‘Spain is racist and must learn from Brazil’ – 05/27/2023 – Sport

A black student of Professor Fernando Barbosa Rodrigues in the Department of Social Anthropology at the Complutense University in Madrid told him that he was forced to leave his job as a security guard at a luxury shopping center in the Spanish capital because he was instructed by his bosses to redouble his attention with dark-skinned customers.

Afro-descendants who want to rent an apartment in the big Spanish cities tend to have much more difficulty, which motivated a campaign by the country’s Ministry of Equality (“I’m not racist, maaaaaaas you don’t rent your house to a black person”, says the slogan), as well as job seekers.

Professor Barbosa himself –a Portuguese son of Cape Verdeans born in Luanda, “coffee-with-milk”, as he says, who moved to Lisbon aged 12 fleeing the Angolan civil war– was recently approached by two policemen in Puerta del Sol, a historic square in the heart of Madrid, on the grounds that its surroundings gave off a smell of marijuana. “When I asked them why they singled me out to be pulled over, they said, ‘Oh, you’re calling us racists?'”

The police officers’ denial is the same as that spread across Spanish society as a reaction to evidence that racism against Brazilian player Vinicius Junior is not limited to the country’s stadiums. Refuting seems pointless, as Spain is indeed a racist country, says Barbosa. The anthropologist –one of those portrayed in an exhibition on people of African descent in Spain on display at the National Museum of Anthropology in Madrid– coordinated a study in 2020 to try to quantify and understand the country’s black population.

This is an isolated effort by the government-linked racism and xenophobia observatory, since the Spanish State, as in most European countries, does not collect statistical data on the race/ethnicity of its inhabitants, a gap seen as an obstacle in fight against racial prejudice.

Barbosa points to Brazil as a reference in this crusade, maintains that Spain is indeed a racist country and associates the phenomenon with the colonial past and the ruins of the Francisco Franco dictatorship, which lasted from 1939 to 1975.

Is Spain a racist country? Yes, it’s racist. The idea that Spain is not a racist country is an old Francoist myth. Francoism gave the idea that Spain, like Portugal, had a world vocation. For seven centuries there were African people here. Black people did not arrive in Spain yesterday, in the Muslim troops who occupied Spain for seven centuries [711 a 1492] there were dark-skinned people. What happens is that they were historically unfeasible and disappeared in the story. If Spain weren’t racist, we’d have to say that this episode [de Vinicius Junior] it had to do with lack of education, lack of sportsmanship. I spoke with referees who told me: it’s not all racism, it’s a way to deconstruct your opponent’s strength, looking for things that can offend. But how am I supposed to offend a black man by calling him a monkey if we all descended from monkeys?

But certainly racism was not born with Franco. What are the historical roots of Spanish racism? What is your connection to the country’s colonial past? Yes, there are several stages. The first would be denial and the false myth of reconquest against Muslims. All the anti-Muslim sentiment was a first act of racism and ethnic cleansing, to say that Spain is white and Christian. The second stage is maritime colonial expansion, the battle that Spain and Portugal face as a Christian and civilizing mission.

I return to the Francoist idea, because the return to democracy is 46 years old, but the country has still not resolved its colonial history. So you see these manifestations in everyday discriminatory acts, as with Vinicius. The person who calls him a monkey learned at school that blacks, Indians, yellow people were inferior to him. When you don’t correct this in school books, people think: I’m not racist, but they don’t have the same capacity as I do, and then we enter the field of European supremacy or white supremacy.

LaLiga president Javier Tebas is a voter for the far-right Vox party. Does this help explain the weak reaction of sports authorities to racism? Now you can perfectly make the connection with these remnants of the Francoist myth that are capable of affirming one thing and denying it the next minute. This gentleman’s connections with Vox are already indicative that he is not clean wheat.

How do episodes of racism in stadiums fit into a more general picture of racism in Spain? Is there more racism in stadiums than on the streets? Yes, because the concentration of masses, the anonymity and the passion that football unleashes also unleashes our worst ghosts. And therefore, in a stadium you can see great demonstrations of solidarity as you can see the worst of our society. And the worst of our society is also involved in football, these hooligans who support their clubs to the death, [torcidas] in which neo-Nazis and members of the extreme right are infiltrated, they use young people as a breeding ground for their immorality, because racism is an immorality, and the people who commit it give free rein to the worst of human beings. Before Vini, Eto’o and many others were victims of racism. [O ex-técnico da seleção espanhola] Luis Aragonés, a kind of national hero, was silent against racist attitudes and statements. First reaction is defensive, we deny it, it doesn’t exist. Spain is not racist, and because it is not racist, here is an “episode”, a “critical incident”. Lie. The critical incident occurs because structural and subtle racism is embedded to the bone. When you close your eyes and look the other way and say “since Spain is not racist, that’s fine”, and they boil down the problem to one or a few individuals. Lie. This individual is supported by a mass of people who shouted “monkey”.

Is it possible to compare what Vinicius experienced in the stadiums with what Afro-descendants experience on a daily basis? What Vini experienced in the stadiums is an increased exposure of the small “critical incidents” that a person of non-white origin in Spain can suffer every day. For example, being stopped more often for racial profiling.

Why is it only now, after countless episodes of racism, that there has been any action on the part of the authorities? The stars coincided. The great President Lula da Silva recently came to Spain and Portugal. When Lula – who gave Brazil greater prominence, whether you like him or not – he spoke of it on an international stage [na reunião do G7 no Japão]affected the good image that Spain wants to have in the international consortium.

Do you think, then, that Lula’s statement contributed to provoking action by the Spanish authorities? It was extremely important, it unleashed everything, it threw the inconsistencies of the left and the socialist government against the wall. She exposed the ineffectiveness and lack of courage of the socialist left in government to face this issue. I thank God that President Lula said this. Now here is a scandal you cannot imagine. The news doesn’t stop, the news opens with news about Vinicius, yesterday everyone was wearing Vinicius’ number 20 shirt, it’s Vini, Vini, Vini, during the soccer round they displayed banners “Racists, out of soccer”.

To what extent does the lack of data on the Afro-descendant population hinder the fight against racism? In all. It obstructs, does not allow us to get to the detail to know where they are concentrated and how to combat manifestations of discrimination. Brazil has advanced with giant steps and has become a reference for everyone in the fight against racism, facing the problem with legislation against hate crimes, insults, typification of racist acts. Europe is 200 years behind Brazil, the Brazilian nation must be proud of what you have achieved. We are having to force the debate in Europe, that we look at the example of Brazil. The problem with European supremacy is that it always looks at the nations of the South as if it couldn’t teach them anything. They are capable of saying that Brazil was the last country to abolish slavery, that Brazil has racism. Very well, but Brazil is doing its duties.

And in this I also blame the Spanish left, cowardly and immoral. To think that being on the left is [automaticamente] not being racist is a myth. You can be perfectly progressive and not have done your homework to address your racial prejudices. That’s why we’re waiting for a law against racism that was shelved, an initiative by Podemos [partido de esquerda que integra a coalizão governista] result of a consultation with people of African descent and society in general. This law did not come out because the PSOE [do premiê Pedro Sánchez] and Podemos do not reach an agreement, they are afraid to face the right and the extreme right, because they are disturbing laws. They say they will harm the political debate, because what needs to be talked about is jobs. How to give up facing inequalities, including on the racial level, could solve the other conflicts.

Spanish lawyers interviewed by Folha argue that the punishment for episodes of racism in stadiums should be in the sporting field and not in the criminal sphere. Do you agree? I do not agree. Spain’s judiciary has to make a aggiornamento [atualização], because the world has changed. It is exactly the same tension that we have with judges who do not want to recognize the advances and demands that feminism brought against gender violence and machismo. Those who oppose it have to go back to studying, they have to go back to school desks. Because the world has changed, and the complexity of our increasingly diverse societies demands a clear response on the criminal, political and legal levels. Everyone has to live in peace, societies have to live on the basis of trust, and anyone who destroys trust because they believe they can say that the other is a monkey also needs to be punished on the moral level, re-educated for living together.

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Fernando Barbosa Rodrigues, 59 years old
Associate Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology and Social Psychology at the Faculty of Political Sciences and Sociology at the Complutense University of Madrid. Among his research topics are language policy, postcolonialism, issues of race, ethnicity and miscegenation in Portugal and Spain. He coordinated the “Study for the recognition and characterization of the African and Afro-descendant community” in Spain. Born in Luanda (Angola), he moved to Lisbon at the age of 12 and lives in Madrid.