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Essay on Racialization of Savagery
Since the early European colonization of the New World, a number of foremost Spanish, Italian, and additional European thinkers--among them Francisco de Vitoria, Juan Gines de Sepulveda, and Bartolome de Las Casas endorsed principles of human level-headedness and universality, but they made reason and progress special European contributions to civilization, beyond what they called the state of nature. They contributed to the idea of a social contract between members of society that made civil society possible, and they accepted the notion of the natural origins of economic and social inequality.
Thus the liberal idea of the equal social worth of each human being was compromised by the notion of natural economic inequality and the liberal idea that all humans are created equal was negated by the practice of treating race as the source of inequality. Terms like universalism and relativism fail to capture the complex of views and strategies that took shape around outlooks on human nature and culture. Indeed, many so -called Universalists and relativists held equally pejorative views about the masses in European societies and of all non-Europeans. From the outset, many Europeans sought to represent their cultural particularism as a standard for determining the nature of difference.
As nationalized states urbanized and nationalism became distinct, states subsumed universality under the making of national identity, such that one's universality became secondary to one's membership in a particular state and society. What emerged as the Western social contract incorporated a racial contract as a subset within the color-coded cultural imperative of global white supremacy; according to W. E. B. Du Bois, this made color one of the defining factors in the making of the modern world. The racial contract has worked through expansionism, the expropriation of lands, colonial genocide and fascism......
