"This island and all the others are very fertile to a limitless degree... Here there are many spices, and great mines of gold and other metals. The people of this island... are artless and generous with what they have... They have no iron or steel or weapons, nor are they capable of using them... They are so guileless and so generous with all that they possess, that no one would believe it who has not seen it."
"I have taken possession of all of them for their highnesses, by proclamation and by unfurling the royal standard, without opposition."
"The area is not desirable for mortgage lending purposes. Infiltration of: Negroes. This area contains substandard properties and a concentration of undesirable population elements. The area is declining and loans should not be made here."
"Security Grade: D — Hazardous. No A or B mortgage money should be made available in this area."
Two documents. 446 years apart. One is a journal entry by a European explorer claiming land for a Spanish monarch. The other is an administrative note by a US federal agency classifying a neighbourhood for mortgage risk.
They are not the same document. But they share something.
Both documents describe people as passive objects to be assessed by an outside authority. Both produce a classification that determines what resources those people can access. Both claim a kind of neutral authority — the explorer speaks for the Crown and God; the assessor speaks for the federal government and the market.
Neither document acknowledges that it is making a choice. Both present themselves as describing what is already there.
The frame through which you see something determines what you see. The frame is never neutral. But the frame always claims to be.
What would it change — practically, not analytically — if these were the same thing?
What becomes invisible if you decide they are?