Lucía Asué Mbomío: "Of course we Spaniards are racist, just as we are macho"

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Lucía Asué Mbomío Rubio (Madrid, 1981), journalist and writer, daughter of Guinean and Spanish, was named in 2013 one of the 30 most relevant Afro-European on the continent. His novel Daughter of the Way (Ed. Grijalbo) speaks of identity, family ties and racism.

How many times have you been asked where are you from? So many that I couldn't tell you, a lot. I can understand curiosity when you hear a certain accent or even after talking with a person for a while, but I don't understand that that is the first question, even before asking you what your name is. The problem that I ask you where you are from is that it automatically alienates you, because it implies the assumption that you cannot be from here, you cannot. And it is not only that: when they ask you where you are from and you answer that Spanish, from Madrid, the answer is often: "Yes. But exactly where are you from?" What they want is to know our origin. It happens to me and the daughters of my friends whose grandparents came from Guinea. And where do you feel? I was born in Madrid, but where I feel is another matter, something that has changed over time depending on of my experiences and even the context. When I have been asked, for example, in Cape Verde, I have said that I am from Equatorial Guinea, because we are in the same continent and it seems to me that this generates a different way of relating than if you are seen as European, and I also feel Guinean. And I feel Spanish especially when I am out of Spain, within Spain it is much more difficult in the face of perpetual denial that you can be from here. But, fundamentally, I feel of Alcorcón.And that? For recognition of my country and my country, because in Alcorcón I don't have to give explanations, there most people know me and recognize me, there I have a story, I'm something else that a skin, I'm not a black one, I'm Lucia, and because in that town of almost 170,000 inhabitants my childhood memories reside. Memories many of them beautiful and others not so many, but hey, that's life, but it wouldn't be called life, it would be called a walk. Spaniards, in general, do not consider ourselves racist. We are, of course we are. As we are also macho. We cannot exclude ourselves from the great systems of oppression that shape us. It is always said that a baby, a boy or a girl, is not racist, and of course it is not. But if at school they never teach him anything that a black person has done, if at the historical level they do not speak to him for example of the Haitian revolution, or do not tell him that Alejandro Dumas was an Afro-descendant or who Frederick Douglass was, it is very possible that it will end thinking that blacks don't paint anything and that I end up being racist without being aware of it. It is very scary that they call you sexist or racist, but the system is and we cannot stay out of it. To the point that there are women who have internalized machismo and black people who have internalized racism. Can you give me an example of internalized racism? It is a product of internalized racism that a black person never imagines himself in certain spaces. Do not think, for example, that you can work in a medium of communication, tremendously white except exceptions. How many non-white people are there, for example, in the writing of THE WORLD or on TV? Not to mention that the media call irregular immigrants "illegal." That is outrageous, no person is illegal. And so with a lot of things. Have you suffered this kind of racist typecasting in your flesh? Clear. What I'm going to tell you has happened to a lot of black women: one day I was on the Gran Vía waiting for someone and they asked me how much I charged. Is it that we cannot stand in certain places without that having these connotations? And I'm going to tell you another anecdote: I move around towns a lot because of my work, and one day I was in a small one waiting for a friend and I ran out of battery in my cell phone. I started asking people if they would please let me charge my phone so that I could tell my friend where I was and a lady left me, assuming that I was the one who "took care of grandparents." It was not his fault: it is the fault of where we are always placed by the media, fiction series, the system, where they are waiting for us ...... Let them think that I am the person who takes care of the elderly or a cleaner in Absolute is bad, not at all unworthy. The problem is that they only place us there. Do you think that if there were positive discrimination fees and programs that could help change the mindset? For me, quotas are a means, not the end. They are a means because in the end they help transform. But I believe that the starting point must be is the recognition of a diverse Spanish State on many levels, also the linguistic one. It is curious that we never hear words in Basque on television, that we do not know anything about how other people speak in other places. And there should also be a recognition of diversity at the phenotypic level. It is necessary first to recognize that diversity to be able to do it later laws. In the BBC, for example, it has been established that from now on 20% of reporters and presenters have to be non-white, a bit in correspondence with what is on the street. My father has been in Spain for more than 50 years, he has the age of being a grandfather and as he has enough people. It is time to stop talking about us as a recent phenomenon. How was your intellectual journey regarding your skin color? Being black is not the same as having an awareness process. It can be painful, because it leads you to rethink a lot of things in relationships with your friends, with your partners or ex-partners or with your own mother, which in my case is white and that obviously loves me with all its soul, but it is socialized in this system. And it is not easy to rethink certain things, because either you fit in the place that you have been reserved in society or there are people who, with phrases like "you are not like the rest", can make you think that you are an exception. And not. I am not an exception, nor do I think there are rules when we talk about people. Is it important in that sense to have referents? The referents are super important. They have always existed, but they have not been visible. That is why it is important that there is visibility of referents and also to discover or rediscover the referents that you have in your closest environment. I remember, for example, Artemis, a girl who told me that her mother was her reference because in Burela, the Galician town where she is from and where there is a large population of Cape Verdean origin, most Cape Verdean women are watering and their mother chose however to work in the garbage service. It is a reference because he has decided to break with what was expected of her. You have to rescue those close referents. And what are their referents? They taught me to read when I was very young and, of course, the princesses of the stories I read were all white. There was one that was called Snow White, another that was called Goldilocks ... In the end you end up empathizing, just like empathizing watching Los Serrano or Family Doctor , although everyone in those series is white. You empathize because they are human stories. But when you suddenly arrive at a book in which you say "I am here. I feel reflected here," a whole process begins. In my case, a process of voracious search of books and also of traveling to find you. An internal and external journey. Chuck D., Mc of Public Enemy, wrote Fight the Power , a book in which he says that when black people go through their awareness process they have an extreme voracity when it comes to acquiring knowledge, to know more, because they feel They have wasted a lot of time. Right now the bulk of the works I read are of black people. And there will be people who say: "How strong, that is racist." But those people should consider how many non-white people they have read have read throughout their lives. Maybe only Chimamanda Adichie or Wole Soyinka, the only black African who has won the Nobel Prize for Literature. Does a black person have to be hyper sales or win a Nobel Prize to be read? Why do you think political parties barely touch on the issue of racism? When a xenophobic murder is condemned, but it is not an issue that is in the electoral programs ... There is little talk of racism because Spain has an image of itself as a non-racist country, a place of friendly and open people. And it is true that it is. Spain is for example one of the countries that helped most after the earthquake in Haiti, when we were in the midst of an economic crisis. But of course there is racism in Spain. It is not about what happened or not, that is nothing more than the anecdotes that show a system. Stopping non-white people more to ask for documentation is racist. I don't say it, the UN says it. That you call by phone to rent a house and tell you to go see it because your accent is from here, but when you go they tell you "casually that it is rented" is racist too. Her book, Daughter of the Way , tells the story of a young woman Spanish and white mother and black father who sits between two worlds and who travels to Equatorial Guinea in search of his identity ... Yes. The "return" is interesting, a good part of the people born outside the country of our parents call this way to go to the country of our parents, "return", although we have never gone before. That has to do with the inheritance received and with the idealization that our parents make of their place of origin. Nostalgia is very dangerous because it erases the bad and makes you stay only with the beautiful. And when you go to that place you are disappointed, because you imagine your Ithaca, an El Dorado, however, there are no perfect places. In the end what you feel is that maybe you belong to two worlds and neither. My book's protagonist Guinea broke her heart, but she also fell in love with Guinea as a teenager.

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