From the football pitch to the athletics track, via the basketball court and in constant connection with the entire planet. Mass sport acts as a mirror but also as a shadow theatre for a society that it sets the pace for while moving billions of euros a year. Spain’s triumph in the European Championship with black players has unleashed euphoria for a team that reflects the diversity of the street while, experts and sportsmen remind us, the reality of racism in national sport is different. All while the extreme right is pole-vaulting with its contradictions to celebrate the triumph without seeming to accept, even remotely, that it is kissing the shield thanks to Nico Williams and Lamine Yamal.
The relationship between football and racism is nothing new and has come as a surprise to the screens in recent months. The far right has been in charge of radical groups at the major European clubs for decades and racism has played a leading role in the stands: from the insults suffered by Wilfred Agbonavbare at the Santiago Bernabéu in the nineties to the monkey-like cries that accompany Nico Williams, Mouctar Diakhaby or Vinícius Júnior, to the harassment of the high jumper Ana Peleteiro every time she opens her mouth or the insults to Thierry Ndikumwenayo after winning a European medal in the long distance running.
In the last five years, the Spanish sporting scene has changed. Since the anecdote that Marcos Senna played for the national football team, Spain has just won the European Championship with two black players playing a leading role. The Spanish Olympic athletics team has fifteen athletes who were either not born in Spain or come from migrant families. In the last national championship in this specialty, up to 13 medallists, all of Spanish nationality, were born in other countries.
The far right, whose ideology is to expel the families of all these athletes from Spain, has been displaying circus-like contortions for weeks to celebrate the return of ‘La Roja’ to the top without rejoicing in the key role of the Spaniards that they do not consider real. In the rest of the country, having already won gold, euphoria has been unleashed by a team that, with its variety of skin tones, reflects the reality of the street. Racialized athletes, turned into icons once they reach the last summit. Various experts consulted by elDiario.es call for calm when praising the Spanish team as the living image of any neighborhood with a large concentration of migrant population.
“There are many Lamin and Nico in our neighborhoods”
“It is an instrumentalisation of certain bodies, in everyday life there is a constant rejection and an invisibility of ethical and rational diversity in Spain.” Yania Concepción Vicente is a psychotherapist and sexual educator, expert among other fields in how racism impacts racialised people. She explains that the presence of black athletes in the Spanish football team is as positive as it is unrepresentative of Spanish society. They are only on an equal footing with whites when they achieve a glory that very few achieve.
“When it benefits you as a country, as a society, then you do give space to racialized people, because it benefits you as a structure. But day after day, in communities that fight to have a space, a voice, dignity… your racist structure violates them,” he explains to elDiario.es. “You use a discourse for your benefit, but to validate and respect racialized people, not there. They have to be excellent.”
Pablo Muñoz Rojo, sociologist and author of books such as “Basketball and Racism”, has a similar opinion. “Representation alone is not anti-racist,” he explains, after recalling that in France the majority of black players do not receive the acceptance of a part of French society. “It is a greater reflection of the diversity of Spain, but while all this is happening, the country’s legislation and politics perpetuate racism, and that does not change because there are a number of black players,” he adds. This is “positive” but invites us to make “a broader interpretation.”
“There are many Lamin and Nico in our neighbourhoods. A lot. And the anti-racist movement celebrates that these two young people have found this space and have been able to get there, of course, but we do not look away or make invisible the fact that there continues to be a reality of daily racism,” adds Yania Concepción.
The numbers don’t just come from football. But this supposed representativeness doesn’t match the statistics either. David Moscoso, professor of sociology of sport at the University of Córdoba, explains to elDiario.es that elite sport “doesn’t necessarily reflect the reality of the whole social structure of a country, it’s a sport that represents a minimal percentage of the population.” Three or four thousand high-performance athletes thus recognised in a country of 47 million people.
A national team in a sport “does not faithfully reflect the social structure, but is conditioned by factors of a diverse nature”. For example, territories where more is invested in sport. He does explain that, on a general level, there is a “more multicultural sporting structure in more and more disciplines”, not only in football.
Racialized with the Spanish jersey
Football is a rollercoaster of emotions, and just a few hours after Spain’s triumph in Berlin, the invisible hand of the market was at work. Álvaro Morata turned “Spanish Gibraltar” into the national team’s rallying cry and the far right celebrated Dani Carvajal’s languid greeting to Pedro Sánchez.
A far right that questions whether Lamin Yamal and Nico Williams, born in Catalonia and Navarre respectively, can wear the Spanish national team shirt. Or whether Ana Peleteiro, born in Galicia, is Spanish. Or who turn up their noses when they have to decide whether or not they are happy about Jaël Bestué’s great career. Heirs to those who thought that England was going to sink when Laurie Cunningham became the first black footballer to play for the British national team.
In 2010, the CIS asked Spaniards if they thought that only athletes born in Spain should compete for the national team. Around 70% were in favour of not having such a limitation. A decade later, David Moscoso repeated the survey for the Centre for Andalusian Studies and saw that this percentage had dropped. The data also showed an ideological background: aversion was growing among the right.
Racism has always existed in the world of sport. In some it is not as obvious as in football, where entire stands imitate the sound of an ape when a black player approaches, but sport, recalls Pablo Muñoz, is “one more place, one more element, one more field in which all these dynamics are reproduced”. And the case of Vinícius Júnior, Brazilian player of Real Madrid, has taken him to court. And it is not always from the stands, but rather from the bench. In the Copa América, the Argentine Enzo Fernández broadcast live how the national team chanted racist and homophobic chants against the French.
The psychological impact on an athlete of racist attacks, Spanish and non-Spanish, is great, explains Yania Concepción. “Trauma, racism, has a significant psychological effect that is not taken into account because it is not something physical and people downplay it. Young people are constantly engaged in an unconscious negotiation, seeking a reaffirmation of identity, being born here but not being part of it… it is affected when society tells you that you do not belong, that you are not, and they make a very hard effort to achieve emotional stability but mental health is not taken into account.”
This also happens to elite players. “That is why it was so shocking to see Vinícius cry, it is helplessness, it generates physical, mental and emotional exhaustion, which is not taken into account when addressing these issues.”
Racism for Spain’s best sprinter
A few weeks ago, the athletics tracks in the Madrid town of Leganés saw the discreet retirement from top competition of one of the best sprinters in the history of Spain. Aauri Lorena Bokesa, who 15 years ago swapped basketball for the 400 metres, hung up her trainers crowned the undisputed queen of Spanish lactic acid: the woman with the most titles as Spanish outdoor champion, three Olympic Games under her belt and the second best time in the history of Spain.
Bokesa, a black woman and the daughter of migrants, tells elDiario.es that her journey into the interior to identify things as racist that she had ignored for years began relatively recently. “When people asked me if I had experienced racism, I always said no,” she explains. Racist comments in the news announcing her presence in the Spanish Olympic team, but also people who questioned whether her time could become a Spanish record in the distance.
Bokesa’s case clearly illustrates the racism that haunts any racialized athlete. Because Sandra Myers and Bruno Hortelano, Spanish record holders in the 100, 200 and 400 metres for men and women, were neither born nor raised in Spain. “Marcus Cooper is not questioned either,” adds Bokesa, who has lived for a time in Switzerland, where her Swiss Olympic teammates have also recounted the racism they suffer.
“You have to be super exceptional”
Bokesa, who left elite athletics with a time of 51.08 seconds in the 400 metres and more than 30 international caps with the Spanish jersey, explains how a racialised person is asked for much more just to be considered part of his own country. “Maybe to be a black athlete who appears more in the media you have to be super exceptional,” he explains. That happens in sport, but also at home.
“My daughter, you can’t go around smelling of sweat, or going around stained, so that they don’t say that black people smell of sweat,” she explains that her mother used to tell her when she was little. “When there is a black person who does things wrong, we all follow him and it is a lot of pressure,” she adds.
“Black people, unlike Caucasians, always have to give their best in everything to be recognized. And we say that it is not necessary. Your humanity is already enough, you do not have to be excellent in everything to be respected and recognized. That is also structural racism,” denounces Yania Concepción. “That is where trauma appears, mental health, you lose your identity, your recognition, and there is emotional, mental and physical exhaustion because you will never be enough for that society.” That is when the black athlete is not, directly, treated like an animal: “They were phrases or beliefs that come from colonization. This extraordinary thing that because you are black you run a lot, you dance well, you have extraordinary genetics… to be recognized, a black person has to be extraordinary,” she laments.
Bokesa, a few days after leaving elite sport, explains the journey she takes to see herself as Spanish. “You build your identity, I realized as an adult, it’s not just someone who writes a comment in the newspaper. I am Spanish, I am black, my parents are migrants, building identity with so many different things is very enriching.”
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