Sixteenth-century nurture itself could be deemed racial contamination
Evidence
Similarly, the Portuguese Franciscans in Goa violently opposed admission of creoles to the order, alleging that ‘even if born of pure white parents [they] have been suckled by Indian ayahs in their infancy and thus had their blood contaminated for life.’ Boxer shows that ‘racial’ bars and exclusions increased markedly during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries by comparison with earlier practice. To this malignant tendency the revival of large-scale slavery (for the first time in Europe since antiquity), which was pioneered by Portugal after 1510, made its own massive contribution. Already in the 1550s, 10% of Lisbon’s population were slaves; by 1800 there were close to a million slaves among the 2,500,000 or so inhabitants of Portugal’s Brazil. — Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities, 231
Categorization
- QUESTION: The suckled-by-Indian-ayahs logic — transmission of contamination through wet-nursing — is an early instance of bodily/dietary contact as racial determinant; worth tracing its later analogues in discourses of Islamic contamination of Western childhood.
- XREF: connects to: Medieval racial classification from Noah’s sons seeded later European denials of African achievement; Early modern blood-purity racism inherited heresy suspicion, not intellectual inferiority