In an interview with Ana Requena Aguilar in eldiario.es, the historian and writer Mary Beard admitted, somewhat embarrassed, that years ago on a plane trip she heard a woman’s voice giving the flight information and wondered why a stewardess was doing it instead of the pilot. Beard, an active feminist, illustrated with this anecdote how sometimes we must fight against pre-established structures in our way of seeing the world, prejudices in the etymological sense of the term, which prevent us from understanding the reality of things.
When I read the interview, I thought of an acquaintance of mine, let’s call him Seydou, and the answer he gives to anyone who asks him how he is. Imagine: he is six foot three, has a shaved head and sports a huge smile with very white teeth that contrast with his ebony skin. Well, when asked, he begins to answer, dragging out his words slowly in a baritone voice with an African accent “as we say in my country…” and then pauses for a moment and ends with a laugh “oso ondo!” (very well, in Basque).
I remembered Seydou while reading Mary Beard, I said, because the first time she answered me that I felt that, like the historian on her flight, I had received a lesson: Seydou is from here and there at the same time and her game is to show you that her place is here too, when upon hearing “my country” you had thought of her only as from outside.
I also think about Seydou a lot these weeks of the Euro Cup, when social networks are overflowing with apocalyptic messages that use the European championship to cry out against a supposed foreign invasion. The modus operandi is always the same: they show a current photo of one of the selected players and compare it with an old one, to cast doubt on the legitimacy of current players who are not white to represent their nation. This is not something new. France, England, Belgium and Germany have been dealing with these discourses for years. In fact, as far back as 1998 The Diplomatic WorldHe published a photograph of the starting eleven of the team that would go on to win the World Cup, in which the players of migrant origin had been erased, in order to raise the alarm about the France that Le Pen Sr. wanted.
The phenomenon, however, does have two worrying new features. The first is that it used to be limited to an anecdotal part of the population, whereas now it seems to have spread like a deadly virus, especially among young people. The second is that it has reached Spain, where the racist far right has gone from being hidden away in the closet of shame until recently to now occupying a large part of public discourse. Thus, in recent weeks we have had to endure dozens of agitators sharing photographs of Nico Williams and Lamine Yamal to question their Spanishness.
Since that 1998 in which The WorldIf he used the example of football to illustrate the dangers of the far right, the world has changed a lot and multiple identities are increasingly common, those that are written with a script and narrated with stories that mix necessity and discovery. Every migrant is from several places, although in all of them they are thought of more as being on the other side than on this one. Benzema complained that when he scored a goal he was French, but when he failed they saw him only as an Arab.
One hopes that people can change and that many of those who today articulate hate speech based on prejudice, especially the young, will realize with the passage of time how wrong and unfair their assessments are and the pain they cause in others. One hopes that they understand that it is the prism through which they look at reality that returns to them an ugly and distorted image of the world. Today’s world is mixed and identities, fortunately, are not rigid and pre-established, but constructible and variable, and that is good. One hopes, ultimately, that they open their eyes and, as happened to Beard on a plane and to me with Seydou’s greeting, understand that many times it is our rigid mental structures that prevent us from seeing the real richness of the human landscape.
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