However, according to Wesleyan University professor Abdelmajid Hannoum, such attitudes were not

prevalent until the 18th and 19th centuries. He argues that some accounts of Arabic texts, such as
those of Ibn Khaldun, were mistranslations by French Orientalists projecting racist
and colonialist views of the 19th century into their translations of medieval Arabic writings. [121] James
E. Lindsay also argues that the concept of an Arab identity itself did not exist until modern times.[122]

Limpieza de sangre
Further information: Limpieza de sangre
With the Umayyad Caliphate's conquest of Hispania, Muslim Arabs and Berbers overthrew the
previous Visigothic rulers and created Al-Andalus,[123] which contributed to the Golden age of Jewish
culture, and lasted for six centuries. [124] It was followed by the centuries-long Reconquista,
[125]
 terminated under the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand V and Isabella I. The legacy
Catholic Spaniards then formulated the Cleanliness of blood doctrine. It was during this time in
history that the Western concept of aristocratic "blue blood" emerged in a racialized, religious and
feudal context,[126] so as to stem the upward social mobility of the converted New Christians. Robert
Lacey explains:
It was the Spaniards who gave the world the notion that an aristocrat's blood is not red but blue. The
Spanish nobility started taking shape around the ninth century in classic military fashion, occupying
land as warriors on horseback. They were to continue the process for more than five hundred years,
clawing back sections of the peninsula from its Moorish occupiers, and a nobleman demonstrated
his pedigree by holding up his sword arm to display the filigree of blue-blooded veins beneath his
pale skin—proof that his birth had not been contaminated by the dark-skinned enemy. Sangre azul,
blue blood, was thus a euphemism for being a white man—Spain's own particular reminder that the
refined footsteps of the aristocracy through history carry the rather less refined spoor of racism. [127]
Following the expulsion of the Arabic Moors and most of the Sephardic Jews from the Iberian
peninsula, the remaining Jews and Muslims were forced to convert to Roman Catholicism, becoming
"New Christians", who were sometimes discriminated against by the "Old Christians" in some cities
(including Toledo), despite condemnations by the Church and the State, which both welcomed the
new flock.[126] The Inquisition was carried out by members of the Dominican Order in order to weed
out the converts who still practiced Judaism and Islam in secret. The system and ideology of
the limpieza de sangre ostracized false Christian converts from society in order to protect it
against treason.[128] The remnants of such legislation persevered into the 19th century in military
contexts.[129]
In Portugal, the legal distinction between New and Old Christian was only ended through a legal
decree issued by the Marquis of Pombal in 1772, almost three centuries after the implementation of
the racist discrimination. The limpieza de sangre legislation was common also during
the colonization of the Americas, where it led to the racial and feudal separation of peoples and
social strata in the colonies. It was however often ignored in practice, as the new colonies needed
skilled people.[130]
A 16th-century illustration by Flemish Protestant Theodor de Bry for Las Casas's Brevisima relación de la
destrucción de las Indias, depicting Spanish atrocities during the conquest of Cuba.
At the end of the Renaissance, the Valladolid debate (1550–1551), concerning the treatment of
the natives of the "New World" pitted the Dominican friar and Bishop of Chiapas, Bartolomé de Las
Casas, to another Dominican and Humanist philosopher, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda. The latter
argued that the Indians practiced human sacrifice of innocents, cannibalism, and other such "crimes
against nature"; they were unacceptable and should be suppressed by any means possible including
war,[131] thus reducing them to slavery or serfdom was in accordance with Catholic theology
and natural law. To the contrary, Bartolomé de Las Casas argued that the Amerindians were free
men in the natural order and deserved the same treatment as others, according to Catholic theology.
It was one of the many controversies concerning racism, slavery, religion, and European morality
that would arise in the following centuries and which resulted in the legislation protecting the natives.
[132]
 The marriage between Luisa de Abrego, a free black domestic servant from Seville and Miguel
Rodríguez, a white segovian conquistador in 1565 in St. Augustine (Spanish Florida), is the first
known and recorded Christian marriage anywhere in the continental United States. [133]
Although antisemitism has a long history, related to Christianity and native Egyptian or Greek
religions[134] (anti-Judaism), racism itself is sometimes described as a modern phenomenon. In the
view of the French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault, the first formulation of racism emerged
in the Early Modern period as the "discourse of race struggle", and a historical and political
discourse, which Foucault opposed to the philosophical and juridical discourse of sovereignty.[135] On
the other hand, e.g. Chinese self-identification as a "yellow race" predated such European racial
concepts.[136]
This European analysis, which first appeared in Great Britain, was then carried on in France by such
people as Boulainvilliers, Nicolas Fréret, and then, during the 1789 French Revolution, Sieyès, and
afterwards, Augustin Thierry and Cournot. Boulainvilliers, who created the matrix of such racist
discourse in medieval France, conceived of the "race" as being something closer to the sense of a
"nation", that is, in his time, the "race" meant the "people".
He conceived of France as being divided between various nations – the unified nation-state is
an anachronism here – which themselves formed different "races". Boulainvilliers opposed
the absolute monarchy, which tried to bypass the aristocracy by establishing a direct relationship to
the Third Estate. Thus, he developed the theory that the French aristocrats were the descendants of
foreign invaders, whom he called the "Franks", while according to him, the Third Estate constituted
the autochthonous, vanquished Gallo-Romans, who were dominated by the Frankish aristocracy as
a consequence of the right of conquest. Early modern racism was opposed to nationalism and the
nation-state: the Comte de Montlosier, in exile during the French Revolution, who borrowed
Boulainvilliers' discourse on the "Nordic race" as being the French aristocracy that invaded the
plebeian "Gauls", thus showed his contempt for the Third Estate, calling it "this new people born of
slaves ... mixture of all races and of all times".

19th century

Advertisement for Pears' Soap Caption reads, "Matchless for the complexion..." Illustration of 'before and after'
use of soap by black child in the bath. Showing soap washes off his dark complexion.
While 19th-century racism became closely intertwined with nationalism, [137] leading to the ethnic
nationalist discourse that identified the "race" with the "folk", leading to such movements as pan-
Germanism, pan-Turkism, pan-Arabism, and pan-Slavism, medieval racism precisely divided the
nation into various non-biological "races", which were thought to be the consequence of historical
conquests and social conflicts. Michel Foucault traced the genealogy of modern racism to this
medieval "historical and political discourse of race struggle". According to him, it divided itself in the
19th century according to two rival lines: on one hand, it was incorporated by racists, biologists
and eugenicists, who gave it the modern sense of "race", and they also transformed this popular
discourse into a "state racism" (e.g., Nazism). On the other hand, Marxism also seized this discourse
founded on the assumption of a political struggle that provided the real engine of history and
continued to act underneath the apparent peace. Thus, Marxists transformed the essentialist notion
of "race" into the historical notion of "class struggle", defined by socially structured positions:
capitalist or proletarian. In The Will to Knowledge (1976), Foucault analyzed another opponent of the
"race struggle" discourse: Sigmund Freud's psychoanalysis, which opposed the concept of
"blood heredity", prevalent in the 19th century racist discourse.
Authors such as Hannah Arendt, in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, have said that the
racist ideology (popular racism) which developed at the end of the 19th century helped legitimize
the imperialist conquests of foreign territories and the atrocities that sometimes accompanied them
(such as the Herero and Namaqua Genocide of 1904–1907 or the Armenian Genocide of 1915–
1917). Rudyard Kipling's poem, The White Man's Burden (1899), is one of the more famous
illustrations of the belief in the inherent superiority of the European culture over the rest of the world,
though it is also thought to be a satirical appraisal of such imperialism. Racist ideology thus helped
legitimize the conquest and incorporation of foreign territories into an empire, which were regarded
as a humanitarian obligation partially as a result of these racist beliefs.