Body, Whiteness and Purity of Blood. A reflection on decoloniality

Abstract

In this text, some notes will be developed to support the thesis that the essentialization of the body was essential for the formation of the Spanish colonial order in America and that this essentialization starts from the color of the skin as a synecdoche of the determining marks of the moral and intellectual qualities and  capacities of the person. The network of cultural, social, political, and economic meanings was configured in and through “whiteness”; through a conceptual system that assumed the body (mainly skin color), purity of blood and cultural characteristics, as defining the hierarchical place that a person occupied within the colonial and colonized society. This interpretation enters into discussion qualifying the support of some decoloniality theorists, mainly what was proposed by Santiago Castro Gómez, who relies on other theorists such as Enrique Dussel, Walter Mignolo and Aníbal Quijano, who proposes that being white had nothing to do with skin color, but rather had to do with the staging of an imaginary cultural fabric by religious beliefs, types of clothing, certificates of nobility, modes of behavior and, above all, by ways of producing and transmitting knowledge.