Unsettling Man in Europe: Wynter and the Race–Religion Constellation

Abstract

Sylvia Wynter brings to light a structural entanglement between race and religion that is fundamental to identifying racism’s logic. This logic is continuous albeit often masked in particular in European race–religion constellations such as antisemitism and islamophobia. Focusing on the Americas, Wynter reveals a structural epistemic continuity between ‘religious’, rational and scientific racism. Nonetheless, Wynter marks a discontinuity between pre- and post-1492, by distinguishing between the Christian subject and Man, the overrepresentation of the human. In this essay, which focuses on European entanglements of race and religion, a process of dehumanization and its historical and geographic continuities is more discernible. As such, I question Wynter’s discontinuity, arguing that the Christian subject was conceived of as the only full conception of the human (although not without debate or inconsistencies), which meant that non-Christians were de-facto and de-jure excluded from the political community and suffered degrees of dehumanization. Within the concept of dehumanization, I focus on the entanglement of race and religion, or more specifically Whiteness and Christianity, as distinct markers of supremacy/difference and show that the Church had, and asserted, the power to produce both lesser and non-humans.

1. Introduction

As a critical philosopher of race in Europe, Sylvia Wynter’s oeuvre has inspired my conceptualisation of dehumanisation as a framework that challenges the problematic separation of race and religion. For scholars studying racism in Europe, this is essential at a time when islamophobia is a daily reality, antisemitism is (once again) on the rise, in new and older forms, and antizyganism (racism against Roma) remains Europe’s most underacknowledged and undertheorized form of racism. Wynter provides a framework to investigate the epistemic, political and material shifts, both similarities and differences, between the entanglement of the concepts of race and religion on a global scale and over a long historical durée spanning from Medieval theological Europe to the present global order of Western secularism. She does so by identifying three epistemological orders: theological (medieval/pre-1492), natural/rational (1492–19th century) and biological/economic (19th century–present) each of which is embodied by a subject: the Christian, Man1 and Man2, respectively. Her analysis provides significant evidence that the religious racism of medieval European Christianity does not end in 1492 but is globally exported. In so doing, Wynter brings a fundamental insight into questions central to the study of racism: where does the racial classification system come from? Why, and how, are some groups of people conceptualized as Other, as non-human or lesser humans? Is there a (masked) logic behind racism’s targets and manifestations? The vast majority of Wynter’s oeuvre focuses on ‘race’ in relation to the colour line and in the Americas; nonetheless, some of her less well-known and earlier writings focus on ‘race’ in relation to what I would suggest is ‘the religion line’. While Wynter is not primarily interested in European forms of racism, she explores the role of religion, and specifically Christianity1, in the context of medieval Europe. Wynter identifies ‘religious’ racism in Europe in the past. She both reveals (and teases out) intersections between race and religion, which I believe can help scholars of race to better understand what I argue is an often-masked continuity between ‘religious’ racism in Europe prior to 1492 and post-1492 race–religion constellations in Europe.2

To accentuate this continuity, I use the concept of dehumanization (an umbrella term that includes racism). Although Wynter does not use this concept, my inspiration for using it partially comes from reading her brilliant scholarship. Focusing on dehumanization helps us to bracket the debates about what race is, because it foregrounds the process of racialization and the effects of this process. I argue that dehumanization in relation to different race–religion constellations is present in Europe from the medieval period until the present (implicitly arguing that even prior to the concept of race, racism occurred). To the extent that Wynter reveals and teases out this continuity, her writings also obscure it. Between the historical period that followed upon 1492 and the European Middle Ages, Wynter suggests a discontinuity by referring to two distinct terms, relating to two definitions of the human: ‘Man’ and ‘Christian subject’. What is unique about Man for Wynter is the global hegemonic power of its episteme to erase/silence all other human stories by overrepresenting its own as the only source of value and truth. Man (who has two temporally distinct manifestations, i.e., Man1 and Man2) overrepresents himself as the human, making himself the exclusive model and measure of what it means to be human. This overrepresentation is the foundation for a new epistemological order, with political and material consequences, that is symbolized by the year 1492 and the birth of the colour line. The Christian subject, who embodies a pre-1492 theological episteme in which G-d rather than Man is central, does not do this according to Wynter. Here, I disagree and will demonstrate that there is a remarkable continuity in the ways in which certain people were included in a concept of humanity while others were excluded. In short: the Christian subject was conceived of as the only full conception of the human, both explicitly and implicitly (although not without debate or inconsistencies), which meant that non-Christians were de-facto and de-jure excluded from the political community and suffered degrees of dehumanization. In this essay, I will emphasize and theorize this continuity by the use of the heuristic device of Man0. Doing so will help to highlight and bring out the continuities pre- and post-1492 that Wynter’s essay (despite the above-identified shift) also reveal.

To make this argument, I will begin by defining my own terms and concepts, focusing on that of dehumanization which is inspired by the process and effects of how Man overrepresents himself as the human and thereby dehumanizes all other human beings. Secondly, I turn to texts by Wynter that I believe provide arguments for the continuity, focusing on her engagements with pre-1492 Europe and specifically the Christian subject. In the third section, I focus on a rather ambiguous source discontinuity with regard to the human status of the Christian subject’s other. In the fourth section, I go beyond Wynter’s writings and consider arguments, historical and conceptual, for the possibility of viewing or converting the Christian subject into Man0 and the concept of dehumanization.

2. Dehumanization

Dehumanization is possible when a group with power, symbolic and material, denies the full humanity of another group based on a constellation (e.g., a particular set, or relation, of exclusionary markers of difference). Regarding 19th century antisemitism, which in Europe is a form of racism that is not structurally belittled or denied3, these markers of difference have been based on biology and sought ‘scientific’ legitimacy. Even without explicitly referring to Jews as lesser or non-humans or Aryans as super-humans, the Nazis, both through their words and deeds, dehumanized Jews, among other excluded groups. Dehumanization does not necessarily require the explicit reference to the humanity, or lack thereof, of the other group. Most dehumanization, as in the case of antiblackness, is expressed by the exclusion of a particular group from a specific (political) community or their subsidiary status in that community. Antisemitism and racism in general, whether cultural, biological or another expression, are forms of dehumanization.

Markers of difference used to deny a group’s ‘humanity’ vary across time and space. For example, in Europe prior to the 15th century, these markers of difference were based on Christian theology. Non-Christians were dehumanized and excluded from the Christian political community. While many of these markers of difference used to identify people as Jews or Muslims were invisible, theological laws made them visible, for example, by requiring non-Christians to wear prescribed items of clothing as in Canon 68 of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215). A question of great importance is: what ‘logic’ legitimizes the selection of these markers of difference and how has this ‘logic’ changed over time and space? Answering this question makes it possible to analyse how the contemporary exclusion of Jews and Muslims from the European political community differs, in terms of its ‘logic’, from that of the 13th century.

While Wynter does not focus on race–religion constellations such antisemitism and islamophobia, I believe her writings which focus on antiblackness can be read to support the view that there is a masked continuity in the logic that is present in different forms of racism. That there is a logic to this global and structural exclusion is not accidental. This of course does not mean that there are not differences—global and temporal. In her terms, the logic—created by an autopoetic origin story/myth—is that Man “overrepresents itself as if it were the human itself, and that of securing the well-being, and therefore the full cognitive and behavioural autonomy of the human species itself/ourselves”.4 The continuity Wynter brilliantly exposes is of the hegemonic supremacy and justificatory exclusion Man imposes over all other genres of the human. Man defines itself as the human, excluding all other genres of the human from being seen as human, thus relegating them to the status of secondary, lesser or non-humans.5 Man thus has the power to exclude all other genres of the human which is what I define as dehumanization. This power to exclude is also a power to produce both lesser and non-humans, which it does epistemically and materially. This process is of course a matter of degrees, which indeed leads to many forms of exclusion ranging from othering, lesser human, sub-human, non-human, etc. I also would argue that the same hierarchy is what creates and justifies the logic of supremacy by defining a particular group, or Man, as superior or super-human.

Within my use of the concept of dehumanization, I focus specifically on the entanglement of race and religion, or more specifically Whiteness and Christianity, as distinct markers of supremacy/difference.6 How did these, separately or co-constitutively, come to be hegemonic in Europe, and how do they hide themselves (when politically expedient)? What origin story helped establish these markers as hegemonic? As Wynter establishes, origin stories provide the epistemological legitimation and political persuasion for all forms of overrepresentation (while erasing the fact that they are created by Man). As she makes clear in the opening paragraphs of “Unsettling”, these different forms of overrepresentation are all different aspects of the same struggle.

All our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal distribution of the earth resources […] these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle.7

The question this quote raises for me is how does the Christian subject, or Christianity, overrepresent itself in this struggle, both past and present?

While not explicitly mentioned in the quote above, in her 1992 appeal to scholars “No Humans Involved”, Wynter connects Whiteness and Christianity, seemingly also searching for the logic that ‘justifies’ viewing certain groups of others as lacking in humanity.

How did they come to conceive of what it means to be human and North American in terms of being white, of Euroamerican culture and descent, middle-class, college-educated, and suburban—in whose logic the jobless and usually school drop-out category of young black males can be perceived, and therefore behaved towards, only as the lack of the human, the conceptual other of North America? Similarly, all Germans of Jewish descent were perceived and behaved towards as the conceptual other to German identity in its then Pan-Aryan and Nazi form.8

In this quote, she acknowledges a similarity between the logics of racism in the US and Europe, with the former connected to the colour line and the latter to a religion line, and she identifies two different spatial locations during the same temporal period (i.e., that of Man2 which begins approx. in the 19th century) that have different conceptual others: different co-temporal manifestations of the exclusionary binary that defines racism. Black people in the US and Jews in the Nazi regime are ‘othered’, which is a degree of what I refer to as dehumanization, leading to their exclusion from the political community.9 Wynter’s ideas, and specifically the notion of Man’s overrepresentation as the only genre of the human, and how this creates conceptual Others who are deemed lesser or non-human, are central to my own conceptualization of the European entanglements of race and religion and why I use the phrase “dehumanization”, a phrase that captures the process and continuity that Wynter outlines.

3. Wynter’s Christian Subject

I now turn to texts by Wynter—focusing on her engagements with the Christian subject pre-1492 Europe—which strengthen the visibility of the historical entanglements of race and religion in Europe that I use to substantiate dehumanization. By exploring Wynter’s notion of religious racism and colonialism, I show two strong continuities between Wynter’s Christian subject and Man. Wynter’s Christian subject offers a new “descriptive statement of the human”, a new epistemic grounding to understand what it means to be human, based on its master code of Spirit/Flesh.10 The ideal of the Spirit is embodied by the Christian clergy, whereas the Flesh is embodied by the Christian laity, who are fallen or marked by sin. Other to the “Christian genre of the human [are] pagan/idolator/Enemies-of-Christ/Christ-killer/infidel Others”.11 The latter includes a huge variety of different others, whose Otherness shifts over time and space. In this article, I focus on the ‘Enemies of Christ’, a medieval reference to Moors, Mohammedans, Saracens12, or Arabs (i.e., which today is associated with Islam and Muslims), and “Christ-killer”, which refers to Jews or Judaism. As these others are neither clergy nor laity, they are outside of the Christian genre of the human and thus at best, lesser humans or at worst, non-human. Wynter refers to Christianity’s origin story which “created [a] divide between an ostensibly generically Christian mankind, on the one hand, and all other species, on the other”.13 This suggests that for Wynter the epistemological legitimation, or story, that arises from Christian theology establishes a significant difference between Christians and all other ‘species’.

For Wynter, the Christian subject, like Man, established an epistemological order which has a global scope, as does the epistemological order established by Man. In a recent in-depth interview with Katherine McKittrick, Wynter describes how the ‘Copernican revolution’ brought an end to “medieval Latin-Christian Europe’s then hegemonic theologically absolute worldview”.14 The fact that the Scholastic ‘order of knowledge’, produced by the Church and clergy, was hegemonic and a worldview—from a European perspective—is significant to understanding how it produced the Christian subject (who Wynter also refers to as Latin-Christian medieval Europe’s homo religious “Adamic fallen Man”15).16 This claim also makes clear that the epistemological order established by the Christian subject changed around 1492 as Man took the centre, rather than G-d/theology. Wynter describes the system that produced the Christian subject as similar to that of our present episteme in that the Christian subject overrepresents himself by means of a hegemonic epistemic system.17 Here, Wynter recognizes the hegemonic scope of the Christian subject’s human episteme, a role that in some of her writings seems to be limited to Man. To explore this more, let us now turn to her analysis of particular entanglements of race and religion in pre-1492 Europe.

3.1. Religious Racism

I begin with two quotes from one of her early writings, focusing specifically on the Iberian Peninsula in relation to the Americas in the 17th century. In “The Eye of the Other” (1977), Wynter explores how the matrix codes of religion and race intersect in relation to the Moors. She states that even as late as the 17th century, “the ideology [of the Christian nations of Spain and Portugal] would not be altogether racial; indeed, its tenets were still partly religious”.18 Implicit in her claim is that religious and racial codes are distinct doctrines but that combining them, to different degrees, is possible. What is not clear is whether these doctrines have the same logic (a claim I make via the concept of dehumanization). Both are ideologies that organize human differences hierarchically, one according to the tenets of race (Whiteness) and the other according to the tenets of religion (Christianity). According to Wynter, there is a much longer genealogy for exclusion in relation to one’s skin colour in Europe when one considers the figure of the Moor. From the 8th century onward, the Moor was associated “with the Mohammedan faith, rule and culture on the Peninsula”19 and excluded both religiously and ‘racially’ (based on colour). The fact that the targets of this logic, in Europe, who include Moors, Muslims and Jews, have been tragically consistent from the Middle Ages to the present raises the possibility of a much stronger continuity between the 8th century and the late 17th century with regard to dehumanization, as well as the possibility that the logic of the colour line and the logic of the religion line not only intersect but are potentially two different expressions of the same logic. With this example, Wynter demonstrates a particular connection and continuity between 8th century and 17th century religious and racial forms of exclusion.

She also explores this in her essay “New Seville and the Conversion Experience of Bartolomé de Las Casas”, published in 1984. Wynter here describes how Latin-Christianity, and Spain in particular, overcame Islam militarily and internally expulsed all Jews in an act of purification inspired by “national destiny, marked by the rise of a new system of centralized monarchy, based on the unifying cement of a single faith—the Christian”.20 Christianity defined itself as the only universal and global truth. Its unification justified the extermination and/or expulsion of difference based on a Christian/non-Christian hierarchy. This unification was driven both politically (Crown) and theologically (Church) as there was no clear separation between theology and politics.

According to Wynter, the exclusionary logic, based on the purity of blood, that served the Church and State was limpieza de sangre, which replaced the strict caste system that had served as the master code of feudalism. As Wynter claims that race replaced caste as the master code, the practice of exclusion based on ‘presumed’ blood purity is of great interest in understanding this shift. Its ‘power’ was that it “cut across the rigid caste hierarchy”21, introducing a different organizing matrix:

All Christians of genetically Spanish birth of whatever rank, were now incorporable as ‘we’ … For the monarchical revolution did not abolish the feudal status-prestige system of nobleza de sangre (nobility of blood) but rather drew it into a new symbolic machinery of monarchical rationalism, one in which the hildago complex (the aspiration to noble status, and to the title of Don), and limpieza complex (the aspiration to ‘clean’ status, to being the Spanish Christian socio-symbolic norm) cross cut, balanced and reinforced each other in a dynamic equilibrium.22

Wynter acknowledges that a theological legitimation (i.e., matrix/code) was symbolically written into one’s blood, in an attempt to naturalize it. This demonstrates that the notion of naturalization was already present in Europe at the time of the Christian subject. The exclusionary medieval logic of Christian/non-Christian was not eliminated but rather expanded through limpieza de sangre. While there may have been challenges to the Church’s power, it was not eliminated but incorporated into the logic of blood purity. Here, Wynter’s account emphasizes the entanglement and continuity between religion and race rather than a clean break between caste and racial difference or from religious racism to natural racism.

Nonetheless, she does not explicitly consider how this Christian logic might produce lesser or non-humans. This however is a possible conclusion to draw based on her account of the black Moor, in “The Eye of the Other”:

The black Moor is portrayed as the opposed term to the Christian religious metaphor. Like the other Moors, he is cast in the dread role of infidel, invader and defiler of Christian altars. The Moor, ‘black as pitch’, was not only the opposed religion; his colour was the opposite of ‘white’, symbol of Christianity. It is important to note two important aspects of this relation, this symbolic structure. As the writer [Miriam DeCosta] points out, the black Moor was not ‘denigrated (or feared as the case may be) because of his colour, but because of his religion’. Also, the relation of the black Moor, symbolically, to the Devil was a relation which sprang from a reality in which the Mohammedan was the dominant power.23

In this text, Wynter explicitly acknowledges that Whiteness is the symbol of Christianity in Europe at the time of the Moors (i.e., from the 8th century and which was prior to 1492, the time of Man1). In this case, the Moor’s Blackness is an external symbolic confirmation of non-Christianity but his colour is not the reason for exclusion per se. The black Moor is feared because of the medieval association between Islam and the Devil (a non-human who could take human form). According to Wynter, these different but intertwined exclusionary codes, Whiteness and Christianity, were exported to the New World in the ‘1492-event’. This importation was “generated from a religious racism dynamically forged in the struggle against an Arab-dominated Islam”.24 Wynter thus acknowledges that a religious racism is born and produced in Europe, against Muslims, and only later exported to the Americas.25

This implies that there are different forms of racism, which—as in the case of the Moor—can also be entangled to different degrees. Could it be that religious racism is dominant in Europe prior to 1492, while colour racism is dominant after 1492 in the Americas? I would argue that both are forms of dehumanization based on different constellations of markers of difference. The central marker of difference in Europe is Christianity while Whiteness is the central element in the Americas. Being Christian trumped (although never fully expunged) other differences, including nobility, gender and colour. In “The Eye of the Other”, Wynter confirms this in relation to the Moors, whose exclusion (or conceptual othering) was justified primarily on religion and secondarily in relation to skin colour. This description of the Christian subject’s world challenges the view that racism as the master code for the hierarchical organization of human differences only arises in the 15th century. Latin-Christianity, overrepresented by the Christian subject, provided the hierarchical organization for the globe prior to 1492.

Wynter does not explore what continues to happen with this religious racism in Europe after the colonization of the Americas. ‘Religion’, or one’s pure-blooded Christian status, was the matrix within which the hierarchical organization of human differences was made. This dehumanizing ‘religious’ hierarchy also intersected with caste and colour, each reinforcing the other. Historical evidence, past and present, proves that the Christian-subject continued to be used to control and manage Black people, Moors and Muslims, as well as Jews and other non-Christians, in Europe—both before and after the 1492-event. Wynter does recognize these continuities, but her focus on the Americas makes it seem as if post-1492 Whiteness supersedes Christianity as the master code of human differentiation. From a European perspective, this is much less evident, as Europe continued to define itself as Christian, a self-definition which continues to be used to justify the dehumanization of Jews and Muslims in Europe. Wynter also implicitly acknowledges this in her references to the Shoah or the Armenian genocide (both in the article “No Humans Involved”). ‘Religious’ racism has not disappeared, nor have caste or racial hierarchies, rather they have amplified and complexified dehumanizing exclusions.

3.2. Colonialism

In her New Seville essays, Wynter also discusses pre-1492 forms of colonialism in the context of the crusades. Colonialism, I argue, represents another mode of continuity between the epistemes of the Christian subject and Man1. Wynter refers to ‘the Reconquest’ as an anti-colonial struggle of Christendom (and specially a Euro-Christian ideology) against Islam. This implies that Islam, from the Christian perspective (which they took to be the universal truth), had colonized Christian lands. In this vein, Wynter recognizes that colonialism exists prior to 1492, both in the form of the crusades and Muslim colonization of Iberia.26 I take colonization to be essential to the hegemony of the Christian subject which also required converting or eliminating all non-Christians on these lands. Wynter—explicitly referring to the crusades—exposed the overdetermined medieval crusader logic that could not accept a plurality of human truths within its own auto-inscribed Christian universality. This is also what she claims post-1492 Man does by overrepresenting himself. This view of truth as singular is driven by a Christian universalism, central to the logic of dehumanization. According to medieval historians, this violent drive for a singular and universal truth—which also served to unite Latin-Christianity—increased around the period of the crusades.27 Wynter shares this analysis:

This was to be even more the case with respect to Christianity from the time of the Crusades onwards. With the result that, as the historian Fernández-Armesto noted in his description of the ‘mental horizons’ of Christian Europeans at the time of their fourteenth-century expansion into the Mediterranean, followed by their expansions into the Atlantic, in the terms of those ‘horizons’, Black Africans had been already classified (and for centuries before the Portuguese landing on the shores of Senegal in 1444) in a category ‘not far removed from the apes, as man-made degenerate by sin’.28

Implicit in this position is that the crusades were a form of colonialism, geographical and epistemological: a colonization of non-Christian people, as well as the large-scale murder of non-Christians. If one views the crusades as a form of colonialism, it also challenges the distinction between pre-modern and modern—upheld by many decolonial scholars—which claims that modernity began with colonialism.29 What this quote also makes clear is that Wynter was aware that prior to 1492, Black Africans were already viewed as close to animals, degenerated by sin, and thus as lesser humans. This view served to justify perpetual enslavement30 for the Enemies-of-Christ, as a necessary means to save lost souls, a theological justification based on a Christian reading of the Biblical Curse of Ham.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto (1987) (whom Wynter cites) states that while Judaism, Christianity and Islam all refer to the curse of Ham, it is elaborated in a very specific way by Latin-Christianity in Europe. Black is associated with the colour of the Devil (to which Wynter refers several times), as well as with the idea of original sin. Ham, according to Wynter, was linked to the ‘Negro’ and is the ‘figure’ of the human made degenerate by sin, nearest to the ape according to religious racism. Yet, for those invested in natural racism, Ham and Shem were the “missing link between true (because rational) humans and the irrational figure of the ape”.31 What is essential, from the perspective of Ham, or the Other, is that his ‘position’ in the hierarchical organization of human differences does not change—even if its epistemic justification seemingly does according to the subjective understanding of those overrepresented. Man also does not change his position at the top of the hierarchy. From the perspective of Man, looking down the hierarchical ladder there are changes and discontinuities. However, from the perspective of Man’s targets, those excluded and on the lower levels of the hierarchical ladder, there is no change or discontinuity.

As I have shown, there is sufficient evidence in Wynter’s writings to suggest that the Christian subject overrepresents itself in a global manner and that racism in the form of ‘religious racism’ existed in Europe prior to 1492. Both claims provide strong support for continuity regarding the relationship between the Christian subject and Man. In what follows, I will focus on a third point in which there is much more ambiguity—the question of whether the Christian subject’s Other was a human other or a non-human other.

4. The Christian Subject‘s Other

By means of the concept of dehumanization, I argue it is essential to acknowledge more continuity in relation to European race–religion constellations, such as antisemitism and islamophobia, from the Middle Ages to the present. While Wynter provides much evidence for this continuity, she also argues for a discontinuity—from the Christian subject to Man, from the medieval period to modernity (pre- and post-1492), from Europe to the Americas and from a theological episteme to a more secularised-scientific episteme. While I concede there are important discontinuities that cannot be ignored, from the perspective of Europe’s others—pre- and post-1492—dehumanization is continuous. In short: the Christian subject was conceived of as the only full conception of the human, which meant that non-Christians were de-facto and de-jure excluded and dehumanized. Wynter would not contest this exclusion, the issue for her is whether the Christian subject’s Other was a human other or a non-human other. While many of her earlier writings are quite ambiguous, the position Wynter maintains in her more-known writings is that only Man has a non-human Other. I would rather embrace this ambiguity which follows from the fact that different Church fathers and different Popes took slightly different, and often contradictory, theological positions regarding the human nature and status of non-Christians.32 In the following section, I show that the Church produced both ontological others and lesser/subhumans. In this section, I examine Wynter’s account showing that even without agreeing upon the ontological question, her analysis supports my claim that dehumanization is continuous in the shift from the Christian subject to Man.

Written in 1995, Wynter’s essay “1492: A New World View” states that there is a pattern present in the post-1492 Americas which has its roots in Europe in the 13th century. This pattern speaks directly to the questions of the hierarchies of the human. Referring to historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto’s research, she states:

The pattern of conquest and colonization that Europe had begun to establish starting some two-and-a-half centuries before 1492 [1229–1492] … in terms of the same system of symbolic representations, related to this original pattern, that two of the events founding to the instituting of the post-1492 Caribbean and the America were to be effected.33

This pattern was one explicitly authorized by the Pope and the matrix of Christian theology.34 Columbus would understand the Indigenous people of the Americas to be idolaters (i.e., without religion, and thus sub-human or not fully human as only Christians could be human), thereby juridically and theologically ‘justifying’ their enslaved status. The same lens would initially be applied to the Black Africans shipped across the Atlantic to buttress and eventually substitute for Indigenous labour. The latter was fundamental to the epistemic change which gave rise to the social construction of racial categories. The Atlantic slave trade created more rungs/steps on the racial hierarchical ladder, one even lower than that of Indigenous peoples. This is a very similar mechanism to the shift from the European caste system to a racial system of differentiation, where an extra rung is created to make non-noble Christians superior to non-Christians. However, during this period the Indigenous peoples became an in-between population, lesser humans, somewhere between humans and supposed non-humans. With this new rung, which for Wynter is marked by the birth of Man, Black Africans “would come to embody the new symbolic construct of Race or of innately determined difference that would enable the Spanish state to legitimate its sovereignty over the lands of the Americas in the post-religious legal terms of Western Europe’s now-expanding state system”.35 For Wynter, Man marks the new construct of Race, as an innate fixed difference, in a period in which religion is slowly superseded by a legal and secular episteme.36

The greatest ambiguity regarding the hierarchies of the human, certainly for those reading with Europe in mind, arises in Wynter’s most known essay, from 2003, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”. In this essay, Wynter refers to Catholic papal bulls37 from the early 15th century (half a century prior to 1492), clearly demarcating the temporal and spatial context of her analysis. Wynter here confirms that newly colonized lands were deemed terra nullius, “the lands of no one”. The inhabitants of Africa and the Americas were taken to be ‘pagan idolators’ (no religion) or ‘enemies-of-christ’ (false religion)—both forms of lack in relation to Christian subject. Those having no religion or false religion, were at this time ‘no one’, which could be interpreted as lesser human or non-human (or both). The epistemic justification for this denial of humanity was clearly theological.

Was carried out within the order of truth and the self-evident order of consciousness, of a creed-specific conception of what it was to be human—which, because a monotheistic [sic, Catholic] conception, could not conceive of an Other to what it experienced as being human, and therefore an Other to its truth … Its subjects could therefore see the new peoples whom it encountered in Africa and the New World only as the “pagan-idolators”, as “Enemies-of-Christ” as the Lack of its own narrative ideal.38

Wynter here acknowledges that there was a conception of the human prior to Man, and that it was a conception of the human that could not conceive of those it encountered as human but only as other. It is not clear how her reference to a Lack, with a capital L, is to be interpreted. It could be a Lacanian lack, in which case it is a binary lack—human/non-human—or another form of lack that allows for degrees, in which case there are different ranks/statuses of dehumanization, from lesser, to sub, to non-human. According to Wynter (which I challenge), Europeans could only conceive of ‘others’ who were subhuman. “For the Europeans, however, the only available slot of Otherness to their Norm, into which they could classify these non-European populations, was one that defined the latter in terms of their ostensible subhuman status”.39 This means that non-Christians in Europe were lesser but not non-human, and this is how those colonized ‘in Africa and the New World’ were conceived of in 1492. This implies that they were seen as human, just lesser humans, or not fully human.

Another important implication of this quote is that this conception of the human, prior to Man, is creed-specific40 and thus might not have the universal and global hegemonic power of Man who sets “the framework of a single history that we all now live”. This however, I have shown, fails to acknowledge that for Europeans, prior to 1492, the truth of the Church was taken to be the only story that led to salvation (for all those who had souls), and that this applied to all lands Christians knew were habitable, and justified the colonization of these peoples and lands. It was, as such, a ‘global’ overrepresentation given the definition of the globe at that time was limited to the habitable Christian world. That Europe’s untrue Christian Others illegitimately inhabiting Christian lands did not believe this truth was irrelevant to the Christian subjects’ subjective understanding, as these others, whether lesser, sub or non-human, did not have souls (according to the Christian model) and thus could not be saved.

In “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”, Wynter claims that what is novel with Man is how the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and the enslaved peoples of Africa became a physical human other to Man which was a “reinvention of medieval Europe’s Untrue Christian Other to its normative True Christian Self”41. Man is the only normal human. Wynter repeats this claim several times. For her, the True Christian Self thus does not define itself as the only normal human. It views itself as normative to Europe’s Untrue Christian Other but does not deny that these Others are human. The view presented here thus embraces an ontological difference between Man/Human which is not present with regard to the Christian subject in relation to its Others. In other words, the transformation (which Wynter also refers to as a transumption or reoccupation) of Europe’s Others (Untrue/Non-Christian), who were physically embodied by Jews and Muslims as well as heretics, and pagan idolaters is distinct from that of Man because they are not understood to be ontologically different to the human. However, as I demonstrated above, Wynter does acknowledge that Jews and Muslims, who rejected Christian Truth (false religion), were viewed as Other. Nonetheless, it is important to consider that the Christian subject viewed Jews and Muslims differently than pagans or heretics, which Wynter does not explicitly state. Also worth noting is that this claim of an ontological difference does not exclude the possibility of forms of dehumanization that includes lesser or subhumans—both in Europe and the Americas.

In her 2014 interview by Katherine McKittrick42, Wynter presents the following account of the shift from the ‘system’ of the Christian subject to Man. Here, she refers to a post-1492 “hierarchically stratified triadic system (black enslaved, indentured conquered neo-serf indigenous, white) of labor”43 which is interlinked with a system of domination based on degrees of humanness:

The no less hierarchically stratified, triadic classificatory system of ostensibly differential degrees of being human/of humanness (degrees of humanness that, of course, coalesce with the inventions of Man1 and Man2 and bring into focus those black, indigenous enemies of Christ, irrational savages, human-Other(s)-by-nature, with postslave black subject occupying the most subordinated status of n-gg-r/wholly Other).44

Here, she states that Man’s invention comes together, or fuses with, a hierarchical system of classification in relation to degrees of humanness. Man of course occupies the highest slot. Next, Wynter seems to lump together several distinct groups: “indigenous enemies of Christ, irrational savages, human-Other(s)-by-nature” in the middle slot. While this middle slot is distinct from the most subordinate slot, that of wholly Other for black subjects, it is rather ambiguous. While enemies of Christ refers to the Other of the Christian subject, indigenous refers to ‘Indians’. Are these distinct from irrational savages, who are Other in relation to their lack of rationality? And how is this rationality related to the nature of these human Other(s). Are all these groups human Other(s), and would this also include the Others of the Christian subject in Europe post-1492? What is clear is that Man creates a hierarchical classificatory system, one which has differential degrees of humanness. The Christian subject also creates a hierarchical classification system.

For Man, the black subject occupies the lowest rank as wholly Other with irrational indigenous enemies of Christ as human-Others-by-nature (a lesser but not the lowest rank). Wynter describes the wholly other as “a figure barely evolved and wholly subhuman that is Other to the fully evolved, thereby only True Human Self”.45 The qualifier that seems fundamental for Wynter here is ‘wholly’. Whereas indigenous peoples were seen as lesser humans, or human Other, only the black subject was seen as subhuman. But is subhuman to be understood as a lesser human or non-human? While Wynter does not make it explicit in this quotation, we might infer that the Christian subject does not create a wholly Other. Man thus produces both human Others and subhumans. Subhumans are wholly Others but it is not explicit whether this means they are ontologically non-human. What we can perhaps conclude is that for Wynter, the Christian subject is not yet a variant of Man as it does not produce a wholly non-human Other. While the ontological difference is by no means the only difference or discontinuity between the Christian subject and Man, it is a fundamental one in Wynter’s more recent work.

Thus far, I have shown many of the most significant continuities between the Christian subject and Man, as well as perhaps the pivotal difference between them which is that Man overrepresents itself as the only genre of the human and thereby constructs its Other as wholly non-human. The question I now wish to explore is: how did the Church view the non-Christian Other, and why did it present this view? Given recent scholarship on the medieval origins and conceptions of race in Europe, I argue that the Church had, and asserted, this hegemonic power to produce both lesser and non-humans, epistemically and materially, a power that I refer to as dehumanization.

5. Converting the Christian Subject into Man0

In this section, I argue that there is a variant of Man to be found in Europe prior to 1492 that overrepresents itself as the human, creating a hierarchy that leads to degrees of dehumanization ranging from lesser/subhuman to non-human. Most importantly, the Christian subject was conceived of as the only full conception of the human, both explicitly and implicitly (although not without debate or inconsistencies), which meant that non-Christians were de-facto and de-jure excluded from the political community and suffered degrees of dehumanization. Thus, while there is without a doubt a difference in degree from the period of Man, I challenge that there is a difference in kind.

According to scholars of medieval history, the period of the crusades (11–13th century), which followed upon the Gregorian Reforms, was one in which non-Christians who were perceived as threats to the Western Church were identified as dissidents. Some were forced to convert while others were eliminated.46 This external boundary formation, which was immensely violent, was in some way an extension of the conflicts central to the reforms which sought to define and sharpen papal primacy and authority, which also required new financial resources, as well as clerical purity by means of sexual regulations. In what follows, I introduce Man0 as a heuristic device for scholars of race and religion to identify race–religion constellations in Europe and their historical continuities. I examine, using historical resources, several different ways in which Man0 produced its other, such as through the ideology of the crusades, its mapping of the world, and its creation of ‘enemies’.

From the perspective of those calling for the crusades, their primary purpose was unifying Western Christianity. For example, the term populus christianus, which means the Christian people (and implicitly the true people as the only vera religion was Christianity, all other ‘religions’—a term here used anachronistically—were false, as were their followers), dates from 1215. The term served to construct and fortify the respublica christiana, the Western Christian political community that was the only and true universal church. Those excluded from the Church, Man0’s Others, were thus essential to the construction of Man0.

The crusades also served to demarcate the ‘world’ as defined by the Church, all habitable land ought to be Christian land and thus the colonization of these lands was theologically and politically justified. While it became much larger after the 1492 ‘discovery’, the world as defined by Man0 was almost fully colonized and as such Man0 was able to ensure his overrepresentation in what was defined as the habitable zone. This world was mapped in the 13th century with Jerusalem as the centre of the nations (Ezekiel) and Rome as “the head of the world”47 as depicted by the Mappa Mundi: the habitable world centred around Christianity. Non-Christians were depicted as beasts and monsters, both forms of lesser or non-humans, which implicitly suggests that Christians were the only full humans to inhabit the world.

There was also a distinction between those with supposedly ‘no religion’, for example pagans, who could, often en mass, be converted to Christianity and those who were deemed to have false religion, such as Jews and Saracens, who could—even with conversion—never be fully Christian (except for very exceptional individual cases which were also often for financial reasons). The latter were thus viewed to varying degrees and by different theological scholars as either lesser or non-humans. This also led to many theological debates, including many prior to that between Las Casas and Sepulvulda in 1551, about whether those with false religion had souls, and thus could be saved—the debate that plays a central role in Wynter’s analysis.

In the period after 1215, with the many crusades to colonize habitable land inhabited by non-Christians, the so-called Saracen was constructed as an external political enemy as “the personification of the very religion of the Antichrist”.48 Likewise, an internal theological enemy was also constructed: the Jew. In order to prevail against these enemies or ‘threats’, Christian rulers, via the Church, demanded peace between Christians—making it a secular and religious crime to shed Christian blood.49 Dehumanization based on Man0 as the only fully human, which manifested itself in colonization of and genocide against non-Christians, thus served to unify Christianity.50

In the case of the Jews and Saracens, the exclusionary norm, embodied by Man0, against which everything else was judged was clearly that of Catholicism (or Latin-Christianity), which was the only vera religio. True religion has its theological roots in Augustine who wrote De vera religione in 390 CE, in which he argues that only the truth of God can lead to salvation. While in the first few centuries of Christianity it was possible, although neither easy nor obvious, for all people to become Christian, this was certainly not the case by 1215. In that year, this theological position is politically instituted in the extra ecclesiam nulla salus doctrine of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which declares that “there is one universal Church of the faithful, outside of which there is absolutely no salvation”. In other words, only those who practice the true religion will be saved, all others are damned. To be damned meant to be excluded from the humanity defined by Man0. While this was the case in 1215, canon law in the period prior to 1492 is not consistent (as different papal authorities took different positions). As historian Julia Costa López writes, “an examination of the constructions of Jews and Muslims in canon law shows an extremely nuanced and varied conceptual apparatus that creates several dynamics of othering—and consequently allows for a variety of ways of relating ranging from toleration and coexistence to conquest”.51 Nonetheless, many of the most influential theologians denied Jews inclusion in humanity. According to Lopez, “the punishment itself [of Jews] (their scattering, subjugation, and subservience) was a fulfilment of divine prophecies, and as such reinforced and proved the Christian truth. The Jew was thus a necessary Other within yet outside Christian society, with the function of permanently proving the Christian truth”.52 For example, Guibert de Nogent, a Benedictine from this period, defined the Jews as the race most hostile to G-d, arguing for their elimination. Peter the Venerable (1092–1156), however, agreed to this description, but disagreed with the solution—Jews must not be murdered as they must bear witness, in suffering and misery, to those who have failed to welcome the truth of Christ. Jews were to be continually dehumanized as wild beasts, sexualized animals and infantilized. Peter dedicated much of his writing to the question of the humanity of the Jews as they were not part of the Christian community which at that time defined the scope of the human.53

While the notion of being lesser or non-human was not explicitly or solely connected to either blood or nature, the notion of reason—central to Man1—was already part of the justification for the exclusion of non-Christians prior to its emergence.54 Peter deemed Jews as non-humans for their failure to possess reason and be obedient to the authority of the Church, arguing that their nature was bestial based on his (mis)reading of the Talmud. This bestiality was also used to ‘justify’ their inability to be convinced—“their failure as a rational being and therefore as a human being”.55 Christianized reason was an exclusionary mechanism: those unwilling to accept Christian doctrine were seen as rejecting reason and denying their own humanity. As such “twelfth-century perceptions of what was reasonable and what was not had a long-lasting influence on European perceptions of what it was to be properly human”.56 In this period, humanity, and therefore human life, was impossible outside of society as the only possible society was Christian. While this by no means should be read to suggest the Gregorian Reforms’ conception of humanity, or the human, was the same as that of the later humanists, it is essential to see that the binary of fully human and non-human was based on the Christian/non-Christian binary, as it applies specifically to those who had false religion.

Perhaps because they were seen to be a military threat to the church in 1215, Muslims did not fare as well as the Jews in Man0’s exclusionary hierarchy. The Saracens were seen as instruments of the devil, having superstition which rejected true religion and sons of enslaved peoples (Hagar). As such, the crusades were much more than a military operation. They were ideological and helped to demarcate Europe as Christian. In this vein, they were depicted as a war between the light of Christ against the ‘darkness’ and pollution of the devil. While Christian blood could not be shed, Muslims were seen as inconvertible and therefore shedding their blood was a means to glorify Christ (e.g., Bernard of Clairvaux’s doctrine of malicidium, the killing of evil).57 This depiction of the Saracens as devils was further intensified during the second crusade (1147–49), which was seen as a battle for the whole human race against the Saracens. Peter the Venerable considered Muslims to be unreasonable, cannibals and barbarians—and as such inhuman and inconvertible, therefore justifying their murder in terms of a Christian/non-Christian binary, which is the blueprint for the human/non-human binary of post-1492 racism. According to Thomas Mastnak, “the potential enemy [an imaginary Muslim] was not so much without as within. The Muslim was used—used abused—so that the Christian could talk to himself”.58 Most Christians would never meet a Muslim, but the idea of the Muslim, or the Figure of the Muslim, was essential for the Christian to know they had the truth. As Costa López notes: “Non-Western peoples, and particularly Muslims, existed in a ‘structurally antagonistic situation’ to the Church, outside of divine and human law’, and as such were to be annihilated”.59

It is often thought that conversion saved non-Christians from damnation. Current research challenges the previous predominant Christian myth which presented the story of baptisms and conversions as a ‘way out’ for non-Christians—an argument also used by scholars to argue for a strong distinction between anti-Judaism and anti-Semitism in the 19th century. Conversion and baptism were depicted as the path to salvation but were rarely so in practice. While it is clear that baptism was a means of full-inclusion into the Christian community for pagans, this was much less the case for those who were born either Jewish or Muslim who, for a diversity of reasons, chose or were forced to convert. While there were exceptional non-Christians who were accepted, and often used as models of ‘good’ converts, the vast majority remained under surveillance and suspicion.60 At even the slightest misstep, real or fabricated, these converts were exposed and excluded, neither theological nor political/legal logic saved them, their friends and families. Even after several generations, the shadow of the figure of the Jew or Muslim remained and led to distrust and suspicion as is clear from the history of Limpieze de Sangre which has its roots as early as the 14th century.61 Thus, while it is the case that for a few exceptions (which are often the only stories that were shared), conversion and baptism could seemingly save and ‘humanize’, most converts remained non-Christians in the eyes of Christian society and were never fully included in humanity. The latter exceptional, and often financially motivated and conditional, inclusion was evident with regard to marriage, business and other social questions. Moreover, the myth of conversion served, and continues to serve, Christian innocence or the illusion that the Other has the choice of being fully included (thereby also making them responsible for their failure to integrate).

Skin colour also played a role in relation to the dehumanization of non-Christians. What is important to note is that colour was not a fixed characteristic, as it often depicted to be post-1492, but an external visible marker of difference for the invisible soul.62 This is clear from the story of the King of Tars as baptism leads to a transformation of one’s skin colour. The Saracen King’s change in skin colour, which is as figurative as his claimed redemption, both serve to mark the invisible process of a soul being saved, which was what defined Man0 as fully human, and thus eligible to be included in the Christian political community which was synonymous with both humanity and the world as such (from the perspective of the Medieval Latin-Christian Church). Nonetheless, in art from the 11–13th century, both Jews and Saracens are depicted as having darker skin and/or are depicted as being in the dark or shadows as opposed to Christians being depicted in the light.63 This darkness was both related to their presupposed fallen status often brought about by their intimate (sexual) relations with the devil, as well as their association with Shem, whose coloration was flexible although clearly between Japeth (white) and Ham (black). Historian Geraldine Heng also speaks about a medieval ‘politics of the epidermis’ which devalued Jews, Saracens, Black Africans, Native Americans and ‘Gypsies’.64

6. Man0 and the Race–Religion Constellation

If one looks at racism, a form of dehumanization, in Europe today, it continues to disproportionately affect non-White non-Christians which is rather incongruous, inconsistent and peculiar given that Europe defines itself as secular. By accentuating the religious roots of dehumanization, as Wynter also helps us to do, and present-day race–religion constellations (e.g., antisemitism, islamophobia, antizyganism) and their intersection with antiblackness, the construct of Man0 also serves as a refutation to those who deny that racism exists in Europe, past and present. Man0 also helps to challenge the presumed opposition between the ‘religious’ and secular that masks contemporary manifestations of the race–religion constellations, which haunt Europe today leading, for example, to the denial of Islamophobia as a form of racism. The continuities brought to the fore, when using Man0 as a heuristic device to study racism in Europe, enable scholars of race to think through both the local and global entanglements of race and religion, as well as their present masking by means of a discourse of secularism. In this final section, I hope to demonstrate this by exploring an obscurity in Wynter’s work that I believe Man0 can help to resolve. I do so by means of a close analysis of a series of terms—religion, monotheism and Judeo-Christian—which exemplifies these ambiguities and the problems they raise.

Part of what distinguishes my reading from Wynter’s is how to conceive of secularism. For Wynter, it is a step away from a theological episteme. In line with recent critical research on secularism,65 I view it as a masking of the theological episteme and thus much more in continuity with Christianity.66 While Wynter clearly acknowledges the continuities between the Christian subject and Man, she also identifies the shift from the former to the latter as a moment of secularization. It is not clear whether secularism for Wynter is to be understood as a form of continuity or discontinuity. It might even be the case that secularism masks the reality of continued racism, muffles its targets from protesting and thus indirectly emboldens racism and racists. If secularism is a masked continuation of the Christian project, as I argue it is in Europe, why refer to it mark a shift away from theology? For example, how much does Christian humanism contrast with humanism? Wynter, at several points in “1492”, reminds her readers that prior to Renaissance humanism [or humanism, proper] is “its precursor, the movement of Christian humanism”.67 Moreover, implicit in this quote is a confirmation of a continuity between the humanism of Christianity and the humanism of the Renaissance/Man1. The latter also implicitly recognizes that prior to the Renaissance, Christianity already had a conception of the human which was that of the Christian subject.

This difference in our understandings of secularism is also manifest in a claim from Wynter’s 1492 essay on Columbus’s view, which was Judeo-Christian [sic68], and therefore ‘religious’, making it “an obstacle to a more inclusive propter nos, [and thus] it was soon to be replaced with a new ‘stereotyped image’ based on the Aristotelian concept of natural slaves.”69 This post-1492 naturalized racial ‘logic’ was according to Wynter based upon a political need for a seemingly more inclusive ‘we’ (propter nos). Implicit in this claim is that for Wynter the religious racism of the Christian subject was not hierarchically very malleable. With our eye on Europe, it is clear that this new propter nos continues to exclude non-Christians. This is also part of the reason her use of the term Judeo-Christian is problematic as it implicitly suggests that Jews were, or are, now included in this new propter nos. Non-Christians in Europe were still not part of this new ‘we’, just as they had not been part of the episteme of the Christian subject which produced the former exclusionary propter nos. Thus, while we have come to associate the term race with the natural episteme of Man1, its roots, ‘logic’ and selection of targets are all already present in the dehumanizing hierarchical organization of human differences of the Christian subject. I thus argue that the Christian subject, in Europe prior to 1492, also overrepresented its own iteration of the human as the only possible full, or True, human, placing Jews and Muslims (as well as possibly others) outside of this category.

In several of her writings, Wynter refers to a monotheistic creed. This would imply that the creed is shared by Jews, Christians and Muslims. Consider, for example, the passage from “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom” I previously quoted, where Wynter refers to papal bulls and the Spanish and Portuguese colonization of the Americas. These bulls are specific to the Catholic church (or Western Latin-Christianity). As such, it is concerning that Wynter uses the term monotheism (or that of religion as she does elsewhere in the article, which also implicitly includes non-Christian peoples), as these terms imply that Judaism and Islam are included when the reality was that these groups of people were not only the targets of the papal bulls and colonization, they were also deemed to have false religion, and excluded from the human as Man0 on these grounds. Man0, as well as Man1 and Man2, are all explicitly Christian projects, previously Catholic and now also Protestant. To refer to them as monotheistic, Judeo-Christian or religious obscures the racial logic that scholars of race aim to expose. This is part of what I aim to do by introducing Man0 bringing to the fore Christianity’s unique role in both variants of Man. No other ‘religion’ produces a variant of Man. Contemporary critical scholarship makes clear that ‘religion’ is a Christian concept and cannot be generalized to include other monotheistic religions or more broadly world religions.70

The scholarly reconfiguration of Christianity as ‘religion’ masks the continuities between Man0 and Man (both Man1 and Man2) by allowing Christian theology to hide behind the supposedly inclusive masks of the Abrahamic notions of monotheism and world religions. A further term which also masks the continued power of Man0, in Europe past and present, is that of Judeo-Christianity, although this time only with reference to Jews/Judaism.71 This term, which again has very different histories and meanings in the US72 and in Europe,73 implies that—at least within Europe—there is a connection, often assumed to have arisen as a result of post-Shoah atonement and reconciliation, between Judaism and Christianity, which denies the reality of centuries of Christian supersessionism and violence, from the crusades until the Shoah.74 For the sake of potential global solidarity between all of Man’s Others, which I will explore in the conclusion,75 it is essential to make clear that the racial logic in Europe, past and present, is a Christian one albeit masked in the discourse of secularism.

A related concern arises with regard to the use of the term secular. As mentioned previously, and cited directly by Wynter by historian Jacques Le Goff (which refers directly to the reforms made during the 1215 Fourth Lateran Council), the term secular is, at least in the time of Man0, an explicitly Christian one. As Wynter herself notes, “the reform first of all established the independence of the Church from secular society. And what better barrier could have been erected between clergy and laity [than that of sexuality]?”76 The use of the term secular here is an internal Christian one, and by no means equivalent to its more contemporary (mis)use to mean non-religious. The examples Wynter provides of two pivotal transformations for Man1, both of which she claims are secularizing77, demonstrate this as they are both intra-Christian transformations which do not affect those who continue to be excluded from Man0. What the Man0 ‘secular’ logic makes possible is a feeling of superiority for laypeople (who are also White, European and Christian) and the possibility of a previously inconceivable social mobility.78 The social position of non-Christians in Europe is not improved by such shifts. Having been dehumanized by the Church prior to 1492, non-Christians remain lowest on the European hierarchical ladder of humanity, a ladder that ranged from sub/lesser human to non-human (animal/monstrous/demonized).

Given the recent examinations of the complex histories and genealogies of secularism79 which challenge the often presumed opposition between religion (or Christianity) and secularism and bring to light the Christian roots or ‘logic’ that persists in the discourse and practices of secularism, it is important to consider what Wynter means when she identifies the movement towards Man as a secularizing one. While this might be the case elsewhere, from a critical European perspective, this is yet another scene/act in Man0’s performance. It is an occlusion enabled by the view that secularism is a move away from religion used to keep these non-Christian groups, and those newly colonized, on the lower echelons of the hierarchical organization of humanity. As such, the assumed epistemic shift from Christian-religious to secular is not revolutionary but rather a ruse that continues to benefit Man. It served to make visible the rungs that were, and always had been, below Christian subjects. This shift did not erase the hierarchical differences between aristocracy/clergy and Christian laity, it just shifts the laity’s attention to the fact that they rank higher than both non-Christians, a category that was now expanded, as new peoples and new parts of the globe were colonized, to exclude those with both false religion and no religion, and Black Africans. If one does not presume secularism to be a shift from religion or Christianity, there is much stronger continuity in the Christian dehumanizing cum racial logic, and between the overrepresentations of Man0 and Man1.

7. Conclusions

As demonstrated with the heuristic device of Man0, Jews and Muslims were not included in any genre of the human. This remains the case in Europe today for all those who are not included in the concept of Man, and especially evident and violent when intersecting with antiblackness. This reading of European continuity does not erase the particularities of history and geography specific to each and every form of oppression but rather demonstrates that in Europe, Man shows a disturbing continuity with Man0 in relation to those it deems to have impure blood or be incapable of integration or citizenship. Those who are, to put it bluntly, not part of the Western (European White Christian cum secular) political community. This is also what W.E.B. Du Bois claimed in the aftermath of the Shoah, when he visited the remnants of the Warsaw Ghetto. Astonished by what he learned, he realized that an understanding of European antisemitism was essential for “a more real and complete understanding of the Negro problem [the colour line]”.80 The histories of racism are more entangled than Man would like us to know. This deception is Man’s magic trick, which facilitates Christianity’s invisible hand in contemporary forms of dehumanization. We must never forget that Man—in all of its variants—always remains at the top. My heuristic of Man0 keeps us mindful of this as well as the continuing presence of ‘religious racism’ in supposedly secular times. This reminder, I hope, can support and encourage global solidarities between those excluded by Man (including gendered variants not explored here).81