The Spanish Inquisition’s interrogations prefigured modern racial profiling by reconstructing life histories

Evidence

Discovering ‘the stains of a heretical religious past’ required that Spaniards accused of practising Jewish or Muslim rituals be interrogated on more than questions of faith. The questions of the Inquisitors ‘were used to reconstruct a certain kind of life history, one built on a predefined set of variables’ that would reveal the hidden stain. Inquisitors tried to fit the accused’s life into a pattern ‘from birth to present, including all places of residence, travel, and major life events.’ Silverblatt considers that the Spaniards were ‘participating in a vision of the world reminiscent of what we today call “racial profiling.”’ Crucially, here racial profiling has two components. First, it is the practice of attributing disloyalty, treason, or criminality to an identified group on the basis of race, religion, and life history. Second, it is a practice that determines who shall have fundamental rights and who shall not. Seen as such, racism lies both in the practice of profiling (e.g., all Jews are disloyal) and in the processes of law and bureaucracy that support the profile as a reason to evict specific groups from law itself. It is in the profile’s connection to the place of law without law that we find race doing the work of making this exile from political community permanent. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 95

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader literature on race-making and law-as-exclusion, and to my interest in how institutions construct profiles from life-history variables rather than acts. — connects to: The Spanish Inquisition was mainly political and economic domination in religious guise. — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of…, 117
• DEFINE: Offers a two-part definition of racial profiling: attributing disloyalty to a group, and determining who holds fundamental rights.