they couldn’t be trusted to make this decision on their own. He had a kind of two-tier model of evangelization: persuasion and reason for “superior” races, compulsion and force for “inferior” ones.
Ryan McDermott: And Las Casas, was his approach different? Or, how was it?
Terence Sweeney: It was completely different. He believed in, as he said, “One way, one way only, of teaching a living faith, to everyone, everywhere, always… the way that wins the mind with reasons, that wins the will with gentleness, with invitation.” He was firm that conversion could never be done by force; people had to choose Christianity. To hold that some people had to be evangelized differently was to deny the unity and essential equality of all humanity, which to Las Casas was unacceptable.
Las Casas’ view of evangelization centered on a core, and rather old, theological claim. Believing that different human beings have kind of inferior capacities and natures meant believing that God made a mistake when he made us, that God didn’t make us very well. But that can’t be the case. God created one human family, and he didn’t make part of the family faulty, because God doesn’t have faults. And so when he makes, he makes well. To hold otherwise is to think that God failed or was unable to do a good job. Las Casas agreed with, and in some ways anticipated, a famous sermon by Martin Luther King, when he cried out, “The ringing cry of the Christian faith is that our God is able.” To think some are inferior or that we can’t overcome racism, or that people have different origins and different ends is to think that our God is not able.
V. The Great Debate [36:48-45:02]
Ryan McDermott: Las Casas proffered his response to racism and colonization over the course of decades of advocacy, legal briefs, philosophical reflections, and spiritual direction. He wrote three different books about the topic: a History of the Indies, a Defense of the Indians, a Brief history of the Indies, and countless other texts and letters.
Terence Sweeney: And he traveled. He traveled across the Atlantic multiple times. He traveled through Spain, went to multiple Caribbean Islands, went to Venezuela. As bishop of Chiapas he traveled through what we now call Nicaragua. He went all the way up to Mexico City and into jungles. He faced possible shipwrecks, he went everywhere, writing popes, kings, and princes. Endlessly creative, he was endlessly active. Sometimes bitter, and yet never gave up on his call for the end of colonization.
And these actions forced the world to take notice. Las Casas was on the lips of the powerful. In 1550, the King of Spain, Charles V, called Las Casas and his rival Sepulveda to Valladolid to debate the question of Spanish colonization—and the shape of the future of the Americas.
Rolena Adorno: The Valladolid debate is one of the iconic moments in the sixteenth century. The years are 1550 and 1551. Charles, at this point Charles V, convened a Junta, a royal gathering to assess the righteousness or lack of justice of the conquest by the Spanish in the Americas. Now the amusing thing is that when Las Casas, well, I should say, when Sepulveda kicked it off, first day, first session, he spoke for three hours. Las Casa comes on and speaks for five full days.
Ryan McDermott: The King wanted to know if the colonization was justified. Could it continue? Did the Spanish need to liberate the Indians, recognizing their governments, and perhaps even leave the New World?
Sepulveda spoke first. He argued that the Spanish could wage war against the Indigenous people because the Indigenous were barbaric and idolatrous, because the Spanish could stamp out the Indigenous practice of human sacrifice, and because the Indigenous needed to be evangelized. Then Las Casas spoke.
Rolena Adorno: He noted that Sepulveda spoke in terms of the lesser and the greater. Everything was a hierarchy. That is the lesser civilized, the more civilized, the more barbaric, the less barbaric and so forth. Las Casas said these hierarchies do not pertain when it is a question of the relationship among peoples. The relationship among peoples in the world do not meet this criteria. In the mutual relations among peoples, there is no such hierarchy.
[40:01]
Ryan McDermott: So who won the debate? The strange thing is, we don’t know.
Rolena Adorno: What did those fourteen judges decide? Well, frankly, we don’t know. We don’t have the, a final disposition from those fourteen judges. But as a result, the conquests were officially resumed and things went on as they had been.
Ryan McDermott: The judges didn’t declare who won philosophically. But it’s clear who won in practice. Conquest and colonization continued, and the slave trade only expanded—especially enslavement of Africans. Las Casas himself recommended at one point that slaves from Africa be brought to work the plantations in the Americas. He saw the Indigenous Americans dying on plantations and seemed to have believed that African slaves would be better able to tolerate the work. He also believed, mistakenly as he later learned, that these African slaves had been captured in what he believed to be “just war.”
Rolena Adorno: He, like everybody, assumed that these were slaves justly taken as the product of war against the enemy, and it was Islam, and that can never be overlooked. However, on discovering that that was not the case, that’s when he said, Oh my Lord, what a huge mistake.
David Orique: And then he lamented almost forty years later, he’s lamenting ever having recommended bringing African slaves in. The way he understood it from, at that time in the fifteen, in 1516, he, he lamented that and he, you know, said it was a terrible mistake to ever recommend that.
Ryan McDermott: Later, Las Casas wrote that “I can never be sure that this ignorance of mine is really an adequate excuse for me before the judgment seat of God.” Perhaps more significant than his regret is that he advocated for the end of the African slave trade, and slavery writ large, hundreds of years before any robust abolition movement.
Terence Sweeney: Las Casas’s legacy isn’t unmixed. But perhaps what’s often most compelling about him is when he’s able to recognize that he’s wrong, and change course. His actions and advocacy were profound and inspiring, particularly for later generations in the Spanish colonized regions, for people who wanted to end that colonization and began the independence movements in Latin America.
Rolena Adorno: At the time of Latin American independence, when most of the republics of Latin America liberated themselves from the governance of Spain, and this is in the 1810s to 1820s mostly with some exceptions, Puerto Rico and so, and the Philippines and so on.
The fact is that Las Casas was taken as the banner from Simón Bolívar onward for the just fight for the independence of these peoples. Now, there’s plenty of complication there, but that was the fact. Then with the foundation of the United Nations, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Las Casas and a few others were considered as antecedents of what that Universal Declaration of Human Rights meant. To Las Casa, it meant this: all humanity is one. And that was his view.
Ryan McDermott: At times, Las Casas failed to live up to his own vision of human rights. But Las Casas was one of the first people to articulate the view of universal human rights that we regard as so morally foundational today. And his life still proves inspirational for people defending those rights for particularly vulnerable groups.
Maria Cristina Rios Espinosa: Contemporary people should care for Las Casas because he inaugurated the defense of natural rights in America, and what we know nowadays as human rights. And it’s important also, because this slavery and this non-respect of the rights of the Indigenous people is still going on in Latin America, mm-hmm, because they are invading where they live because they want to urbanize, they take out the water, mm-hm, they take out their sacred places, and they are exterminating their languages. That is why Bartolomé de Las Casas’ activism is still necessary in contemporary people.
VI. Conclusion [45:03-51:20]
Ryan McDermott: Tracing a genealogy of racism can tell us a lot about the nature of racism—the personal, structural, and ideological aspects of racism—and how it continues to shape our times. But we need to start telling the stories of anti-racism too if we are going to do the work of building a just society. We can’t just critique; we need to emulate good models. We can’t just tear down; we also need to build up.
Terence Sweeney: This means doing more historical work. It means highlighting the resistance of the Indigenous to conquest. It means recovering figures like Enriquillo, a friend of Las Casas and one of the Taino people indigenous to the island of Hispaniola. Enriquillo led the most successful revolt of the Taino people against the Spanish from 1519 to 1533.
Telling these stories means recognizing that Las Casas was part of a movement of many people, a movement featuring Franciscan and Dominican friars, a movement that worked in tandem with the Indigenous themselves. It means broadening out and seeing the importance of Our Lady of Guadalupe for Indigenous movements in Mexico and beyond. None of this means we can paper over how many Christians, like Sepulveda, were involved in developing racist theories and structures of colonization. But we can, in recovering these anti-racist Christian voices, see how an anti-racist Christianity is fundamentally a truer one.
Rediscovering Las Casas’ Christian resistance to racism shines light on subsequent Christian resistance, in movements like abolitionism, especially amongst the Quakers, and in the Civil Rights movement’s deep Christian roots in Black Christian Churches and in the Southern Christian Leadership Council.
Sound: Joseph E. Lowery, Voices of the Civil Rights Movement Black preachers had been the natural heads of most of the movement because, I guess two reasons—one, black preachers were the freest, most independent people in the community, and secondly, the movement had a spiritual base, so the church became the background and the home base of the movement. (0:00-0:30)
Ryan McDermott: This is Reverend Joseph E. Lowery, Co-founder and President Emeritus of Southern Christian Leadership Conference, speaking with Voices of the Civil Rights Movement. His legacy and the legacy of Christian civil rights activism continues today with figures like Esau McCaulley, an associate professor of the New Testament at Wheaton College. With N.T. Wright, Professor McCaulley teaches an online class called “Ethnicity, Justice, and the People of God.” The course description reads, “Historically, some in the Church have used scripture to enable structures of injustice. Others have used these same scriptures to resist these damaging systems. Beginning with the conviction that God’s plan has always been for a gathering of diverse peoples to share in the divine story … We invite you to deepen your understanding of how race, justice, and faith come together in the life of God’s people.” Here’s Professor McCaulley when asked what his hope is for the course:
Sound: Esau McCaulley, N.T. Wright Online What I really hope is that in a world that is saying that we need to toss the scriptures aside in order to find justice, that we can, that people will decide that it is through a close reading of Biblical text they find the justice that that our hearts long for. (0:04-0:18)
And when you open up the Gospels, you see a guy who cares about the poor and the marginalized, and so that, in other words, I want people to begin to see the Biblical testimony about caring about justice; and different cultures are part of spiritual formation, of discipleship, they’re not an extra, they’re not an optional add-on that we do, we have, we’ve got everything else done spiritually, we add on diversity and justice. (1:32-1:57)
Ryan McDermott: Determining how to oppose racism in the present requires that we consider past approaches to opposing racism. To look back to the life and writings of Bartolomé de Las Casas is to discover a vision of a universal humanity, one whose origins and ends are found in a God beyond any race or nation. To tell only the stories of racism is to be trapped within the story of racism. To recall the origins and developments of resistance to racism and of how people justified that resistance allows us to see different possibilities for different ways to oppose racism today. It allows actual dialogue to occur; it allows allies to grow from within different belief traditions.
Terence Sweeney: For Las Casas, anti-racism was a logical implication of the soundest medieval tradition, as opposed to modernist “innovations” in ethical reasoning. Resistance to racism for him was inextricable from Christianity itself, from God’s words and God’s commandments.
Creative genealogies can give us the resources to do the work we have to do now, in the present. If we don’t share Las Casas’ Christianity, we can still find inspiration in his work to dismantle the encomienda system and to resist the earliest origins of racism. If we do share his faith, we can embrace his work of fighting against racism as living out “the will and work of Christ” just as Las Casas thought, embracing it for the same, very devotional, and even un-modern reasons that he did.
Ryan McDermott: Not everyone agrees on a single way to enact or even to theorize opposition to racism. But looking back to the multiple histories of that opposition can allow people from different traditions to become allies in the shared goal of justice for all, even if they are drawing on different resources in the past. And the different history that we uncover when we look at figures like Bartolomé de Las Casas shows how it’s possible for us to travel along different roads and still share the goal of overcoming racism.