Bumpy, I’ve been reading your work a long time and finally decided to add this to the conversation.

The creation of white supremacy in Europe, begins in the 1400s, with three Papal Bulls. Akin to the U.S. Constitution, these bulls served as founding documents, a manifesto, the moral and legal justification for white Christian conquest of the earth – and all of its inhabitants and all its riches.

European conquistadors, missionaries, and corporations carried them everywhere they went, from India to Africa, China, Australia, Mexico, North, Central and South America, and numerous island nations.

On June 18, 1452, Pope Nicholas V had issued the papal bull Dum Diversas which granted permission to King Alfonso V of Portugal… “to invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens (Muslims), Jews, pagans and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed… and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities, dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery… and to apply and appropriate to himself and successors, all their dominions, possessions, and goods, and to convert them [to Christianity] for their use and profit.”

As the authors of Unsettling Truths explain. “The Portuguese took these ecclesial [church] statements to heart and perpetrated the slave trade from the African continent to the European and the American continents. As a Christian ruler, the king of Portugal would have power endowed from the church to take possession of “the other” as slave labor from the continent of Africa. The pagan African body was just another commodity to be taken for the pleasure and profit of the European Christian body, the one made most fully in the image of God.”

Mark Charles and Soong-Chan Rah (Professor of Evangelism, Fuller University and author of Unsettling Truths: The Ongoing, Dehumanizing Legacy of the Doctrine of Discovery).

https://www.fuller.edu/faculty/soong-chan-rah/

https://globalhealth.emory.edu/_includes/documents/unsettling-truths_chapter-1.pdf

In 1492, the much confused Christopher Columbus returned to Spain and reported that he had sailed west across the Atlantic Ocean and reached India. The Spanish Crown rushed the good news to the Vatican.

On May 4, 1493, Pope Alexander VI issued “The Papal Bull "Inter Caetera" which ensured Spain’s exclusive rights to the lands discovered by Columbus the previous year. Known as “The Doctrine of Discovery,” the papal bull of 1493, provided the moral justification for European colonization, licensed the marriage between European monarch’s corporations and Christian missionaries and established the worldview of European Christians that remains the driving force behind Christian evangelism to this very day.

While people die, institutions don’t. Unfortunately, the marriage of Church and State produced institutional offspring that carried the Doctrine of Discovery from one generation of white Europeans to the next.

As time marched on, the offspring of Europe’s state and church sanctioned unions spawned horror beyond imagination. Murder so massive it required a name of its own – genocide. Rape so extensive, populations of entire continents were physically altered. Brutality so hideous, people screamed, fainted, and vomited at the sight. Cruelty so painful, people sacrificed their own relatives, rather than submit. Slavery so vile, it defied imagination. Hate so deep, it ate people alive. Fear so great, people prayed for death or killed themselves. And wealth so great, it turned mere mortals into G-ds.

You can read the Doctrine of Discovery, in full, here.

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/sites/default/files/inline-pdfs/T-04093.pdf For now, these two excerpts offer a solid summary.

“Wherefore, as becomes Catholic kings and princes, after earnest consideration of all matters, especially of the rise and spread of the Catholic faith, as was the fashion of your ancestors, kings of renowned memory, you have purposed with the favor of divine clemency to bring under your sway the said mainlands and islands with their residents and inhabitants and to bring them to the Catholic faith.”

“We trust in Him from whom empires and governments and all good things proceed, that, should you, with the Lord’s guidance, pursue this holy and praiseworthy undertaking, in a short while your hardships and endeavors will attain the most felicitous [pleasant and rewarding result] to the happiness and glory of all Christendom.”

https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/spotlight-primary-source/doctrine-discovery-1493

Christopher Columbus carried the Doctrine of Discovery with him on his next three voyages to what, he wrongly assumed, was India.

In 1521 Spain brought the Doctrine of Discovery to Mexico with them. European diseases quickly killed 90% of the people in North, Central, and South America.

During the Protestant Reformation of the 1500s, reformers were not willing to abandon the Doctrine of Discovery’s promise of wealth and power beyond compare, or the idea that “the Christian religion be exalted and be everywhere increased and spread…."

In 1607, the Puritans brought the Doctrine of Discovery to the eastern shores of North America.

In the 1823 U.S. Supreme Court case Johnson v. McIntosh, Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in the unanimous decision held "that the principle of discovery gave European nations an absolute right to the New World lands." As result of the ruling, Native Americans Indians had only a right of occupancy, which could be, and was abolished by the American courts.

At the end of the second Opium War, the defeated Chinese Emperor signed the 1858 Treaty of Tianjin. By then an estimated 25% of the Chinese people were addicted to British opium. Nonetheless, in the treaty, the British corporation, known as the East India Company, secured the right to import opium produced on its corporate farms in India, into China. To entrench corporate power even deeper, the treaty also provided Christian missionaries the right to reside in China, and the right to freely travel throughout the interior of China. Today, the Chinese people still call the next 100 years, the Century of Humiliation.

PS. If my comment is too long, or unwelcome, let me know and I will delete it. This is your space – not mine.