The fact that there’s a lot of racism in Spain should come as no surprise to anyone. The very public struggles fútbol players of color, particularly Vini Jr., who has been constantly harassed and subjected to racist chants since he started playing in Real Madrid, paint a clear picture. But there was still a certain amount of shock from plenty of people when old tweets from Oscar Nominee for Best Actress Karla Sofía Gascón surfaced in the past week. A majority of the tweets were discovered by Canada-based journalist Sarah Hagi.
Gascón’s bigoted tweets, which were verified by outlets like Variety, ran the gamut from Islamophobia to plain old racism, and had her wondering “Are there more Muslims in Spain?” and adding, “Next year instead of English we’ll have to teach Arabic.” She also mocked Islamic customs, saying in the same tweet, “How DEEPLY DISGUSTING OF HUMANITY,” and appeared to blame China for the COVID-19 pandemic. On top of that, despite playing a Mexican woman in the movie that made her famous, alleged resurfaced Facebook posts from Gascón also show her apparently criticizing Latines in general.
It doesn’t stop there, as she also speaks against George Floyd, calling him, “a drug addict and a swindler” and criticizes the Oscars for their inclusivity, “More and more the #Oscars are looking like a ceremony for independent and protest films, I didn’t know if I was watching an Afro-Korean festival, a Black Lives Matter demonstration or the 8M.”
As someone who has lived in Spain, however, Gascón’s tweets simply read as someone saying the quiet part out loud.
The number of hate crimes in Spain is on the rise according to a 2022 study by the Spanish Ministry. And racism and xenophobia account for the majority of reported incidents in a 2023 study by Statista. This is without even taking into account online hate. According to OBERAXE (Observatory for Racism and Xenophobia), a tool created by the Spanish Ministry to monitor online hate speech, there was an increase in Islamaphobic comments from 10% recorded in November-December 2022 to 23% in January-February 2023.
To give further context on racism in Spain, in 2023 Cuban writer Abraham Jiménez Enoa told the AP he’d documented the daily episodes of racism he’d suffered – 182 at the time of his statement. Those incidents included being followed around stores, asked for his ID on public transportation and watching Spaniards compliment his lighter-skinned son. He had only been in Spain for 16 months. Jiménez Enoa went as far as to say that he has “never suffered such explicit racism in the streets, in shops, in the market, wherever” as in Spain.
My experience in Spain was pretty similar. I spent over a year in the country, specifically in Barcelona, as I was getting a Masters Degree. As a lighter-skinned Latina, I was safe from most of the outward racism that other darker-skinned Latine people suffer in Spain. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t discriminated against, that people didn’t speak derisively about the “colonies” to me, or that they didn’t yell “sudaka” at me in the subway — a slur for Latin Americans. I also saw how Spaniards treated anyone who wasn’t white, day in and day out.
Some of the worst examples I remember involved South Asians, who had a strong presence in the city, and especially Muslims. Every one of them was referred to as “paqui,” even if they were not from Pakistan, and people would buy their food in the middle of the night, after leaving clubs or bars, but refuse to touch them as they exchanged money. According to a 2023 study by Statista, there are approximately 2.41 million Muslims in Spain.
Accounts of obvious racism are often conditioned by words like “it’s not everyone,” and “there are bad apples everywhere,” like that should make it all better. It doesn’t. If anything, it’s important to note the first-hand accounts of racism and the statistics we already have available when it comes to reported racist or xenophobic incidents in Spain and look at it as a systematic problem within the country that needs to be addressed from the root up.
Emilia Peréz has been nominated for 13 Academy Awards with Gascón making history as the first out trans actress to be nominated for the Best Actress category. And yet, at no point during the Oscars campaign for the movie did she think about deleting those old offensive tweets. The reason why is obvious: they didn’t register as offensive. Just as Jacques Audiard, the director of Emilia Peréz had no problem calling Spanish, the language the movie is in, “a language of modest countries, of developing countries, of the poor and migrants.”
This is, in many ways, the way of Europe.
Gascón and Audiard are the status quo. And worst of all, they feel comfortable enough in their way of thinking that Gascón only apologized for causing pain, but not for her actual words. Later, she went on to delete her X account and referenced a campaign of “hate and misinformation” that has affected her and her family, once again without taking any sort of accountability or trying to learn from it. And even after the controversy raged on, the best she could muster was the equivalent of “I can’t be racist; I have a Muslim friend” amid a word salad that felt like she was saying “What I said wasn’t the problem, it was how I said it” on Instagram. She followed that with an interview with Juan Carlos Arciniegas from CNN en Español where she said she didn’t think about deleting her previous tweets because her “conscience was clear.”
But again, as someone who’s been there, who has seen the treatment of Vini Jr. and many other Black and Brown public figures in Spain, someone who was treated worse in Spain than anywhere else in the world, I can’t say I’m surprised. “I’m sorry for those Spaniards who disagree but today, Spain is known as a country of racists,” Vini Jr. said after racist abuse in Valencia. He was right. The numbers don’t lie. This is a big problem in Spain. And if Karla Sofia Gascón’s reaction to her own words causing backlash is any indication, it’s not getting better. It’s being swept aside as if there wasn’t a problem in the first place.
