Racism has always been closely tied to the use of morality to dehumanise people. When Christopher Columbus first arrived on the shores of what the colonisers would later call America, he wrote a letter describing the indigenous brown-skinned people he encountered as people without religion.

In a letter dated October 1429, Columbus said: “They all go naked as their mothers bore them... I suppose and still suppose that they come from the mainland to capture them for slaves. They should make good servants and very intelligent, for I have observed that they soon repeat anything that is said to them, and I believe that they would easily be made Christians, for they have no religion.”..