The Other Side of the Story: Human Rights, Race,

and Gender from a Transatlantic Perspective

Human Rights, Race, and Gender from a Transatlantic Perspective

Julia Surez-Krabbe
Introduction
One of the most serious critiques against human rights politics is that its primary point of reference is white male subjectivity based on a normative construction of the category human. This essay explores the intimate relationship between race, gender, and the definition of what it means to be human
during the conquest and colonization of the Americas, and suggests that we
revise our historiological and legal assumptions about human rights. The
classification human emerged out of the discourses of the Spanish colonizers during the 16th century. To understand how this designation problematizes twentieth(and twenty-first)-century human rights, the following discussion
translates the coordinates of our analysis from the space of Europe to the
Americas and from the time of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(ratified by the United Nations in 1948) to the late fifteenth (post-1492) and
sixteenth-century discovery of the Americas.
This analytical shift, a shift in the geography of reason, provides a vital
framework for examining the history of human rights from the Other side.
The rights narrative commonly refers back to the English Bill of Rights in
1689, the US Declaration of Independence in 1776, and the Declaration of
the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1788 in the context of the French
Revolution. According to this account, these declarations reached a culminating point in 1948 with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Balfour/Cadava 2004: 282, Douzinas 2000, 2007a) and a series of more recent
culminating points in connection with the history of UN peacekeeping and the
recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. These wars are referred to in the third
section of this paper, where the notion of a just war is examined.
In contrast to mainstream accounts of rights and race, the understanding
expressed here proceeds beyond the scientific racism that emerged during
the nineteenth century and classified humans biologically. Such determinism
was a radicalization of the hierarchization of humans that emerged shortly
after the 1492 discovery of America (cf., for instance, Csaire 2006, Quijano 1992, 2000a, 2000b). The fault line in human rights politics namely its

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normative formulation of what it means to be human1 needs to be considered in relation to the historical connection linking human rights to race and
to gender. This tie emerged out of the period of the first modernity, that is,
the period of Spanish and Portuguese colonialism. During this time, the first
systematic transatlantic connection involving slavery, genocide, and the exploitation of Europes Other was also established.
The shift in the geography of reason that informs this essay involves developing concepts beyond mainstream definitions of human rights. Boaventura de Sousa Santos nuanced understanding of the different processes of globalization is useful for addressing the other side of human rights; human rights
can be globalized localisms, localized globalisms (reinforcing relations of
power), as well as a common inheritance of humanity (contesting power
relations) (2002a: 2529). In addition, Frantz Fanons distinction between
2
the zone of being and the zone of nonbeing (Fanon 1967: 10) is relevant
to this analysis; namely, the distinction between those whose existence accords with prevalent norms and those who are constructed and assessed
against those norms. In the zone of being, human rights provide legality and
protection. However, in the zone of nonbeing, rights require victims and are,
more often than not, articulated around the logic of appropriation, exploita3
tion, and violence (cf. Santos 2007: 1, Surez-Krabbe 2011). Simultaneously, the zone of nonbeing contains the possibility of treating human rights as
the common inheritance of humanity by virtue of other grammars of human
dignity4 that occur among subjects in this zone.
This essay explores the limits of human rights with reference to the critiques of de Sousa Santos and Fanon. It also examines historical and current
normative constructions of the category human. The following section
addresses presumptions of sovereignty from the subjective stance of the conquistadors and their heirs. The de facto lack of access to the emancipatory
and enabling aspects of human rights is an outcome of that subjective stance
and a major concern for social movements and progressive political organizations involved in enacting human rights. It is at the point where human rights
collapse that the struggles for human rights become most relevant. In order to
grasp contemporary human rights politics, we therefore need to apprehend the
reasons behind this failure (Baxi 2002).

1
2
3
4

This essay refers to human as a category, among other things, to emphasize the ways in
which the term is used to hierarchize people.
See Fanon 1967 and Gordon 1995, 2004, 2009 for more on the zone of nonbeing.
See Santos conceptual image of the abyssal line in 2007: 1.
The research project ALICE, Strange Mirrors, Unsuspected Lessons (2012-2015), operates
with this terminology. See the project webpage at: http://alice.ces.uc.pt/en/index.php/thema
tic-areas/human-rights-and-other-grammars-of-human-dignity/?lang=en.

Human Rights, Race, and Gender from a Transatlantic Perspective 213

Subjectivity and Sovereignty: I Conquer and the Imperial

Attitude
Spanish colonialism and the European invention of America initiated a complex series of processes that have had a profound and lasting impact on the
modern/colonial world-system (Quijano 2000a: 553). This impact extends
from the personal politics of subject formation to the global economic, social,
political, legal, and epistemic order. The world-system is modern/colonial
because coloniality of power (Quijano 2000a) as against colonial power
is the underbelly of modernity.
To the reader unfamiliar with the Latin American decolonial tradition, it is
necessary to explain that when this discussion conceptualizes global processes in terms of what the sociologist Quijano describes as a world-system, it
refers to a world-system in which center and periphery continue to play an
important role, but whose coordinates are changing. However, these changes
do not (at least not yet) challenge the colonial logic of the world-system.
Crucially, then, when this essay refers to the world-system, it also signifies
the modern/colonial world-system in order to emphasize the logic by which
global processes continue to be colonial.
Coloniality began with Spanish and Portuguese colonialism in the first
modernity, between 1492 and the eighteenth century. The philosopher Enrique Dussel has elaborated extensively upon the continuities between the
first and second modernity; his terminology reflects the shift in the geography of reason at the heart of this essay. The first modernity is his designation for the processes initiated by Spanish and Portuguese colonialism; it is
pivotal to understanding the emergence and consolidation of Europes hegemony over the Atlantic. While this hegemony is the crucial phenomenon in
the transition to the second modernity, when northern Europe achieved its
position as a geopolitical center (Dussel 2004: 3, 28), its dominance has only
now begun to be dismantled. The term second modernity refers to the
events and processes traditionally attached to the term modernity from the
eighteenth century onwards, notably including the Industrial Revolution and
the Enlightenment. To decolonize the Enlightenment, we must engage with
the other side of modernity, whose shadow we can discern in the processes
which took place during the first modernity.
Coloniality is intrinsic to contemporary configurations of power. This implies among other things as indicated by the collapsing of the terms modern/colonial that there is a direct link between colonial subjectivity and
modern subjectivity. Indeed, Dussel noted this historical connection in the
early 1990s, arguing that the Cartesian ego cogito was preceded by the ego
conquiro, the I conquer of the first modernity (1992: 40). Dussels approach to the I conquer considers the historical processes that took place in

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the context of the discovery of America (including the Caribbean) from the
sixteenth century onwards. The I conquer is the first modern subjectivity. It
is a way of being that seeks to erase the Other through exploitation and violence. It is an incarnation of the conqueror, who arrived and practiced diverse
forms of violence in the Americas; it represents a male, enslaving, and phallic
ego (Dussel 1992, 2008). The first modern subjectivity is thus also a deeply
gendered subjectivity (Dussel 1992, Lugones 2007, Maldonado-Torres 2008).
While Dussels conceptualization of the I conquer elaborates some of the
ideas already being explored within the Latin American philosophical tradition, it is especially by virtue of Nelson Maldonado-Torres and Maria Lugones analyses that this essay explores the links between the colonial/modern
subjectivity, race, gender, and human rights.
In any examination of human rights, acknowledging the colonial origins of
modern subjectivity is crucial; this reveals an oversight in human rights
scholarship that many human rights proponents and critics alike overlook. To
refer to one example, Costas Douzinas' seminal Human Rights and Empire:
The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (2007b) demonstrates this
blindness to the concept human within human rights and within the practices of humanitarianism, even though his approach is otherwise persuasive.
Early in Human Rights and Empire (2007b: 12), he provides a brief account
of the genealogy of the idea of the human being that stays within the geographical confines of Europe (Ancient Greece and Rome being the epicenters
of the narrative) and consequently collapses historical time to these places. As
such, Douzinas narrative neglects the events taking place during the first
modernity and the actors involved in these events. In addition, he does not
consider how race and gender inform the emergence of the category human effectively, disregarding coloniality. This means that, although interesting, his analysis and arguments are flawed as his critique moves within the
same Eurocentric framework as the ideas he examines.
By contrast, this essay establishes that the construction of man or the
human emerged in the context of the discovery of America. Several scholars have shown that this construction had already been established during the
sixteenth century, as can be seen in the context of the debates among the
Spanish colonial powers concerning the humanity of the Indians. These debates, best known as the Valladolid debates, were conducted by representatives of two conflicting perspectives. According to the viewpoint represented
by Gins de Seplveda, who framed his argument in secularized terms (cf.
Seplveda 1996 [approximately 1550]: 109113), the indigenous peoples
were subhuman Others who had to comply with more advanced peoples and
their laws. If war was necessary to meet these aims, then war had to be
waged.
Seplvedas position provided legitimization for colonization and exploitation, including sexualized exploitation, as discussed below. Bartolom de

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Las Casas (1552), representing the other side, rejected conflict as a means of
civilizing the Other. Instead, he proposed that the Other must be won by reason and that Otherness must at least in principle be respected. According
to Las Casas, the indigenous peoples were human (or at least potentially human) and thus subject to rights, including the right to be different (cf. Castro
2007, Dussel 2008, Maestre Snchez 2004, Surez-Krabbe 2011, Wynter
2003). Given that Seplvedas stance conformed to the interests of the Crown
and the conquistadors, it received far stronger support than Las Casas position within the Americas experience of coloniality.
To state that the I conquer stance actualizes a gendered ego is to emphasize that the racist configurations of power cannot be understood without
taking into account the patriarchal configurations of power (cf. Lugones
2007: 202). The notions of gender and sexuality with which Spanish men had
arrived in the Americas (where there were exceedingly few Spanish women)
changed fundamentally with the emergence of the I conquer. With the I
conquer, the masculinity of Spanish men was not solely constructed in their
relationship with the Spanish women, but also in their relationship of (sexual)
violence with the indigenous and also later with African men and women (cf.
Silverblatt 1987, Wynter 2003). The eroticism practiced in the colonies by
this phallic ego was part of a practice of domination of the body through the
sexual colonization of women and the forced labor of men (Dussel 1992: 50).
The notion of appropriate gender applied to white European, Christian,
and bourgeois women and men, that is, to those in the zone of being which
came to be characterized by biological and sexual dimorphism, heterosexualism, and patriarchy (Lugones 2007: 190). In the zone of being, the category
man orders white bourgeois men and womens lives and simultaneously
determines the modern/colonial significance of all men and women. Moreover, the zone of being is heterosexual, and heterosexuality permeates the
racialized patriarchal control over production (including knowledge production) and collective authority. At the same time, the category man characteristically ignores race and naturalizes gender. Its fundamental dependence
on the zone of nonbeing is also distinctive.
According to Lugones (2007: 195196, 206), the coloniality of gender
had two principal effects on white bourgeois women. Firstly, women were
women as long as they were regarded as sexually pure and passive, thereby fit
to reproduce bourgeois, white males class, colonial, and racial position. In
accordance with dichotomist biological distinctions, the white woman was
characterized by her reproductive role as well as by her sexual passivity and
purity. Secondly, because of their nature, women were excluded from the
collective sphere of authority, knowledge creation, and (by and large) from
control over the means of production. Purported weakness of mind and body
were important components in the reduction and isolation of these women
from most of human experience (ibid).

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Those relegated to the zone of nonbeing have been, in turn, confined to

spaces organized by the logic of appropriation, violence, and control.5 People
in the zone of nonbeing are non-human or sub-human; they do not have a
gender and are forcibly subjected to sex, labor, and death. Other modalities of
gender and sexuality have also been relegated to the zone of nonbeing. As
they do not qualify as human according to white, male criteria for humanness,
they have not been endowed with a sexuality, but have been ascribed an extremely aggressive sexual disposition. They have also not been classed as
men and women, but as males and females although the biological distinction between these categories remains blurred.
With Lugones, it is important to note that the race and gender relations in
coloniality imply that some principles of social organization, which tend to be
universalized by white feminism, only apply to the zone of being the same
zone from which these feminist readings of society emerge. These are, first,
the division between public and private social spheres and, second, the upholding of appropriate gender differences, such as the dichotomy between
men and women. This race-gender normativity also naturalizes white womens privilege of solidarity, where, for example, Scandinavian women can
experience solidarity with Muslim women (implying that they are oppressed),
but Muslim women cannot share solidarity with Scandinavian women (implying that they are free from oppression) (Bouteldja 2011). This functions to
emphasize differences between those inside and outside of the zone of nonbeing.
Maldonado-Torress contribution to this discussion in his essay On the
Coloniality of Being: Contributions to the Development of a Concept expands upon this knowledge, showing that questions concerning the humanity
of the Indians whether they were rational beings, whether they had rights
are founded on what he terms a racist/imperial Manichean misanthropic skepticism, or the imperial attitude (2007: 245) of I conquer. This imperial
attitude questions the humanity of the conquered and precedes the Cartesian
methodological skepticism, whose central principle is doubt. MaldonadoTorres emphasizes the crucial significance of doubt or of questioning, in sum,
of misanthropic skepticism, because of its centrality in understanding the
existential dimensions of the I conquer for the conqueror and the conquered. As he states:
Misanthropic skepticism doubts in a way the most obvious. Statements like you are a
human take the form of cynical rhetorical questions: Are you completely human? You
have rights becomes why do you think that you have rights? Likewise, You are a rational being takes the form of the question are you really rational? (ibid: 246)

In contrast to Lugones distinction between the light and the dark side (2007), I prefer Fanons more existential distinction between the zones of being and nonbeing (1967).

Human Rights, Race, and Gender from a Transatlantic Perspective 217

What is important about misanthropic skepticism is not the answers to the
questions posed; what is notable are the questions themselves. It is this doubt
about the humanity of the Other that relegates the Other to the zone of nonbeing, where she is expected to remain or constantly prove her being:
The Misanthropic skepticism provides the basis for the preferential option for the ego
conquiro, which explains why security for some can conceivably be obtained at the expense of the lives of others. The imperial attitude promotes a fundamentally genocidal
attitude in respect to colonized and racialized people. Through it colonial and racial subjects are marked as dispensable (ibid: 246, italics in original).

As such, the imperial attitude has quickly become a racist and colonial commonplace that has radicalized and naturalized the non-ethics of war (ibid:
247).
When Maldonado-Torres writes about the non-ethics of war, he does so in
order to emphasize the differences between the zone of being and the zone of
nonbeing. In the zone of being, we can discuss an ethics of war. This ethics of
war is, however, suspended in relation to those in the zone of nonbeing,
where it becomes a non-ethics that includes genocidal and epistemicidal practices towards the subjects relegated to this zone. As Maldonado-Torres elaborates, war also includes rape, and although the primary targets of this latter
practice of sexual violence are women, men of color are also regarded as
penetrable subjects (ibid: 247248).
These insights are linked to the development of human rights politics: the
imperial doubt had already been internalized within the subjectivity of the
conquerors by the time that Pope Paul III, in 1537, declared the Indians human. Hence, the Popes declaration had no significant impact (MaldonadoTorres 2007: 244, cf. Quijano 1992). Accordingly, the same doubt was already in play when the above-mentioned Valladolid debates regarding the
humanity of indigenous peoples occurred.
The imperial commonplace, the I conquer stance, was never an occasion
for interrogation by Cartesian doubt either and has been left unquestioned and
continues to lie at the heart of the dominant scientific disciplines concerned
with the study of social, economic, political, legal, and humanistic affairs.
This is not coincidental. Rather, as the last section of this discussion demonstrates, it connects historically to the processes that took place during the
transition between the first and the second modernity and so to the transition
between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, when northern European
(mostly British, Danish, Dutch, French, and German) and North American
colonialisms began to take over the transatlantic connection and slave trade
previously controlled by the powers of Spain and Portugal. The next section
examines the complex relationship between the construction of the category
human, the race-gender normativity fundamental to the imperial attitude,
and human rights.

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The Imperial Attitude and Human Rights

The Spanish conquistadors and colonizers, the agents of the Crown, and the
members of the clergy each adopted different positions in the dispute over the
humanity of indigenous people in the Americas (Knig 1998: 1314). To the
colonizers and conquerors, whose position was predicated on the desire for
rapid enrichment and access to power, it was convenient not to regard the
Indians as human. Rapid wealth production and access to power depended
directly on the exploitation and/or eradication of native populations. The
colonizers and conquerors viewpoint was that the Indians were born to be
enslaved, because they had wild customs and were intellectually weak.
As Hans Joachim Knig notes, the perspective of the conquerors and colonizers was an almost direct extrapolation of the ways in which the Spanish
had conceived of Others in antiquity and in the Middle Ages (Knig 1998:
15). The Spanish Crown, also concerned with rapid enrichment, maintained
some ethical limits due to its connection to the Church more specifically
due to its obligation to convert the Indians. For the most part, the Crown
aimed to protect the lives of indigenous peoples and to facilitate their conversion to Christianity, because the autochthonous population was considered
part of the wealth of the discovered territories they were its labor force and
tributaries. The Churchs predominant position was that the Indians were
human and had to be understood as such. They were, however, not fully realized human beings. Rather, having the potential to become Christian, they
could become fully realized humans when they accepted Christianity; the
main focus of the Church was its evangelizing endeavor. In spite of these
differences among the Spanish, the crucial point is that across all three positions, the indigenous peoples were regarded as inferior to the Spanish. The
issue of the humanity of African slaves was not even debated they were not
considered to be people (Knig 1998: 15, Surez-Krabbe 2011: 102105).
This hierarchization of human beings is fundamental to racism. It implies
that those who endorse white, male, bourgeois, and Christian standards for
defining what human means evaluate whether those who do not meet these
standards are human or to what degree they are human. The less similar other
people are to these standards, the less they are regarded as human. Social and
material life is organized according to the hierarchies created by applying the
above-mentioned criteria. During the first modernity, these deliberations were
made on the basis of what the Spanish powers took to be important elements
constituting the human: spirituality, economy, social organization, political
organization, sexuality, and thought.
Racism is not only about having the power to determine other peoples
humanity, but also about defining the terms of such discussions. While many
scholars state that the Church was often on the side of the indigenous, they

Human Rights, Race, and Gender from a Transatlantic Perspective 219

often leave unquestioned that their very ability to take the side of the indigenous was a privilege only the conquering elites had meaning that solidarity
is embedded in the coloniality of power and frequently enacts the zone of
being. In the case of the conquering elites, solidarity was built upon the imperial attitude; the people who were on the side of the indigenous were so because of the potential of the latter to become like them (and so fully human)
this way of thinking remains decidedly racist.
We need to acknowledge the complexity of the historical trajectory of racism and to understand that by debating the rights of people and the laws of
nations (jus gentium), the Spanish elites assumed the privilege of defining
rights by asking whether the indigenous peoples were human and therefore
could have rights.
The deliberations of Francisco de Vitoria, a Spanish Renaissance theologian, jurist, and important contributor to modern international legal interpretations of the ancient Roman customary law of jus gentium, include an exploration of the moral basis of trade based on profit (cf. Anghie 1996, 1999,
2004, Gmez Rivas 2005). Vitorias work condenses, in significant ways, the
positions of the Crown, the Conquerors, and the Church to form a rationale
and a (non-)ethics of war. As Antony Anghie has shown in his writings on
Vitoria and international jurisprudence, Vitoria provides principles for the
distinction between natural law, human law, and divine law in order to conceptualize the Indian question, that is, the legitimacy of imperial power over
indigenous peoples in America. Within this distinction, Vitoria makes the
crucial move to situate questions of ownership and property within natural
and human law. While divine law, mediated by the Pope, is limited to the
Christian world, natural and human laws transcend cultures. Because they are
argued to be within the realms of laws that transcend specific cultures, natural
and human laws are regarded as being universal. It is within the framework of
this operation that we find the basis of the law of peoples, jus gentium
(Anghie 1996: 324326, cf. Vitoria 1981).
The problem of cultural difference is central to Vitorias ideas and the
way in which he deals with it also explains the point of collapse of human
rights discussed in the first section of this essay. In order to grapple with
cultural difference, Vitoria makes three decisive cognitive moves that continue to be central to the negation of the Other in international law. Firstly, Vitoria recognizes the social and customary difference of the Indians. Secondly,
he attempts to overcome difference through jus gentium and the characterization of Indians as human beings who have a universal rationality as reflected
in their social, economic, and religious organization (Anghie 1996: 331). This
universal rationality allows the Indians to understand and therefore comply
with jus gentium. Thirdly, because they are equal to the Spanish in having the
capacity for universal reason, one can expect them to obey universal stand-

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ards. The difficulty is, of course, that these apparently universal standards are
actually Christian Spanish standards (Anghie 1996: 332).
While Vitoria emphasizes the humanity of the indigenous peoples in some
parts of his discussion, in others he excuses just war against them. He does so
because, according to the Spanish, the Indians are potentially ontologically
equal to them. The criteria for this ontological equality, however, are formulated within Spanish Christian epistemological frameworks and the negation
of the Other, the zone of nonbeing, lies at the center of this definition. In
other words, what the Spanish regard as the indigenous peoples potential to
become like them is, at the same time, that by which they negate the humanity
of the Other: that is, a potential for sameness is also a negation of difference.
This negation makes it possible to grant meta-legal status to the war
against the Indians; the war against the Indians was justified by the universal
jus gentium, similar to the way in which contemporary wars against Iraq and
Afghanistan are justified in the name of human rights. Indeed, whereas Vitorias argument concludes by not denying the difference of the Indians, it also
uses their assumed sameness and equality to deny them sovereignty. As mentioned, it is precisely because the Indians are equal to the Spanish that they
have to obey universal norms for example, those that dictate the right to
travel and explore other lands, to trade in a fair manner, and to spread the
Christian religion in other words, the Indians have the right to colonize if
they become what they in fact can never be: Spanish (Anghie 2004: 2021,
Vitoria 1981: 7276). Vitorias humanist equality masks difference and unequal power relations with a veneer of Spanish philosophical, cultural, economic, and political life. These Spanish forms of life dictate the terms of jus
gentium, demonstrating that the imperial attitude is in operation.
The imperial attitude additionally interprets the Indians resistance to becoming like the Spanish as their inability to comply with the universal laws of
jus gentium. This allows the Spanish powers to affirm that the Indians are
violating universal laws and consequently committing a transgression that
legitimates just war against them (Anghie 1996: 326). Indeed, this is a naturalization of inferiority, and this inferiority itself becomes the rationale for a
just war (cf. Dussel 2008: 166, Maldonado-Torres 2007). By these means, the
Indians end up existing as violators of the universal law who cannot implement righteous war themselves. Just war is, by this definition, a Christians
right; therefore the indigenous peoples would have to convert to Christianity
before being able to conduct war righteously (Anghie 1996: 330). As suggested with reference to the recent Iraqi and Afghani wars, the foundations of
contemporary international law and the doctrine of sovereignty share this
ambiguity which is obscured or explicitly negated in most studies of international relations and international law (cf. Anghie 1996, 2004).

Human Rights, Race, and Gender from a Transatlantic Perspective 221

Conclusion
The imperial attitude has remained almost wholly unexamined in dominant
knowledge construction since the sixteenth century. This is connected to the
processes that took place during the transition between the first and the second modernity, when northern Europe started to take charge of the transatlantic connection and slave trade previously controlled by Spain and Portugal. In
this period of transition, the colonial elites across the Atlantic continued to
deny, or render obsolete, the social struggles of non-elites that, however, had
powerfully affected their thought and political practice. While it is outside the
scope of this discussion to consider the dynamics between emancipation and
the subsumption or neutralization of emancipation within the coloniality of
power, it is nevertheless important to underline the crucial role the Other has
played in changing the terms of ideas and legal issues, perhaps most saliently
in relation to the idea of racial equality (cf. Surez-Krabbe 2013). It is symptomatic of the imperial attitude that the impact of the social struggles of these
Others, such as the Haitian Revolution (17911804), has been largely negated
over time.
The criticisms that came to be known as the Black Legend, which was
primarily advanced during the Enlightenment, involved a representation of
Spanish colonialism as anachronistic and exceptionally brutal.6 The Black
Legend was in effect a Protestant, northern European backlash against Catholic, colonial Spain promoting the imperial interests of northern European and
North American colonialisms. By representing Spanish colonialism as particularly cruel, northern European colonial powers could differentiate themselves as being more humane and modern (Beverley 2008: 599). In effect, the
Black Legend played an important role as another stratum of denial, which
legitimized colonialism and the imperial attitude.
The initial layer of denial, as outlined above, in the discussion of I conquer and its imperial attitude is based upon the negation of the Other. The
second layer is the Cartesian ego cogito, which conceals the negation of the
Other and is built upon the I conquer. The third layer is an extension of
these negations, whereby Spain and southern Europe are themselves located
in a border zone, as they are, for example, via the Black Legend. Spain, Portugal, and the rest of southern Europe are considered neither modern nor
colonial. At best, they might be considered pre-modern due to an academic
bias towards the heritage of Ancient Greece and Rome (cf. Santos 2002b).
One of the common assumptions of northern European elites has been an

Julin Juderas coined the term in his 1914 book The Black Legend and Historical Truth in
reference to anti-Spanish propaganda. The Black refers here to the pejorative representation of Spanish colonial behaviour.

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understanding of the Other as being at an earlier stage in the history of humanity; more specifically, at an earlier stage of northern European history.
Significantly, the imaginaries reflected in the Black Legend have facilitated a denial of the transatlantic nature of Western ideas since the discovery of
the Americas. This denial is one of the reasons why many students of human
rights depart from the assumption that these are mainly a product of seventeenth and eighteenth century northern European thought, particularly linked
to Hobbes (Leviathan, 1651) and Locke (Two Treatises of Government,
1690) and additionally place the origins of human rights in the French Revolution (as outlined in the introduction to this essay). This historical narrative,
however, is an aspect of the third stratum of negations mentioned above.
To forward this essays central thesis that human rights are not only
built upon, but also protect, white male subjectivity, and that they are the fruit
of the construction of the category human that emerged as a central point of
discussions among the Spanish colonizing elites during the sixteenth century it is pivotal to understand the three layers of negation briefly outlined
above. The race-gender power relations embedded in the category human
played a significant role in the context of the social struggles of racialized
subjects in Latin America during independence and republic-building. Among
the effects of these struggles was the inclusion of the idea of racial equality in
the legal frameworks of several newly independent countries.
Many years later, the idea of racial equality also came to impact on the
Universal Declaration of Human Rights (Glendon 2003: 33, cf. Carozza
2003). Although the idea of racial equality put the Latin American and Caribbean legal tradition at the forefront of human rights thinking, it increasingly
lost its emancipatory potential and was instead accommodated by white male
elites to protect their interests. It was indeed used to make invisible and to
neutralize the struggles of racialized subjects, who had brought the idea of
racial equality into the light in the first place. For instance, the widespread
assumption that the abolition of slavery was a white mans concession still
has currency.
The period of independence and republic-building in Latin America is
connected to the general decline of Spain as a major colonial power and the
rise of northern Europe and the US as imperial powers. While Latin American
independence movements explicitly used the idea of racial equality, the elites
in Europe and the United States largely ignored racial issues. As the French
revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen attest, the
concerns for racial equality had been absent in these latitudes for some time.
Contrary to debates on the rights of people in the sixteenth century, consideration about the colonial aspects of issues concerning citizenship and
(in)equality were increasingly absent from elaborations of the ideas of rights
(Mignolo 2000: 29).

Human Rights, Race, and Gender from a Transatlantic Perspective 223

These ideas were elaborated within epistemological frameworks determined by the processes that established and universalized Western principles
of national belonging and sovereignty (cf. Santiago-Valles 2003) and by the
configuration of the idea of the citizen within these structures. In order to fit
into the category of the citizen, a person had to conform to requirements regarding religion, blood, color, gender, knowledge, government, and property as defined by European male elites. According to the dominant imaginaries, the formerly colonized still had to progress towards maturity before
they themselves could be expected to start the processes that marked out
civilized societies, including those of defining rights.
The proposals of the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of Citizens, of the US Declaration of Independence, and of Latin American selfdetermination movements and constitutionalist endeavors were varied continuations of a theme that first began to be discussed in connection with the
management of the colonized lands of the Americas (cf. Csaire 2006). All
were, in diverse ways, concealing the imperial/racist colonialist misanthropic
skepticism or imperial attitude behind the emerging focus on the nation-state
and on the category of the citizen a status not granted to all inhabitants.
Understanding the imperial attitude is central to comprehending how the
significance of the struggles of racialized men and women has been downplayed despite their impact on the development of international human rights
policy, for example on racial equality (as discussed above, cf. Buck-Morss
2000, Lasso 2003, 2006, 2007, Surez-Krabbe 2013). The imperial attitude
remains commonplace as long as a normative, white, male construction of
human subjectivity prevails. This explains the above-mentioned duality of
human rights, and why the security of some, as Maldonado-Torres states, is
promoted at the expense of the lives of Others (2007: 246). The race-gendernormativity embedded in the category human allows Western societies to
mobilize their armies against these Others, alleging to save brown women
from brown men (Spivak 1993: 93), and to save brown men from themselves
(Leets Hansen 2011).

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