Ceuta, racism and us
A few weeks ago, I accidentally overheard a summer conversation between primary school children from Mallorca, about ten years old. They were talking about the last school year and one of them let slip, with the naturalness with which one says things heard at home, that "the best day of the school year was the day of the Feast of the Sacrifice". The others laughed and agreed. There was no need to explain it: it is a day when most of their Maghrebi classmates do not go to class. These children haven't invented anything. They are reproducing, as children always do, what they have heard adults say. And that is, precisely, what should worry us.
The conversation from the anecdote did not take place during the school term, but in the middle of August, which is why it caught my attention. And the fact is that what has happened in Ceuta since the end of July –when in two days about 80,000 people entered by swimming and many of them drowned– has made visible, and has made grow, a racism that we were already harboring. Ceuta is a tragedy on three levels. The first is human: more than a hundred dead, most of them drowned, with unidentified bodies that not even their own country wants to repatriate. The second is humanitarian: thousands of people who spent days without water or food, attended to first by neighbors and organizations and not by the State, and 862 minors all alone in a city with 29 places to host them. And the third is that of coexistence, which in Ceuta has already cracked –on the night of August 27, a group burned the migrants' shacks on Trampolín beach and prevented the Red Cross from distributing aid there– and which, by contagion, is also cracking here.
Because what is happening in Ceuta affects us all as a society, no matter how much we think it is far away from us. This racism has connected without much effort with the most rancid Spanish nationalism, the one that comes from afar, which is national-Catholic in its foundation and 'anti-Moor' for a lifetime. We heard it in the slogans of the demonstrations on September 2, called in the name of 'borders' and not the dead, and we hear it in the classroom, in the playground, in the conversation on the beach. And we will hear it again on October 12, the day of the 'Race'.
And this is where partisan use comes in, which is as predictable as it is irresponsible, especially in a community with a significant Maghrebi and Muslim presence that, like any other group, tries to work and stay afloat here after having fled a country without opportunities or democracy. But a very good friend of our magnificent Kingdom, by the way. President Prohens speaks of "an attack on our borders and the territorial integrity of Spain," and her spokesperson warns us that "what happened in Ceuta could happen in the Balearic Islands," and they play the victim with the boats that arrive on our coasts as if it were an invasion, when organizations and experts have said a thousand times that it is migration in transit, which does not even stay here. It doesn't matter: fear doesn't need data, it needs repetition. And the far right, which is the one that sets the framework, knows this well. Every time it can, it tries to fragment and divide us, and others, in order not to lose votes, buy into its language and imagery.
The episode of these days with the t-shirt ‘We are all mackerel’ is more of the same: an association of Valencian businessmen (with business dealings with Morocco, for good inri! ), with LaLiga, which is promoting a 'solidarity' campaign with Ceuta that speaks of 'territorial cohesion' and does not say a single word about the dead or the minors. When Vinícius, Mbappé and Konaté –and previously Barça– refused to wear the message, the response was not to ask why, but to point at them. A 'solidarity' that does not have a single word for the people who have lost their lives, and which in 24 hours becomes a lynching of three black footballers, says a lot about what is really being defended.
What needs to be done, then? First, the urgency: resolving what is happening in Ceuta, which is the responsibility of all administrations –the State, the autonomous city, the communities that must share the reception of the minors– and also of Morocco, which has used the border as an instrument of pressure with people as a bargaining chip. Here, there are no excuses or jurisdictions that hold any weight.
The second task is longer and it is ours: to unite a society that a few are determined to tear apart. This is done at school, where the 'sheep' party should be something that is explained and understood and not a celebration due to the absence of a portion of the student body; and it is done in the neighborhoods, in sports clubs and in neighborhood associations, where coexistence is not a slogan but a daily practice; and also in the institutions, which should be clear that governing is not about managing the voters' fear, but about protecting and taking care of all citizens, regardless of where we were born.
The children who were laughing at the 'sheep' party are not racist. They are the mirror of a society that is letting itself be told who its enemy is. The answer lies with us, and it does not admit any more 'emergency situations'.