Sex, COVID-19, and Racism: Part 3
In the last post, I posed the question, “What happens if we read the Bible through the lens of minority voices?”
In response to the latest incident of police brutality, resulting in the loss of the life of George Floyd (not to discount the deaths of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Rayshard Brooks, and countless of other Black and Brown bodies), there’s been an enormous surge of support and protests on behalf of Black bodies.
In the last two weeks, I’ve read dozens of articles about frontlining Black voices, from Black-owned small businesses to lists of books and other media written and produced by Black men and women.
My hope is that you’re finding some sort of way to participate in advocacy for Black voices and bodies, and that that will continue in the month of July, August, the year 2021, and onward.
I’ve been asking several questions over the last few weeks:
How do groups, specifically Christianity, gain power?
How did we get to the discrimination of bodies? As I mentioned in the last post, folks have created ingroups and outgroups for millenia.
How far back does this particular brand of discrimination—white, Eurocentric bodies and discourses dictating trends, expectations, and physical expectations for non-White bodies—go?
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For about 800 years, the southern part of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal), or Al-Andalus, was governed by Muslims.
Al-Andalus certainly had its problems. There was infighting among the royal family, and a bit of economic injustice. Islamic caliphates have been historically funded by zakats, alms and tithes paid by Muslims, and jizyas, taxes paid by non-Muslim male, able-bodied residents (not women, children, elderly, or ill). Jizyas specifically funded public expenditures, and provided physical protection and certain freedoms, including the freedom of religion. Non-Muslims complained about the additional logistical and psychological burdens of paying taxes that Muslim residents didn’t have to experience.
However, al-Andalus, specifically Cordoba, its capital, the largest city in Europe in the 10th century, was an economic, cultural, and scientific hotspot. Cordoba, which is about two and a half hours away from Granada, was the site for innovations in trigonometry, surgery, astronomy, and pharmacology, and also the first location where Muslims, Christians, and Jews collaborated and exchanged cultural advancement.
What followed in al-Andalus is a process that’s repeated itself throughout history in this violent intersection between race, privilege, and religion:
A group of people, in the name of the church/Christianity/other religious affiliation, begin as a minority, enter into violent conflict with other people, often native people, take over their land, property, and people through whatever means possible, in the name of God, and establish themselves as the dominant culture, whereupon:
Native people are expected to convert to Christianity.
The cultural and academic components of the conquered land become whitewashed, often setting the culture back decades (if not centuries) developmentally.
The bodies and voices of the conquered people become subjugated in the process.
It started small. Christians and Jews would protest, usually against the jizya, and gather the assistance of their northern neighbors, who happened to be Christian-dominated communities influenced by Papal Europe. Usually al-Andalus survived and reoriented itself, despite a geographical shrink. In 1230, the Nasrid Empire established a 250-year long empire, with Granada as its base, where Muslims, Jewish, and Christian people exchanged ideas, collaborated on academic developments, and experienced economic wealth.
I had the privilege of visiting Granada a few years ago; this image is taken from my Airbnb in the Albaicin, the old Muslim quarter of Granada, with the Alhambra, the governing house of the Nasrid Empire, illustriously located in the background, and my favorite wine, tempranillo, in the foreground.
During the reign of the Nasrids, the rest of Europe was under a quiet siege from the Catholic Church. After helping to expel the Muslims and Jews from Eastern Europe and the former Byzantine Empire in the Crusades, the Catholic Church spent the 13th-15th centuries consolidating power within Europe. Central and Western Europe still had its individual kingdoms and fiefdoms, but the Catholic Church became a unifying body, collaborating with local legislative units through inquisitions, which reduced “religious heresy” and maintained a sense of order.
Western and Central Europe weren’t particularly economically or culturally diverse. Kingdoms that were influenced by the Church were riddled with disease and poverty. Most literature and architecture centered around the development of the Church, be that the Gothic architectural tastings of cathedrals or the monastic and theological reflections of Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas Aquinas, and other religiously-informed contemporaries. The Catholic Church did expand its wealth through the creation and implementation of weaponry, which it used both on non-Christians and Christians, but its warlike mentality further reinforced its diminished emphasis on intellectualism, public health, and economic diversity.
Generally speaking, pluralism and cultural diversity were not a thing in 15th century Europe.
Spain was largely spared from this until 1469, when Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castille, the two dominant kingdoms in the Iberian Peninsula, were married. The Catholic Monarchs.
Over the next 350 years, Ferdinand and Isabella (and ensuing Spanish royalty) oversaw the Spanish Inquisition, an attempt to eradicate heresy, the practice of religious beliefs and morals that were not aligned with the Catholic Church. Remember, in 15th century Europe, leaders were assumed to be selected by God; there was no separation of Church and state.
Not surprisingly (sadly), the Spanish Inquisition started with the expulsion of the Jews; by the 16th century, the Inquisition pursued the eradication of Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. Jews and Muslims were given two options through the Alhambra Decree: convert, or leave. Conversos assimilated into Catholic culture, while those who left were often tortured or killed before escaping the Iberian Peninsula.
The Spanish Inquisition turned into a police force for the Spanish crown, which oversaw the most defining part of Catholic culture: obedience to God (and the crown). Folks were accused anonymously of heresy or a crime against a person or property, subjected to solitary confinement, tortured through some advanced sadist devices, treated to a trial, often without adequate defense, and accept a formal punishment, often including physical abuse and public execution.
The 16th-18th centuries were an economically and sociologically depressed period for Spain. In a monocultural system where the Catholic Church was the centralizing cultural and economic force, the Spanish government had to seek income through more totalitarian sources. They gained royalties through confiscation of property through the Spanish Inquisition. They colonized the Caribbean, overwhelming native populations and stealing natural resources for the Spanish Kingdom. They created a jizya-like system for the Basque and Catalan regions of Spain, capitalizing off of their revenue in return for the promise to not invade those cultures.
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In the last 800 years, we see this process repeated throughout the world, where the Catholic Church (or, later, in the 18th through 20th centuries, strands of the Protestant Church), overtake a pre-existing collective of people, often with violence and human rights violations, without offering economic or cultural protection, let alone growth:
Colonization of North America, both by Catholic and Puritan Christians, and the destruction of the lands, cultures, and languages of countless Native tribes.
The enslavement of hundreds of millions of African bodies in Western Europe and North America, a process that has transitioned in the United States from slavery to Jim Crow to our current model, prison labor exploitation.
The European colonization of Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries, rooted in expanding Christian ideals and morals, which resulted in the demarcation of Africa by European-defined geographical lines, rather than the tribal demarcations that Africans used for the prior millennia, and at the expense of human lives and natural resources.
The Evangelical coup of the Republican Party starting in the 1970s in the Deep South, in conjunction with the rise of the Moral Majority and White supremacist rhetoric. While minority groups have often spearheaded important cultural and artistic trends in the South, it’s no coincidence that former Confederate states continue to be the most economically depressed regions of this country.
This is what happens when a formerly minority group becomes the dominant culture. Left unchecked (as Catholic, Protestant, and Evangelical churches often have), the dominant culture becomes more interested in staying in power, often through exploitative measures, than it is in promoting the democratic values of inclusiveness, open dialogue, and the equitable exchange of ideas and products. The dominant culture becomes the oppressor, the Inquisition that severely punishes nonconformity. The dominant culture loses a sense of its own cultural distinctions, defining itself on what it isn’t (not gay, not Black, not old, not sinful) rather than what it is.
This is Whiteness.
This is the history of the Christian Church.
Antiracism begins with acknowledging these discriminatory patterns, and seeks to find new ways to celebrate the diversity of ways that folks have to find joy, health, and meaning in their lives.