Spanish colonists transferred African racial categories onto indigenous Americans.

Evidence

Almost from Columbus’s arrival, Spanish colonists began to degrade and enslave the indigenous American peoples, naming them negros da terra (Blacks from the land), transferring their racist constructions of African people onto Native Americans. Over the years that followed, they used the force of the gun and the Bible in one of the most frightful and sudden massacres in human history. Thousands of Native Americans died resisting enslavement. More died from European diseases, from the conditions they suffered while forcibly tilling fields, and on death marches searching and mining for gold. Thousands of Native Americans were driven off their land by Spanish settlers dashing into the colonies after riches. — Ibram X. Kendi, Stamped from the Beginning, 59

Categorization

• DEFINE: Introduces negros da terra, a key term showing how the pre-existing anti-Black racial construction was exported — evidence for the primacy of the racist framework over the specific people it was later applied to.
• XREF: Strong support for Kendi’s reversal: the category precedes and is projected onto the new people (Native Americans), i.e., the racist idea was carried to the Americas as a ready-made framework rather than arising from encounter. Useful for the reader’s goal of placing arguments into segregationist/assimilationist/antiracist scheme.