and the noble life.”® Lope de Vega, a sixteenth-century contempo-
rary of Cervantes, wrote: “Soy un hombre, / aunque de villana casta,
/limpio de sangre y jam / de hebrea o mora manchada” (Iam a man,
although of lowly status, yet clean of blood and with no mixture of
Jewish or Moorish blood).

This cross-class mind-set can be found as well in the stance of
descendants of the old settlers of British colonization in North
{\merica. This then is the first instance of class leveling based on
imagined racial sameness—the origin of white supremacy, the es-
sential ideology of colonial projects in America and Africa. As