Vinicius Jr. points to the stands during this Sunday’s game in Valencia. JOSE JORDAN (AFP)
The umpteenth racist attack suffered this Sunday by the Real Madrid striker, Vinicius Jr., in Mestalla, the Valencia stadium, has raised a recurring question: Is Spain a racist country? Does a man who shouts “monkey” represent the feelings of a country?
The player, who has accumulated 10 complaints for similar events, has made his opinion crystal clear on social networks: “I’m sorry for the Spaniards who disagree, but today, in Brazil, Spain is known as a country of racists.” The repercussion of this episode, which has reverberated even in the 28-M electoral campaign and even in the G7 (President Lula da Silva alluded to it in his appearance), invites us to raise the debate on racism in Spain —and here experts and the discriminated against themselves agree—beyond football. Discrimination, whether subtle or explicit, conscious or unconscious, is present daily in the streets, in the rental market, in police actions, in companies, in the Administration. At the individual and institutional levels.
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The diagnosis of racism in Spain starts from a problem: how it is measured, the quality of the data —or the lack thereof— and the difficulty in finding experts dedicated to the subject. In Spain there is no data on the ethnicity or race of its inhabitants and not many statistics on whether they suffer discrimination. “Traditionally, there have been no studies on racism, with the exception of atigitanism,” explains Mercedes Fernández, co-author of the Evolution of racism, xenophobia and other forms of intolerance study.
Until 2017, the CIS asked Spaniards if they considered themselves racist. And the last survey showed that on a scale from one to 10, the interviewees were at 2.2. The figure is positive, but it has a relative value because if the experts repeat something, it is that certain questions cannot be asked in such a direct way, because the respondent will not answer what they think, but rather what they think they should answer. This is the so-called “social desirability bias”.
Studies on immigration and attitudes towards it are more abundant and, although they do not respond to the complexity of the phenomenon or take into account the racism that Spaniards also suffer, they do provide some clues. “Spanish society identifies non-white people as immigrants and although they are not the ideal tool, surveys that measure attitudes towards immigration can also reflect racism,” maintains Fernández, who is also director of the University’s Migration Institute. of quotes.
For Fernández, according to the analysis of the surveys, Spain does not show racism associated with a feeling of superiority based on skin color. But it does reveal the so-called “aversive racism” or subtle, whereby an individual may appear to be apparently in favor of diversity and multiculturalism and deny being racist, but shows rejection of the culture, participation or use of services of non-residents. white. “With the data we have, I dare not say that Spain is racist, but the studies do come to tell us that the immigrant is seen as a competitor and that in the collective imagination there are more stereotypes about the use of public services or access to subsidies. than a superiority motivated by the color of the skin”, he affirms.
A 2020 survey conducted by the EASIE project (Explaining Calm Attitudes towards Immigrants in Spain) asked about the sympathy or antipathy generated by certain groups of immigrants. Moroccans (13%) and sub-Saharan Africans (6%) were the most often categorized as “very unfriendly”. Serigne Fall, a 55-year-old Senegalese who works as a social and legal mediator at the Ramón y Cajal hospital in Madrid, has never felt attacked in his 15 years in Spain, but he observes some trends with concern: “I have never wanted to say that Spain is a racist country, because I have only seen some isolated behaviour. But for months I have been observing racist episodes very frequently. It’s very surprising to me.” Fall blames them on hate speech from the far right.
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“Unfortunately, as in all societies, there is still racism in our country,” says the Secretary of State for Migration, Isabel Castro. “Although we must specify that the situation of racism in Spain compared to 20 years ago is, without a doubt, better and the commitment of all the institutions has resulted in a specific legislative development to combat this type of incident.”
The latest Report on the evolution of hate crimes, published in 2021, offers an overview of the phenomenon, and reveals that almost 90% of the victims do not report it. Of the 1,802 registered cases, more than 35% were due to racist attacks, the most numerous. The study also shows that hate crimes associated with racism have grown by almost 32% from 2019 to 2020.
Hate speech on social networks also has a racist, xenophobic, anti-Semitic, anti-Gypsy and Islamophobic component. The Spanish Observatory for Racism and Xenophobia (OBERAXE), which has been monitoring this content on the Internet since 2017, reflected in its latest bulletin, from January 1 to February 28, 695 cases, attacks mainly directed at people from North Africa. The platforms withdrew only 38% of this content, an “insufficient” response, according to the agency.
‘Auction’ on Twitter
Journalist Moha Gerehou, born in Huesca to Gambian parents, was auctioned off on Twitter seven years ago. “Following a publication, I received several messages simulating an auction as if he were a slave,” he recalls. “For this I pay 1,000 euros and if he comes dewormed, 1,200”, wrote the Internet users. Gerehou denounced and the judicial process took six years to translate into a sentence of a year and a half in prison and 3,000 euros in compensation, although the convicted have taken the case to the Supreme Court.
The journalist celebrates the international impact that the latest racist episode against Vinicius Jr. has had, which has led the Brazilian president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, to condemn the attacks. “Is Spain racist?” Gerehou wonders. “Yeah. But whether it is a lot or a little is a question that is asked more by those who benefit from racism than by those who suffer from it. I don’t care if someone considers that Spain is more or less racist than France, the important thing is that we suffer from it, ”he explains. “I hope that the case of Vinicius opens a debate beyond the soccer fields and focuses on the structural racism that exists in Spain, in access to housing, in racism in social networks, in the school segregation that occurs especially in public schools, in access to jobs or in the participation of many spaces of public life”, he adds.
Access to housing has served in recent years as a thermometer to measure discrimination. A study carried out last year by OBERAXE with Provivienda concluded that the private rental market is “discriminating and excluding towards the population belonging to the ethnic and population groups that suffer racial discrimination more frequently”. The causes are associated with the owners’ prejudices about the economic precariousness or misuse of the property. When Limin Chen from the Canary Islands was looking for a flat after the lockdown, one of the landlords asked her where she was from. “I told them that she was Spanish and they told me that she didn’t look like it,” she recalls. The deal was closed with the owner’s ruling: “We do not rent to foreigners.”
Chen, 24, recounts experiences of racism on the street, at school, on the subway and at fashion events. “I have grown up having to deny my Chinese part because my environment has always made me think that I was wrong or the boys at my school have told me several times that I am very pretty and very smart, but that they would never have anything with me because I am Chinese” she explains. “Yes, there is racism, but it is out of sheer ignorance,” she points out.
Mahmoud Assy, Diversity and Inclusion consultant at Eufonia Diversity, believes it is unfair “to simplify the context of an entire country to say whether or not it is racist.” This 25-year-old Egyptian refugee does point out the stereotypes that end up limiting people’s lives, such as the search for housing. He also points out those microracisms disguised as humor. “Sometimes even my friends make jokes related to terrorism. Repeated many times they perpetuate the association of the stereotype to the person ”, he assures. “It is not the most violent, but it is the most common and it does more damage because it is not talked about as much.”
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