“You cannot tell the truth about Spain without offending the Spanish people”, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier said in his memories and, although I suspect that it is something that happens with all nationalities, he was not without reason. Of course, the controversy over the racist insults to Vinícius is being an endorsement of an opinion that is more than 200 years old.
Above all, because one of the most repeated arguments seems to be ‘Spain is not racist’ and that leads us to ask ourselves some very interesting questions. How do we know if someone or some group is racist? Can that be measured? Can it be objectified? Has it been measured in the Spanish case? For years, social psychologists have been trying to answer this question, and yes, we do have some answers.
It is increasingly difficult to measure racism directly. As University of Toronto professor Ulrich Schimmack explained, over time (and as “the open admission of racial bias has become less acceptable”) it has become increasingly difficult to ask about it directly.
A handful of decades ago, questions like “How would you like it if a close relative married a black person? Would you be very much for it happening, somewhat for, neither for nor against it happening, somewhat against or very against it happening?” They weren’t just used in research, they worked well.
Today, a large part of the population is not willing to speak openly about these issues. For this reason, social researchers have had to look for ‘indirect’ ways to continue studying a phenomenon so common in contemporary societies.
Can ‘implicit’ things be measured? Obviously, we do not have a ‘perfect’ measure of racism, researchers have spent decades trying to solve the problem of ‘implicit racism’ in very original ways. One of the classic examples is implicit association tests, tests that try to see how people’s ‘reaction times’ change when they are subjected to different types of stimuli.
I mean, it’s a kind of racial ‘Stroop effect’. The stroop effect is the well-known fact that it takes us less time to say the ink color of the words on this list.
than the color of the ink of the words of this. You can ask someone to time you or use an online test to check.
Why is this happening? It’s funny because they are exactly the same words and the same colors. In different orders, yes. And there’s the key: when the name of a color (for example “white”, “yellow” or “purple”) is written in a color other than the one it denotes (for example, “yellow” written in green ink) name the Ink Color takes longer and generates more errors than when the ink name and ink color match.
The interesting thing about this is that we cannot avoid it. If we know the language in which the words are written, the ‘stroop effect’ appears (whether we like it or not) and, in fact, popular legend has always said that the US secret services used it during the Cold War to find out if someone knew russian. Could this be used to measure other implicit things like racism?
The answer (with nuances) is yes. You have to be very careful in the design of the tests and this is only one of the ways to measure it, but in the last two decades very interesting tests have been developed to measure the impact that racial biases have on behaviour, decision making decisions and attitudes of the people.
The ‘nuances’ to which I refer is that the investigation of racism is inserted in a very polarized political environment and that sometimes causes ‘properly racist attitudes’ to be confused with ‘ideological attitudes’ (which would not have to be direct product of racism).
At a purely psychometric level, it is not the same to be against ‘positive discrimination measures’ for racism, misogyny or aporophobia than for a political position that advocates the abolition of the state. And, precisely, the measurements of implicit racism are what allow us to distinguish these two positions quite clearly (even when the second ones are held as a ‘screen’ to hide the first ones).
How racist is Spain? Once we confirm that we can measure racism in a group, the question becomes obvious… Do we know how racist Spain is? And the answer is very difficult to give. In the United States, there are studies that try to quantify the ‘racial bias’ in the population (and to see how common it is in different political or ideological options). In Spain, we hardly have this type of work.
Reporting is often based on cases or self-reports, and while this is a necessary approach, the end result is comfortable for everyone. It makes it easier for speeches to be articulated that minimize the problem, for the problem to be accepted without having too many practical consequences and makes the implicit racism we are talking about invisible.
Awkward questions we haven’t asked ourselves. That is, there is a lack of information and not because we do not have mechanisms to obtain it; but because we do not believe it is necessary (or we do not believe it is opportune) to collect it. There is no doubt that, by many measures, the Spanish situation is not faring too badly, but the lack of public will to discover the truth of the problem is a symptom in itself.
A symptom that goes one step further than what Servando Teresa de Mier said two centuries ago, because without truth there is no way to be offended or stop doing it.
