2.6 A Medieval Anti-Racist
What if racism shared an origin with opposition to racism? What if the condemnation of injustice gave rise both to an early form of anti-racism and to the racial hierarchies that haunt the modern era? Rolena Adorno, David Orique, and María Cristina Ríos Espinosa tell the story of how Bartolomé de las Casas, a Dominican missionary to New Spain, came to racial consciousness in the presence of slavery. His intellectual rebellion spurred slavery’s apologists to more strident and sinister modes of defense—but also laid a lasting Christian groundwork for the fight against racial injustice.
Episode released Dec 6, 2023.
Researcher, writer, and episode producer: Terence Sweeney, Assistant Teaching Professor, Honors College, Villanova University
Art Direction and Animation: Dimitrios Salonikios
Video Writer and Producer: Jasmine Adams Piescik
Featured Scholars: Rolena Adorno, Sterling Professor Emerita of Spanish, Yale University
María Cristina Ríos Espinosa, Professor of Arts, Humanities, and Culture, University of Sor Juana’s Cloister, Mexico City
David Orique, Professor of History, Providence College
Special thanks to: Chiyuma Elliott, Michael Sawyer
Resources
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The transcript for Episode 2.6 is available here.
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This episode's Teaching Aid is available here.
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Bartolome de las Casas. In Defense of the Indians. Translated by Stafford Poole, CM. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 1992.
—. The Only Way. Edited by Helen Rand Parish. Translated by Francis Patrick Sullivan, SJ. New York, NY: Paulist Press, 1992.
—. To Heaven or to Hell: Bartolome de las Casas’s Confesionario. Translated and Edited David Thomas Orique, OP. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2018.
Clayton, Lawrence A. Bartolome de las Casas: A Biography. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Jordan, Winthrop. White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro 1550-1812. University of North Carolina Press, 2012.
Lantigua, David. Infidels and Empires in a New World Order: Early Modern Spanish Contributions to International Legal Thought. Cambridge University Press, 2020.
