Great care must still be taken by scholars to remove later anti-black accretions, most of which originated in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, to the meaning of terms associated with black and African peoples and cultures. These more recent, colonial layers of meaning are anachronistically projected and historiographically written back into the past by modern societies presenting themselves as normative. For example, while it is common in late modernity to speak of the Judeo-Christian tradition, the Judeo-Islamic tradition was in fact far more historically substantial across both space and time, but mostly developed in an African context that has come to symbolize the conceptual opposite of Western society and its version of civilization, one of its core legitimating pillars. The societies that span southern - especially Iberian - Europe, the Mediterranean and North Africa, reaching south into and beyond the Sahara, constitute a sort of fluctuating grid of hierarchical relational racial points in a system that is itself immersed in a similarly fluid and interactive global system of parallel coordinates. During the time of the kingdom of Al -Andalus, the grid was largely non-hierarchical, and it tilted toward what we now call Africa and blackness, towards the southern Sahara and the empires of Central Africa, the Indian Ocean and southern Asia. With the Reconquista and the rise of Europe and its empires, identities were epistemically/conceptually frozen, ordered in an increasingly extreme hierarchy of race and class, and their orientation was inverted. Imperial Spain and Portugal, and later Holland and its neighbours, claimed centripetal primacy, with the strata to the south at a proportional disadvantage. Eventually, even southern Europe and its immigrants were racialized by their northern European heirs. North Africa continued to reflect a border of "otherness", even as it was pulled north