RACE, RELIGION, AND ETHICS IN THE

MODERN/COLONIAL WORLD
Nelson Maldonado-Torres

ABSTRACT
The concept of religion as an anthropological category and the idea of race
as an organizing principle of human identification and social organization
played a major role in the formation of modern/colonial systems of symbolic
representation that acquired global significance with the expansion of
Western modernity. The modern concepts of religion and race were mutually
constituted and together became two of the most central categories in
drawing maps of subjectivity, alterity, and sub-alterity in the modern
world. This makes the critical theory of religion highly relevant for the
theory of race, and both of them crucial for ethics. It follows from this, not
only that religion and race have been profoundly intertwined in modernity,
but also that any ethics that seeks to take seriously the challenges created
by modernity/coloniality has to be, at least to some extent, decolonial.
KEY WORDS: race, modernity/coloniality, coloniality, decolonial ethics,
theory of religion, Frantz Fanon

What we have come to call religion and what we call race have played a
central role in the way peoples and societies have been depicted, con-
ceived, approached, and organized in the West for the last several centu-
ries. Few other ideas have had equal weight. Religion and race have come
to define how we imagine entire groups of people within societies and
across nations in the modern age. If one looked at the literature on
religion and race as modern concepts or areas of study, however, one would
find that scholars theorizing religion and those theorizing race are not
typically in serious conversation with each other. In the area of religious
ethics, race arguably remains as an optional subfield of study, even though
race is not only an idea about human capacity but also about the
possibility/impossibility and the desirability/undesirability of contact

Nelson Maldonado-Torres holds a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Brown University and has
taught at Duke University’s Religion Department and the Department of Ethnic Studies at
the University of California, Berkeley. He is now Chair of the Department of Latino and
Hispanic Caribbean Studies and core faculty member of the Comparative Literature
Program at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. He is also Research Fellow in the Depart-
ment of Political Sciences at the University of South Africa and the author of Against War:
Views from the Underside of Modernity (Duke UP, 2008), as well as guest editor of special
issues in publications such as Transmodernity and Worlds and Knowledges Otherwise.
Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Lucy Stone Hall, A26854 Joyce Kilmer Ave, Piscataway, NJ 08854,
[email protected].

JRE 42.4:691–711. © 2014 Journal of Religious Ethics, Inc.

692 Journal of Religious Ethics

between some individuals or groups and others. Neither do those who

work on race and ethics or politics take religion as a category that
deserves critical scrutiny, because there is a sense that, at the end of the
day, we all know what religion is. Here, I join those who have brought race
and religion together, but also wish to complement their contributions
with the elaboration of a thesis that brings the themes of modernity and
colonialism right to the forefront of this reflection.
Although not a work on religion as such, one of the most eloquent
treatments of race and religion in the last decade is J. Kameron Carter’s
Race: A Theological Account (2008). In it, Carter critically assesses and
expands on Michel Foucault’s account of race war, which, different from
racism, has emancipatory possibilities and refers to the sometimes
explicit and sometimes underlying conflict and opposition among parties
in a certain social order (Carter 2008, 65–66). For Carter, “modernity’s
racial imagination has its genesis in the theological problem of Christ-
ianity’s quest to sever itself from its Jewish roots” (2008, 4). Carter is
concerned with the ways in which theology opened up possibilities for
race thinking beyond what Foucault suggests in his description of the
role of the Jews in the formation of the counterhistory of race war in
modernity. Carter engages in the theological analysis that does not
appear in Foucault’s work, while at the same time providing ways to
evade Foucault’s own complicity with “the story of the modern racializing
. . . of the Jew” (2008, 75). However, Carter’s analysis, like Foucault’s,
remains anchored in a fundamentally European genealogical account of
race that does not allow for a proper consideration of the ways in which
categories such as religion and race obtain a particularly modern
meaning in relation to a more ample set of historical experiences, dis-
courses, and institutions—one in which Christian theology is one among
several relevant bodies of knowledge and sets of documents. I seek to go
in that direction here by concentrating my focus on often-
unacknowledged elements of the Age of European “Discovery” and early
colonization of the New World (15th–16th centuries). Carter is very much
aware of the significance of the “early colonialist vision” and believes
that “the Kantian outlook [with which he is primarily concerned in his
examination of race] is only the discursive maturing of the racial colo-
nialism inaugurated in the mid-to-late fifteenth century” (2008, 5). My
interest lies in identifying what it was in the “early colonialist vision”
that was new and that matured into philosophical positions such as
Kant’s. And, while I agree with Carter that “in the middle of [the early
colonialist vision] was theological discourse,” I also believe that the age
of European explorations, “discovery” and early colonization from the
mid-to-late fifteenth century also involved other discourses and generated
possibilities that were not necessarily anticipated by ancient or theologi-
cal writings.
Race, Religion, and Ethics in the Modern/Colonial World 693

One of the arguments here is that by bringing the Age of Discovery and
early colonization into consideration one can better understand how the
category of religion obtains a particularly modern meaning that affects how
we have come to see Christianity and Judaism, among other religions. Guy
Stroumsa defends a similar thesis. He rightly asserts that “the early encoun-
ter between Christianity and New World religious phenomena, for which
traditional categories stemming from medieval theology offered no adequate
concepts, entailed a broadened idea of religion” (2010, 21). He also correctly
posits that “the encounter with Amerindian religions engendered a series of
conditions necessary for the modern study of religious phenomena” (2010, 23).
This account broadens the horizons of possibility when thinking about
genealogies of religion in modernity. The “discoveries” and early colonization
that took place in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries are not just
stopping stations on the path from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance or from
the Renaissance to the Age of Reason. For Stroumsa the Age of “Discovery”
was one of the major historical events that was “necessary for the emergence
of the modern approach to religious phenomena” (2010, 5). What I would like
to add to Stroumsa’s analysis is that it is difficult to obtain a full appreciation
of the significance of “discovery” and early colonization without considering
the extent to which this period was crucial not only for the production of the
modern category of religion, but also for the modern idea of race. This would
lead one to consider the Age of Discovery not only as one major historical event
in the way to the modern study of religion, as Stroumsa does, but also as a
major epistemic revolution in its own right, as I will argue here building on the
work of Anibal Quijano and Sylvia Wynter. And in the middle of it all there
was not only theology, but also religion and race.
In addition to the idea that considering the Age of Discovery and early
colonization can lead to a better understanding of the modern concepts of
race and religion, the main points that I will outline in this essay are:
(1) the emerging concept of religion is intimately linked with the
modern concept of race, and that both race and religion play a
key role in the formation of modernity/coloniality.1
(2) the explanation of the nexus between religion and race requires
considering not only Christian theological conceptions of Judaism,
but also the relation between Christianity and Islam, perceptions
of indigeneity and blackness, the production of symbolic
Manicheism (Fanon 2005), as well as the mutation or transforma-
tion of medieval conceptions of space and time.

1
Modernity/coloniality is a concept formulated and developed by Anibal Quijano (2000),
Walter Mignolo (2000), and other intellectuals linked to the modernity/coloniality/
decoloniality network. It captures the idea that early modern “discoveries” and colonization
led to the creation of a form of power that was colonial in character (“coloniality of power,”
see Quijano 2000) and that this form of power is constitutive of Western modernity.
694 Journal of Religious Ethics

(3) colonization is a generative action and not a passive vehicle of

previous ideas or interpretations. It raises dilemmas, aporias, and
questions that provoke epistemic shifts. This tends to be denied in
genealogical analyses (for example, Nietzsche and Foucault) and
phylogenetic theories (for example, Freud’s analysis of civilization)
that tend to rest on or contribute to Eurocentric historical accounts.
(4) if colonization was central in the making of the modern world, then
decolonization can be equally central in the effort to transcend its
limits. This is key for any attempt to produce a form of discourse or
practice that aims to overcome the problematic aspects of Western
modernity, including any form of ethics or socio-political thought.

This essay is more the outline of a research program than a full elaboration
of the positions that I have mentioned, but one that I hope makes the
convincing point that coloniality is central for the understanding of modernity
and the modern categories of religion and race and vice versa, that race and
religion are key for the understanding of modernity/coloniality. Since modern
conceptions of race and religion play a key role in the formation of modern
accounts of subjectivity and human otherness, the nexus between modernity/
coloniality, race, and religion also put ethics and socio-political thought at the
center. In that sense, race and colonialism should be considered more than
sub-topics in the study of ethics and religion in modernity. This essay aims to
contribute to opening up these perspectives and ensuing debates.

1. Race, Religion, and Modernity/Coloniality

La mayor cosa después de la creación del mundo, sacando la encarnación y
muerte del que lo crio, es el descubrimiento de Indias; y así, las llaman
Mundo Nuevo. (The greatest event since the creation of the world, save the
Incarnation and death of Him who created it, is the discovery of the Indies
that are thus called the New World.)
—Francisco López de Gómara (1979, 7)
The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the
Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events recorded
in the history of mankind. Their consequences have already been very great:
but, in the short period of between two and three centuries which has
elapsed since these discoveries were made, it is impossible that the whole
extent of their consequences can have been seen.
—Adam Smith (2005, 508)
The modern world-system was born in the long sixteenth century. The
Americas as a geosocial construct were born in the long sixteenth century.
The creation of this geosocial entity, the Americas, was the constitutive act
of the modern world-system. The Americas were not incorporated into an
already existing capitalist world-economy. There could not have been a
capitalist world-economy without the Americas.
—Anibal Quijano and Immanuel Wallerstein (1992, 549)
Race, Religion, and Ethics in the Modern/Colonial World 695

One of the reasons to focus on the nexus of race, modernity, and

colonialism is that in the last several centuries, colonial enterprises have
typically included a modernizing or civilizing impetus of some kind,
combined with ideas of racial difference. Modern colonialism also led to
genocides, massive racial slavery (linked to the need for work in the
colonies), and multiple forms of segregation between “natives,” slaves,
settlers, and creoles. Colonialism was by no means the only, but arguably
the principal form in which western modernity spread through the world.
It is important to note the specific character of modern forms of
colonization as opposed to colonization simpliciter, since it should not be
presupposed that all forms of colonization throughout history have been
fundamentally the same. The Caribbean theorist Sylvia Wynter offers an
eloquent analysis of this. For Wynter, modern forms of colonialism owe
their emergence to a fundamental reconceptualization of geography and of
the very meaning of humanity and the human community in the Age of
“Discovery.” At that moment, the closed horizon of classical and Christian
geography gave way to what she has characterized as “a new worldview”
rooted on the notion of “discovery” and the secularization of various key
elements of the Christian episteme (Wynter 1995).
According to Wynter, “Columbus’s voyage involved ‘a root expansion of
thought’” that, citing Théophile Obenga, she describes as “part of an
intellectual mutation that was to provide all humanity with ‘a new image
of the earth and a new conception of the cosmos’” (1995, 264). This “root
expansion of thought” and “intellectual mutation” involved a challenge to
the theocentric ideas of late Scholasticism, particularly to (a) the arbitrary
mode of divine creation (1995, 27), and (b) the binary schemata of
terrestrial/celestial and of habitable/uninhabitable zones in the known
world. Against the arbitrary mode of divine creation, the Christian
humanists proposed the idea of an earth that had been created for the
sake of humankind and according to principles. Columbus shared those
ideas and believed that, if the earth had truly been created “for life and
souls,” the seas were meant to be navigable and that there were habitable
lands in what was later known as the Western hemisphere (Wynter 1995,
20).2 This is a hypothesis that animated Columbus in his first voyage. He
also believed that the Second Coming of Christ was near and that the
moment had come to take Christianity to all parts of the world.
Columbus’s first voyage of “discovery” vastly accelerated a shift to
considering empirical observation as key in figuring out the ways in which
God had created the world. The “discovery” of new lands and peoples in
zones previously considered to be either non-existent or uninhabitable,
also paved the way to a questioning of the binary schema that was central
to the scholastic worldview and that expressed itself in binaries such as

2 Wynter attributes the phrase “for life and souls” to João de Barros.
696 Journal of Religious Ethics

those of clergy/laity, nobility/non-nobility, habitable/uninhabitable, and

celestial/terrestrial. Not too long after Columbus, Copernicus would simi-
larly begin to undo the divide and parallelism between the celestial and
the terrestrial world. What does all of this have to do with race? Wynter
provides two lines of response.
The first line of response to the question of what does the “root
expansion of thought” or intellectual revolution that took place in Colu-
mbus’s time have to do with race requires further consideration of Colu-
mbus’s presuppositions and motives. Columbus saw his explorations as a
way of helping to further expand Christianity while at the same time
obtaining the material benefits of status and wealth (Wynter 1995, 25).
The Spanish state was the vehicle for this expansion, which would also
bring it more power. “Discovery,” evangelization, and colonization there-
fore went together hand in hand, or, as Wynter puts it: “The same path
opened up to a scientific geography would also open onto the phenomenon
of what was to be the increasingly global colonization of the peoples of the
earth by the modern post-feudal European state” (1991, 257).
There is another part to this first line of response. Columbus saw the
world according to the “triadic formal model specific to the Judeo-Christian
perception of the world’s population as being divided up into Christians
(who had heard and accepted the new Word of the gospel), infidels like the
Muslims and Jews who, although they were monotheists, had refused the
Word, and those pagan polytheistic peoples who had either ignored or had
not as yet been preached the Word” (Wynter 1991, 260). This meant that
Columbus “at once” saw the groups that “he confronted on October 12,
1492” as fitting “into the empty slot or ‘mobile classificatory label’ of
idolator” (Wynter 1991, 260). Columbus therefore started “to behave
towards the small stateless societies of the Neolithic Tainos of the Carib-
bean in terms of what was ‘good’ for the invading Christian statal subjects
to believe” (Wynter 1991, 261). In other words, “both Columbus and his
fellow-Spaniards . . . behaved towards the Tainos or Arawak peoples in
ways prescribed by the term idolator” (Wynter 1991, 263).
The religious term “idolator” informs the meaning of the secular term
“Indios/Indians” and this in turn becomes the “‘oppositionally meaningful’
label” in the new secular classificatory system that begins to emerge.
“Indios/Indians” become “the first mode of the human Other” in the order
of things that led to the formation of the European concept of Man (see
Wynter 1991, 266–67). Quickly after the circulation of the new meaning of
the category “Indio,” there was “a shift made from the Indio as human
Other, to the Negro (i.e., all African-descended peoples) as Other to
Man—as, in effect, the mobile classificatory label ‘nigger’” (Wynter 1991,
267). “In this shift,” Wynter continues, “all peoples of African descent were
now made into the empirical referent of the Other to the new true self that
was now conceived of as an ‘evolved’ selected being (of a eugenic rather
Race, Religion, and Ethics in the Modern/Colonial World 697

than noble line of descent)” (1991, 267). Modern colonialism combines the
logic of “discovery” and its related ideas about the well-being of the
increasingly secular European states and peoples with what later came to
be known as race thinking.
Wynter’s second line of response to the question of how race connects
with modernity and modern colonialism is, in a way, an elaboration of the
first. The first line of response highlights how “Indios/Indians,” who were
initially seen as “idolators” according to the feudal and Scholastic Chris-
tian classificatory schema, become the anthropological form of otherness
in relation to which a secular conception of Man (humanitas) begins to
emerge.3 What is not clear is exactly what led to this particular transfor-
mation, particularly considering that the shift from the Scholastic
episteme to the emerging modern European worldview involved the eradi-
cation of a number of substantial binaries, such as the difference between
the habitable and the uninhabitable lands, and between the celestial and
the terrestrial world. Rather than an eradication or overcoming of these
lines, though, what Wynter proposes is that the “ontological difference of
substance between clergy/laity, nobility/nonnobility, peasantry that had
been supernaturally ordained by God in his Creation,” as well as “the
parallel ontological difference of substance, represented as existing
between areas of the physical universe (that is between the habitable/
uninhabitable realms, between the celestial and the terrestrial)” are ana-
logically reproduced in the emerging modern Western worldview. The new
line that posed an ontological difference of substance ended up becoming
what W. E. B. Du Bois referred to as the “Color Line” (1995, 43). That is,
for Wynter, the “color-line” is not only a sociological description of racial
divisions in the United States and other parts of the world at the start of
the twentieth century, but also a major constitutive dichotomy in the
conceptualization of humanity and human difference in the modern age.
As such, also,
Like its medieval counterpart that is the habitable/unhabitable, celestial/
terrestrial line mapped onto the physical universe and that had served to
absolutize through the analogy of a nonhomogeneous earth and universe
that it inscribed, the feudal order’s ostensibly immutable status-organizing
principle of caste based on the allegedly also divinely ordained
nonhomogeneity of ontological substance between the hereditary line of
noble descent and those of the nonnobles (whose extreme Other was the
peasantry), the color line has come to serve a parallel function for our
contemporary world-systemic order and its nation-state units. (1995, 39)

3Consider that the concept of humanitas, used to refer primarily to European humanity,
went hand in hand with the idea of anthropos, which was used as a label to characterize
mainly non-European subjects. See Nishitani 2006.
698 Journal of Religious Ethics

Wynter understands the “Color Line,” therefore, as a binary logic and axis
of a particularly modern system of representations that establish the
“biogenetic nonhomegeneity of the species” in various ways (1995, 42).
While the earlier binaries and ontological differences of substance were
divinely preordained, the new set of differences was increasingly consid-
ered to be genetically preordained. The justification for this differentiation
is built on the apparently evident nature of the sub-humanity of the black
African in the emerging modern Western world in the context of the
emergence of racial slavery. “Black physiognomy” is presented as “‘proof of
the represented evolutionarily determined degrees of genetic perfection”
(Wynter 1995, 42). “Consequently,” Wynter argues,
if the torrid zone and the Western Hemisphere had served as the nec plus
ultra sign and marker of the outside of God’s redemptive grace, the physi-
ognomy, black-skin, way of life, culture, historical past of peoples of Africa
and Afro-mixed descent has to be represented consistently as the liminal
boundary marker between the inside and the outside of the ostensibly
genetically determined and evolutionarily selected mode of “normal being”
encoded in our present model of being, Foucault’s “Figure of Man.” (1995, 43)

Wynter also argues that “from this ultimate mode of otherness based on
‘race,’ other subtypes of otherness are then generated—the lower classes
as the lack of the normal class, that is, the middle class; all other cultures
as the lack of the normal culture, that is, Western culture; the
nonheterosexual as the lack of heterosexuality, represented as a biologi-
cally selected mode of erotic preference; women as the lack of the
normal sex, the male” (1995, 42). The “Color Line” therefore has to be
understood as co-extensive with other forms of domination and as meta-
phorical in various ways, as it does not only refer to color but as it also
“serves as a blueprint of the ongoing division of humankind” (Gordon
2000, 266).
On the basis of this analysis, one can see the “color-line” as the secular
myth of origin or fundamental difference within which other inventions
such as modern individuality, freedom, and equality were built, therefore
gradually generating other sorts of contradictions—like the contradictions
between Scholastic cosmology and the irreconcilable observations that
took place for centuries before empirical science gained credibility, but of
a more complicated nature. The contradictions were due to phenomena
like expressions of freedom among Blacks in contexts where such desire
for freedom among Black people was conceived as impossible or truly
unthinkable.4

4
I here follow Michel Rolph Truillot’s analysis of the alleged a priori impossibility of
the Haitian Revolution. For Trouillot, “the contention that enslaved Africans and their
descendants could not envision freedom—let alone formulate strategies for gaining and
Race, Religion, and Ethics in the Modern/Colonial World 699

Wynter provides one of the most ambitious and provocative genealogies

of the modern Western episteme based on the work of a vast array of
sources, particularly Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean figures such as
Du Bois, Aimé Césaire, and Frantz Fanon. Multiple questions and areas
of investigation remain to further solidify Wynter’s theorization of race
and modernity. One key area left unclear in her account is the explanation
of the way or ways in which the category of “idolator” gave way to the
“Indio/Indian” as a secular ethno-racial category. There is also the related
issue of identifying how precisely the category of “Indio/Indian” led to the
formation of the notion of “nigger” (of the black subject as other to Man)
and how it became a crucial reference for the emerging new conception of
selfhood and the classificatory system of humankind. As I have pointed
out elsewhere, one crucial point is that when Columbus first described
native peoples in the Americas he hypothesized that they were peoples,
not with the wrong religion, but without religion altogether (“sin secta”;
see Maldonado-Torres 2008b; Maldonado-Torres n.d.). The notion of people
without religion had circulated more or less before, but it did not become
prominent before then. What was clear is that the concept of people
without religion challenged the classificatory system of feudal Scholasti-
cism, based on the division between Christians, infidels, and idolators.
The being without religion was formally out of this schema, representing,
not a self or a people who had the wrong beliefs, but one that lacked a
soul. Inasmuch as it can be said that there was a bridge between the
feudal Scholastic world and the emerging classificatory system of the
modern Western world this bridge could have very well been the idea of
the non-religious.
The absence of religion indicates the possible absence of a soul—as the
perceived primary constituent of humanity that serves for establishing a
relation between human beings and the divine. The concept of the non-
religious being also brings up a binary logic of its own that defies the
triadic Christian view of peoples as Christians, infidels, or idolators. The
triadic Scholastic Christian view of peoples presupposed the fundamental
character of a divide between having true and having false religion, which
presupposed the existence of religion and therefore of a soul. The concept
of the non-religious proposes a different schema, based on the binary
religious/non-religious, which presupposes the possibility of beings
without souls and opens up a logic of differentiation that can culminate in
the opposition between soul and non-soul.
Citing scholarship on this area, Stroumsa approximates this view when
he discusses the unthinkability of religions in the New World. “For

securing such freedom—was based not so much on empirical evidence as on an ontology, an

implicit organization of the world and its inhabitants” (1995, 73).
700 Journal of Religious Ethics

Columbus,” he remarks, “the inhabitants of the New World represent a

hitherto unknown category of religious identity” (2010, 14). This new
religious identity led to the formulation of various key questions such as:
“Is the existence of humans remaining unstained by original sin at all
conceivable? If so, how should one think about them? Do they possess a
soul? Are they destined, by nature, to become slaves, as postulated in
Aristotle’s theory?” “It was then,” Stroumsa continues, “in religious terms
that European intellectuals first learned to reflect on the nature of
New World inhabitants in the time of ‘the first globalization.’ This reflec-
tion would soon transform anthropological conceptions, eventually launch-
ing the modern human sciences in the seventeenth century” (2010, 14–15).
My main point in dialogue with Wynter and Stroumsa is that idolator
was not the only category that was mobilized to refer to the indigenous
people of the Americas, but that the category of Indio/“Indian” was created
as well. At the same time, Indio/“Indian” was not simply an extension of
the already known category of the idolator, but also an anthropological
expression (before the birth of the modern human sciences) mounted
on the idea of the being without religion that indicated that Europeans
began to conceptualize the world as being divided, not simply between
those with true and false religion, but more fundamentally between
subjects with different degrees of substance—thereby producing what I
have referred to elsewhere as sub-ontological difference, or difference
between Being and the active negation of being—as in some practices of
dehumanization (Maldonado-Torres 2008, 18, 182). From then on Euro-
peans would begin to conceive themselves as a race, and gradually as
“white,” and no longer solely as cristianos/Christians. Here is where race
enters the scene, proving to be intrinsically connected to the emergence of
the anthropological view of religion and to the birth of the modern human
sciences.
Historically, the idea of the non-religion of native peoples was quickly
translated into a debate about their ontological character, namely whether
they had souls or not. The first half of the sixteenth century saw a number
of discussions and debates about this (see, for instance, Hanke 1974). Not
having a soul meant being devoid of human essence. It meant that one’s
interior life was non-existent, non-substantial, or essentially pathological
in some way. Following Wynter, the thesis here is that the binary
habitable/uninhabitable that was challenged with the emergence of native
peoples in the Americas gradually gave way to the binary soul/non-soul or
fully human/not-fully human. The strength of the first binary led to the
emergence of another binary: if the New World in the Western hemisphere
existed and was habitable there was still the question about the exact
nature of those who lived in the New World and all the torrid zones.
Bodies that looked like humans could be there, but that did not mean that
full-fledged humans would be. The “ontological difference of substance”
Race, Religion, and Ethics in the Modern/Colonial World 701

that was expressed in the habitable/uninhabitable binary finds a new

locus in the ontological difference of substance between the nature of
people in the habitable lands, particularly Christians, and those in the
formerly considered to be non-existent or not populated areas. The New
World and the torrid zones of Africa became markers of sub-humanity, and
the religious/non-religious, and soul/non-soul divides gradually turned, by
virtue of the secularizing and fundamentally colonizing turn of the time,
into various divides, most notably the divide between White and Black or
Native. Secularism and colonization worked together in the production of
“race” as a category.
From this perspective, Du Bois makes a significant contribution not
only to the understanding of the “Color Line” as the heart of the binary
code that sustains the modern Western social classificatory system, but
also to the fundamental character of the question about the existence of
being without souls. He makes both arguments in his classic 1903 text
The Souls of Black Folk (Du Bois 1999). Souls is a book about what is
fundamentally impossible or unthinkable within the modern system of
symbolic representations. It distinctly and clearly enounces what should
remain unthought in Western modernity: Blacks have souls, that is, a
substantial interior life as well as agency. In Souls, Du Bois diagnoses the
system that produces the binary and describes the challenges for black
subjects in it.
Frantz Fanon also sheds light into the constitution of the modern
system of social classification. He refers to a “zone of nonbeing” where
most Blacks cannot descend (Fanon 2008, xii). If they cannot descend into
this hell it can be in part because they are already there but cannot fully
realize it because of the force of the normative view of the human, which
is white, the enchantment of whiteness, and what Fanon calls
negrophobia (see Gordon 2005, 3–4). In short, the descent into the “zone
of nonbeing” is not fully accomplished because either “masking” (black
skins wearing white masks) or pure abjection takes place at the point
where the Black subject does not necessarily realize the gravity of “hell.”
Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (2008) is a propaedeutic of sorts into the
“hell” of the zone of nonbeing, out of which “a genuine new departure can
emerge.” Hell is primarily the place where those without “ontological
resistance” in face of colonizers are located (Fanon 2008, 90). The “zone of
nonbeing” brings together space and race, combing the power of the binary
between the habitable/uninhabitable lands with the schema of people with
soul and without soul. The “zone of nonbeing” is created by the “Color
Line,” and even more fundamentally by the suspicion that certain subjects
do not have souls.
To live in the zone of nonbeing is to live in contexts where law and
ethics are fundamentally suspended and the appearance of those who are
made to inhabit it generates anxiety, pathological erotic desire, and fear
702 Journal of Religious Ethics

(see Maldonado-Torres 2008a, 2010).5 Murder and genocide often appear

as genuine possibilities in this death-world of coloniality. Fanon takes the
reader through a “tour” of this zone in Black Skin, White Masks. It is an
ontological and sociological war zone where the transcendence of human
alterity is selectively but radically suspended and where brutal forms of
violence become normal. The ethics of the polis become the death-ethics of
war, and Western modernity takes on the dimensions of a warring
paradigm (see Maldonado-Torres 2008a). Here it is not a matter of race
war, as in Foucault’s analysis, but of the naturalization of war through the
category of race and coloniality. The understanding of Western modernity
as a paradigm of war necessitates an analysis of race, religion, and
coloniality. It also needs to engage ethics.
The modern Western paradigm of war fosters a world where altruism
and solidarity are fundamentally skewed. Even though she does not use
the term, Wynter makes clear that it is not only knowledge, but also ethics
that is deeply transformed by modern systems of signification. She argues
that culturally specific modes of perception, organization, and truth estab-
lish normative behaviors, expectations, senses of the possible and the
impossible, as well as ideas of self and others that govern the understand-
ing and expression of altruism and solidarity (1991, 264–65; 1995, 38). Put
differently, care for the self and care for others is defined, oriented, and
delimited by basic conceptions of the self, time, space, and other key
coordinates that humans use to make sense of themselves and their
surroundings. To the extent that the Age of “Discovery” led to the emer-
gence of new conceptions of time, space, and subjectivity, the year 1492
stands for a major historical and epistemological event that led to the
formation of new modes of solidarity and intersubjective relation. It also
led to new conceptions of life and death, and of legislation over them. In
short, not only the basic contours of epistemology and philosophical
anthropology, but also normative ethics and politics get redefined with the
emergence of modernity/coloniality.
The world that came to be formed in the long sixteenth century and
gradually expanded globally was a fundamentally non-homogeneous
world where civilization entailed colonization, where colonization was
perceived as a form of spreading civilization, and where the new secular
binary oppositions that were at the core of the system defined and limited
ethical relations.6 Modern civilization and modern colonization were
linked at the core by basic notions of self, other, space, and time that

5
These are emotive dimensions that Fanon elaborates in Black Skin, White Masks. In
that sense, Black Skin is a text about the existential dimensions in the death-world of
coloniality or zone of non-being. The damné or condemned is not only a nothing, but a
non-being, that is, its being is suppressed.
6 For an analysis of the links between civilization and colonization, see Césaire 1972.
Race, Religion, and Ethics in the Modern/Colonial World 703

presupposed a racial division of humankind. The ensuing racism presup-

posed not simply a collapse of the differentiation between beings and
Being, or ontological difference, as Martin Heidegger would have it (2010),
but more particularly the emergence of a sub-ontological difference that
divided being from nonbeing (Fanon 2008; Maldonado-Torres 2008a,
2010). This sub-ontological difference is at the root of colonial difference
and provides the basic coordinates for the production and always selective
and complicated (re)generation of other forms of differences, including
racial, gender, sexual, but also political and economic differences
(Maldonado-Torres 2010; Mignolo 2000).
It is in this way that sub-ontological difference not only becomes a key
organizing principle in modern forms of colonialism, but also a constitu-
tive element in the modern conception of the self. This means that
undergirding ideas about the centrality of individualism in conceptions of
modern subjectivity, there is a fundamental presupposition of collective
belonging and separation between those who are deemed to be completely
human and those who are not. To argue for the centrality of individualism
in this context can therefore unintentionally contribute to rendering
invisible power dynamics that reproduce colonialism, just as any ethical
discourse that fails to recognize the gap between the zone of being and the
zone of nonbeing can become complicit with the production of sub-
ontological difference.
In sum, the universal application of something called religion and the
formulation of radical exceptions to it in reference to New World peoples
and slaves brought from Africa opened up a universe of signification that
culminated in the naturalization of inferiority, the belief in ontological
gaps between different groups of human beings, and the production of
what Fanon referred to as a Manichean divide that rendered colonizers as
good and colonized as essentially evil. That is to say, modernity generated
a Manichean divide out of the religious/non-religious and the soul/non-
soul binaries. This modern predicament cannot be understood without
addressing the ways in which religion and race have combined to generate
ideas about self and other in modernity. This points to the relevance of the
combined study of religion and race. Some of this is found in the still
emerging fields of decolonial religious studies (including religious ethics)
and decolonizing spiritualities.7
If coloniality is about the production of social Manicheism and the
naturalization of war, then decolonization has, by necessity, to involve, not
simply a search for autonomy or political independence, but the effort to
create a new form of valuation altogether. Its challenge is to overcome the
constitutive relation between modernity and coloniality, which is what I

7 See, among others in this area, Erskine 1997; Lara 2007; Pérez 2007; Rodríguez 2002;

Smith 1999; and Wade-Gayles 1995.

704 Journal of Religious Ethics

have been calling modernity/coloniality, and its Manichean dimensions. In

this effort, every single element of Western modernity must be interro-
gated, which is not to say that the entire stock of ideas produced in
modernity has to be rejected. This exercise is intellectual and practical, as
well as ethical, although not in the typical way in which ethics is
understood. To begin with, whatever else ethics means, here it has to do
with the overcoming of the “zone of nonbeing,” with the dominant Western
understanding of the human (as Man), and with the separation between
Man and its sub-others. Having covered race, religion, and modernity/
coloniality so far, I will dedicate the rest of this essay to key implications
of this analysis for ethics.

2. Ethics and Decoloniality

Generally speaking, Western modernity has invested as much effort in
affirming individual freedoms as it has paid attention to sustaining an
order of sub-ontological differences. Freedom is thus advocated as a virtue
and a possibility for those who inhabit the zone of being. Ethics is
typically considered to be a discourse about the relation between free
beings, and it would therefore appear that it is delimited to the zone of
being as well. That is, if ethics is defined as the relation between free
beings, then there is no ethics in the zone of nonbeing. It is for this reason
that some scholars, such as Lewis Gordon, argue that ethics is not viable
or relevant in the colonial context—understood as a context profoundly
marked by efforts to create and sustain the zone of nonbeing.
For Gordon, colonialism represents a break with the self/other dialectic.
Following Fanon he points out that, in the context of Western modernity,
subjects in the position of master do not encounter others in their alterity,
but rather as inferior subjects or “nothings” of sort. Fanon put it clearly:
“The black man has no ontological resistance in the eyes of the white man”
(2008, 90). This lack of ontological resistance results from what I have
called sub-ontological difference, and it defines the mode of existence in
the zone of nonbeing. In that respect, both Fanon’s and Gordon’s argu-
ments help to further clarify the concept of sub-ontological difference and
the zone of nonbeing that are crucial in the analysis of race, religion, and
ethics provided in section one.
Where Gordon and I seem to diverge is in the idea that for him ethics
is not relevant in the colonial context or in the analysis of sub-ontological
differences such as race. For Gordon:

As a matter of praxis, then, decolonizing struggles and those against racial

oppression do not begin on ethical but on peculiarly political premises of
constructing a genuine Self-Other relationship through which ethical rela-
tions can become possible. A problem that emerges, however, is that politics
Race, Religion, and Ethics in the Modern/Colonial World 705

also requires the elevation of those who are “nothings” to the level of
“people.” The struggle here, then, is a conflict with politics as an aim through
which ethical relations can emerge. The dialectic, echoing the one on
liberation, becomes one from war or violence to politics to ethics. A more
stable, humane environment is needed, in other words, for ethical life. (2008,
87–88)

As a result, Gordon notes that “unlike Fanon’s and my work, which ques-
tions the role of ethics under colonialism, Maldonado-Torres has attempted
to reconcile ethics with postcolonial liberation” (2008, 181). I view my
treatment of ethics differently: I have not aimed to reconcile ethics with
postcolonial liberation, at least in the way of leaving their basic definitions
untouched and trying to link them, but rather to redefine ethics in light of
the dynamics of colonization and decolonization, making it inseparable from
the political. In that process, the political is also redefined and taken, not
simply as a struggle between antagonists, but as the effort to restore a world
of human relations, which means precisely a restoration of ethical relations.
However, if decolonial politics aspires to an ethical restoration, it is not for
any other reason than it is always already oriented by the ethical. In this
sense the dialectic, if there is one, begins in a profound decolonial ethical
moment of reaching not toward an Other, but toward a sub-other. The
highest ethical moment is found in the reaching of a sub-other to another
subject in a position of sub-alterity. This is the center of decolonial ethics,
and it is also the point of departure for any decolonial politics.
If I consider ethics relevant for contexts marked by sub-ontological
differences, it is because I do not take ethics to be defined solely as the
relation between a self and an Other that is in a symmetrical relation to
the self, or as the relation between two or more free individuals. I find
ethics to be located first and foremost in the intersubjective constitution
of the self, or in what Fanon called the “positive” impulse in every
consciousness that seeks a connection of love or understanding with an
Other.8 Along with the “negative” relation of transcendence that allows the
subject to differentiate itself from things, eros and ethics are primary
elements in the constitution of the self: they connect the self with Others.
Sub-ontological difference affects and distorts the self’s fundamental
modes of relationality, which allow the self to relate to another as an
interlocutor and to generate discourse, as well as to engage in a loving
relationship. Both dimensions, language and love, which become the focus
of the first three chapters of Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, presuppose
a certain “gift of the self” which for Fanon defines “ethical orientation”
(2008, 24). It is this ethical orientation that fuels in Fanon’s work the
opposition to racism and all forms of dehumanization. Even when logical

8 See Maldonado-Torres 2008a for an analysis of a decolonial ethics of love and the gift

in Fanon.
706 Journal of Religious Ethics

arguments challenge the idea of such resistance, “love” perseveres and

animates it. As Fanon puts it: “Between the white man and me there is
irremediably a relationship of transcendence. But we have forgotten my
constancy in love. I define myself as absolutely and sustainedly open-
minded. And I take this negritude and with tears in my eyes I piece
together the mechanism. That which had been shattered is rebuilt and
constructed by the intuitive lianas of my hands” (2008, 117).
Racism creates fundamental ethical distortions. It creates a context
where some selves are not deemed worthy to enact relations with Others.
Fanon describes the experience:
“Dirty nigger!” or simply “Look! A Negro!” I came into this world anxious to
uncover the meaning of things, my soul desirous to be at the origin of the
world, and here I am an object among other objects. Locked in this suffo-
cating reification, I appealed to the Other so that his liberating gaze, gliding
over my body suddenly smoothed of rough edges, would give me back the
lightness of being I thought I had lost, and taking me out of the world put
me back in the world. But just as I get to the other slope I stumble, and the
Other fixes me with his gaze, his gestures and attitude, the same way you
fix a preparation with a dye. I lose my temper, demand an explanation. . . .
Nothing doing. I explode. Here are the fragments put together by another
me. (2008, 89)
However fragmented this self is, Fanon notes, it is still moved by an ethical
orientation. And it is, ultimately, the “constancy” of “love” that would keep
subjectivity committed with an anti-racist and decolonizing effort. Ethics
does not so much come after politics, as it has the potential of animating and
orienting the self and her or his decolonial acts, including political ones.
Therefore, politics for Fanon is not defined purely as the opposition of
enemies, the search for power, or simply the affirmation of freedom, but
rather as the consistent expression of “love.” Likewise, decolonial politics is
a result of the ethical orientation of the self in conditions of systematic
dehumanization.
Politics seeks to build a world not where ethical relations can exist, but
where their fulfillment is more the norm than the exception. And the most
profound ethical relation in the zone of nonbeing is not that of the master
with another master, but that of a slave with another slave. At the end,
it is not only the master who can start a relation. It is true that the master
does not see the slave as another self and in that sense ethics is abrogated,
but that does not mean that the slave does not have other possibilities of
establishing relationship. Likewise, ethical relation is not simply one of
recognition. In Fanon’s work, ethical relation is primarily one of the
offering of the self even when the other lacks interest or is looking for a
connection elsewhere. In the zone of nonbeing, ethics is not so much
recognition, as the incessant commitment with decolonization, understood
as the “constancy” of love.
Race, Religion, and Ethics in the Modern/Colonial World 707

Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks itself can be understood as an effort

of the subject in the zone of nonbeing to communicate. Fanon asks: “Why
am I writing this book? Nobody asked me to. Especially not those for
whom it is intended” (2008, 9). Fanon writes—this for him is a mode of
connecting with an Other—even if no one asks him to, and proposes that
love can overcome logic. This is the affirmation of the ethical orientation
of the self in conditions of dehumanization. Ethics therefore is not ren-
dered obsolete, but rather calls for political commitment and for the
enactment of relation with those who also inhabit the zone of nonbeing.
In order to differentiate this understanding of ethics from other forms
of ethics, I have proposed that we refer to it as decolonial ethics, which,
because of its oppositional nature in contexts defined by modernity/
coloniality, can be referred to as ethico-political in nature (see
Maldonado-Torres 2008a). Even the minimal expression of seeking under-
standing or love by someone who belongs to a group that has been
perceived as having no soul, is simultaneously ethical and political. It is
ethical and political because it puts in radical question the categorical
order that creates and sustains the zone of nonbeing. No matter how
passively this is done, any act that affirms the potential of ethical
orientation of a subject in the zone of nonbeing cannot be taken but as an
irruption or violent act. This also points to the inseparability of ethics and
politics in decolonization.
One question that emerges here is the extent to which what we call
religion and the study of religion can contribute to the rethinking of
ethics/politics and the decolonization of the modern/colonial world. One
would think that if a fundamental part of the problem in modernity
started with the exclusion of sectors of humanity from the universal idea
of religion then the solution would consist in their incorporation. This has
in fact been a strategy that colonized peoples have used to make the point
that they do not merely have customs, but religions, and that these
religions can even be described as “world religions,” thus acquiring the
same status as Christianity (see King 1999, and Masuzawa 2005).
However, as time went by, Christianity lost much of its centrality in the
West, and the differentiation between religions or between the religious
and the non-religious ceased to have the same significance. The relation
of sub-ontological difference between the religious and the non-religious
adopted other forms, each time at least apparently more secular in
character, such as that between colonizer and colonized, white and indig-
enous, or white and black, among multiple combinations that preserved
and expanded sub-ontological difference.9 In this transition the idea of
exorcising religion from public life also became important. In this context,
the colonizer can afford having the colonized claim entry into the realm of

9 I develop this more in Maldonado-Torres n.d.

708 Journal of Religious Ethics

the religious. But this is done under at least two presuppositions: (a) that
European religiosity is still taken as the standard for defining acceptable
religions, which means that the anti-colonial act of claiming religion in a
context where such an act is denied can also entail the assumption and
incorporation of Eurocentric elements, and (b) that having religion no
longer provides the ultimate or definitive concession of full humanity.
A shift took place in the Age of Reason as reason and autonomy
surpassed religion as fundamental markers of what constitutes humanity.
In fact, religion tended to be seen as a form of tutelage and therefore
against true enlightenment. Therefore, the colonized could claim religion,
but this still kept then at a remarkable distance from the claim to full
humanity. Claiming a “world religion” lost power in the effort of overcom-
ing sub-ontological difference. Colonized peoples needed two things: first,
the right religion—that is, a religion that appears as much like Christi-
anity as possible—and second, the capacity to think beyond religion and
to organize their society rationally. That said, the power of foundational
binaries and systems of symbolic representations is that they can keep
shifting terms and expectations as well as make it possible to revive old
ideas that keep leaving their major coordinates untouched. This is one of
the reasons why more than discrete sciences, decolonization requires
radically transdisciplinary discourses, as well as efforts to question
various problematic binaries that we have inherited (whether religious/
non-religious, civilized/non-civilized, or ethics/politics).
The study of religion and the study of race represent two of the most
significant interdisciplinary formations in the twentieth-century univer-
sity. They should come together more frequently and when doing so go
beyond the effort to clarify the perceived and obvious linkages between
race and religion—as in contained case studies that address both areas.
They can come together to help understand the constitutive relation
between modernity and coloniality, as well as to advance what could
become a twenty-first-century post-Eurocentric form of human sciences.
This essay aims to be a contribution in this direction.

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