the matrix slot of otherness

In his seminal book, Anthropology and the Western Tradition: Towards an Authentic Anthropology (1985), Jacob Pandian enables us to see that within the terms of the Judeo-Christian religious creed (within the terms, therefore, of its variant of the “formulation of a general order of existence,” correlated “postulate of a significant ill,” and therefore proposed behavior-motivating “cure” or “plan of salvation” that is defining of all religions [Girardot 1988]), the physical referents of the conception of the Untrue Other to the True Christian Self had been the categories of peoples defined in religious terminology as heretics, or as Enemies-of-Christ infidels and pagan-idolaters (with Jews serving as the boundary-transgressive “name of what is evil” figures, stigmatized as Christ-killing deicides). In the wake of the West’s reinvention of its True Christian Self in the transumed terms of the Rational Self of Man, however, it was to be the peoples of the militarily expropriated New World territories (i.e., Indians), as well as the enslaved peoples of Black Africa (i.e., Negroes), that were made to reoccupy the matrix slot of Otherness—to be made into the physical referent of the idea of the irrational/subrational Human Other, to this first degodded (if still hybridly reli-gio-secular) “descriptive statement” of the human in history, as the descriptive statement that would be foundational to modernity.

Wynter, Sylvia. "Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument." CR: The new centennial review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257-337.