# Rise of the self/other matrix of relational difference  
As European feudalism and the aristocracy receded, its limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) concept shifted from justifying a supposedly divinely ordained blue-blooded landed gentry to the more familiar, modern biocentric concept of race, fixed in and on the body, and almost immediately signifying blackness and relational non-Whiteness specifically. Thus was set in motion the grid of modern "ethno-racial coordinates" to which Cheikh Anta Diop referred (1981 [1991]): a matrix of possible racial locations along a black/white continuum into which other non-white people could be figured, usually closer to the black end of the spectrum, always differentiated in a multivalent way (Wynter, 1979). This grid has operated in incredibly complex and varied ways across the ensuing five centuries, but the basic Manichaean schema has remained remarkably stable and powerful to the present day. During the Reconquista, a kind of monoculturalism was conceptually and conscientiously imposed for perhaps the first time, in the modern sense of a fixed hierarchical grid of relational identifications. It became so normalized that today only multiculturalism and diversity, which are factually closer to the historic and human norm, need to be explained and defended (Lorde, 1984), or in many cases are rejected outright (the 'culture wars' in the United States of America, for example), while - literally - Aryaninflected monocultural aberrations remain largely invisible and unnamed and are the discursive norm against which the literal Other is identified and defined.