A few weeks ago I heard, by chance, a summer conversation between Majorcan primary school children, 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 one has heard at home, that "the best day of the school year was the day of the lamb festival". The others laughed and agreed. There was no need to explain it: it is a day when most of the Maghrebi classmates do not go to class. These children have not invented anything. They reproduce, as children always do, what they have heard adults say. And that is, precisely, what should disturb us.
The conversation from the anecdote did not take place during the school term, but in the middle of August, and that is why it caught my attention. The fact is that what has happened in Ceuta since the end of July –when in two days about 80,000 people entered 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 deaths, mostly drowned, with unidentified corpses 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 the 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. This racism has connected without much effort with the most rancid Spanish nationalism, the one that comes from afar, which is national-Catholic at its core 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, seeks to work and get by here after having fled a country without opportunities or democracy. But a great 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 transit migration, which doesn't even stay here. It doesn't matter: fear does not need data, it needs repetition. And the far-right, which is the one setting the frame, knows this well. Every time it can, it tries to fragment and divide us, and others, in order not to lose votes, buy its language and imagery.
The episode these days with the 'Todos somos caballas' t-shirt is more of the same: an association of Valencian businessmen (with businesses in Morocco, to make matters worse!), with LaLiga, which promotes a campaign of 'solidarity' with Ceuta that speaks of 'territorial cohesion' and does not say a word about the dead or the minors. When Vinícius, Mbappé, and Konaté –and before that 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 should be done, then? First, the urgency: resolve 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. There are no excuses or jurisdictions that matter here.
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 'lamb' party should be something that is explained and known and not a celebration due to the absence of a part of the student body; and it is done in neighborhoods, in sports clubs, and in neighborhood associations, where coexistence is not a slogan but a daily practice; and also in institutions, which should be clear that governing is not managing the fear of voters, but protecting and taking care of all citizens, regardless of where we were born.
The children who were laughing at the 'lamb' 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'.
