Racism in Spain yesterday and today: ‘eppur si muove’

Spain is not racist to the same extent that Spain is not sexist and Spain is not classist. In other words, Spain is racist. Less than other countries and more than other countries, but as the saying goes, there are witches. And it was enough for a victim of racism, the Brazilian footballer Vinicius José Paixão de Oliveira, Vinicius Júnior, to highlight it for a good part of society and almost all of the sports press to make an eloquent, perhaps unconscious, exercise of, precisely, racism.

The complacent assertion that Spain is not racist is an ideological excrescence of Franco’s Spain, as long as you don’t ask a gypsy, the only relevant ethnic minority at the time. Or not even that, to the Andalusians, Extremadurans, La Mancha, Galicians and Murcians of the Spain of internal migration, who dragged the bad reputation that poverty gives and were branded, at best, as maketos in the Basque Country and of xarnegos in Catalonia. There were hardly any blacks in Spain, but those who were there suffered: I have already told here that when in 1982 I interviewed Chester Himes, the great black master of the American black novel, he told me how angry he was at the curious glances and whispers about the colour of his skin from his neighbours in Moraira, Alicante, where he settled in the 60s with his beautiful white, blonde and Parisian wife: “But they were blacker than me!” And a small immigration was enough – small compared to that of other developed countries, since in 2002 in Spain there were only 0.87 migrants per thousand inhabitants – for our worst racist face to appear: the refugees from the criminal Chilean and Argentine dictatorships were South Americans; when the Central Americans arrived, hot dogs; sub-Saharan Africans, conguitos and the Maghrebis, Moors (and not in the etymological sense, of Mauritanian, but in the pejorative sense).