Constructing Whiteness

thoughts on a future book

I’m still look for a place to publish the 20 page essay I wrote analyzing the Middle High German medieval romance Parzival to suggest that not just the clergy but also the lower aristocracy were developing fundamental features of modernity’s concept of humanism. Also, it has to be a place that will publish non-academics. Talk about a niche market!

Incidentally, humanism is a white supremacist concept, and in Parzival we can see the good-natured, fumbling attempts of the knighthood in a globalizing world (the Crusades were happening at the time it was written) to create a universal fraternity in spite of the moral ranking inscribed on bodies because of race, which was nascent if not non-existent at the time. I’ve long been arguing that black and white originated as purely moral concepts that were then taken as a framework for race at the beginning of the European-led slave trade.

So let me know if you can think of a magazine or even just a good blog!

What I want to talk about today looks at the history of the construction of whiteness within the laboratory of Spanish colonialism and the invention of Spain, a book I’d like to write in the future.

Ready for a rant?