No one should have to ask permission to be who they are
Soraya Mohamedi Mohamed · Ubuntu Canarias · 8 min read
In the Canary Islands we share buses, classrooms, building sites, markets and hotel kitchens with people who have come from very different places. That coexistence is real, and in many neighbourhoods it works better than people sometimes say. But being close to each other does not mean racism has gone away. Often it has simply become quieter and harder to name.
That quiet form is what I want to talk about. Not open aggression or insults shouted in the street, which almost everyone rejects, but what happens in everyday relationships, even between people who care about each other.
"I can't be racist, I have foreign friends"
This is probably the most common sentence whenever the subject comes up. The people who say it usually believe it, and there is no reason to doubt their good intentions. The problem is that it mixes up two different things: the affection we feel for a particular person and the idea we hold about the group that person belongs to.
Social psychology has been studying this for decades. In the 1950s, Gordon Allport put forward what is known as the contact hypothesis: getting to know people from other groups can reduce prejudice. But he also pointed out the conditions needed for that to happen. People have to meet as equals, share goals, cooperate, and do so in a setting that supports that equality. Living alongside someone as an equal is not the same as having them nearby in an unequal relationship: the person who looks after an elderly relative, the co-worker who always gets the worst shifts, the neighbour we greet without knowing anything about her life.
Later research has confirmed that contact usually helps, but that on its own it is not enough. It is common for someone to keep their prejudices about a group intact while seeing their friend as "an exception". The phrase "you're not like the others" sums it up: it sounds like a compliment, but it leaves the prejudice exactly where it was.
What I have lived through
I grew up between two cultures, Moroccan Amazigh and Spanish, and I also speak about this from my own experience.
I have had friendships that were very good for years. People with whom I shared secrets, celebrations and important stages of my life. And yet, in some of them, on the day an argument came up, the word "mora" (a derogatory term for a Moroccan woman) appeared. Other times I found out that people had talked about me behind my back, through the same old prejudices. And often it was subtler: when something about my character didn't suit them, the explanation was my origin. If I was direct, it was because of where I come from. If I made a decision they didn't understand, the same.
What made me think most was not the insult itself, but realising that the prejudice had been there all along, waiting for its moment. The friendship was real, but it hadn't made the prejudice disappear. It had only kept it quiet while everything was going well.
I share this because I know it is not only my experience. Many migrants, and many children of migrants, will recognise it.
Everyday racism
There is a name for these small situations that keep happening: microaggressions. The term was coined by psychiatrist Chester Pierce in the 1970s and is now widely used in psychology. They are gestures, comments or questions that, even when no harm is meant, tell a person that they don't fully belong where they live.
Someone born in Gran Canaria is asked where they are "really" from. A migrant woman with a university degree is spoken to slowly and loudly, as if she wouldn't understand. People assume someone works as a cleaner or on a farm because of their accent or the way they dress. Someone is congratulated on how well they speak Spanish when it is their mother tongue.
None of these scenes seems serious on its own. But people who live through them don't experience them one at a time. They add up over the years and leave a kind of tiredness that is hard to explain to someone who hasn't felt it: the sense of always having to prove you have the right to be here. Being constantly on alert takes a toll on self-esteem, on mood and on the wish to take part in the life of the neighbourhood or the workplace. Many people end up withdrawing from the places where they feel watched, and that loss also belongs to everyone around them.
Where prejudice closes doors
There are two areas where these attitudes stop being merely uncomfortable and become real obstacles: work and housing.
At work, a person can have exactly the training and experience a job asks for and still not get past the first filter. Sometimes because of their surname, sometimes because of their photo, sometimes because of a foreign qualification nobody stops to consider. The people doing the selecting are not always aware they are ruling candidates out for these reasons, and that is precisely why it is so hard to change.
Something similar happens with housing. Anyone who looks for a flat with a foreign accent knows the phone calls where the flat suddenly stops being available, or where they are asked for guarantees that other people are not.
What stands out is that, behind those decisions, there are often people who have friends from other backgrounds in their private lives and don't consider themselves racist. They probably aren't, in the way we usually use the word. But their decisions, added together, leave people out.
Intention and impact
One distinction helps a great deal: separating intention from impact. Most of the time nobody wants to discriminate. But the absence of bad intentions doesn't erase the effect. If a comment or a decision makes someone feel like a foreigner in their own city, the harm is real even if nobody meant it.
Recognising this doesn't mean living with guilt or with a fear of getting things wrong. It asks for something else: listening when someone tells us something hurt them, instead of answering that it wasn't a big deal. Asking ourselves where some of the ideas we take for granted come from, and whether we have ever checked them. And, when we see someone being treated unfairly in a shop, at work or in a WhatsApp group, daring to say something. A timely "that's not okay" changes a lot for the person going through it.
There is also discrimination that doesn't depend on what anyone says, but on how things are organised: requirements a newcomer cannot meet, information available only in Spanish, procedures nobody explains. Looking there too is part of the work.
What depends on each of us
There is something that, in my experience, isn't always said when we talk about racism. We tend to put our hopes in laws, plans and anti-racist campaigns. They are necessary, and I don't take away from their value. But I don't believe racism, or the mark it leaves, can be overcome just by waiting for others to put them into practice. Sometimes, when these initiatives are designed from the outside without involving the people they affect, they can even reinforce the idea that we are a separate group in need of protection.
For me, an important part of the way forward lies within each person of a different background: those who have migrated, those born here to parents who came from elsewhere, those who have grown up between two cultures, like me.
It has to do with the responsibility to love yourself and to feel valuable in your own uniqueness. Without claiming to be more than anyone, but not less either. With recognising everything you can bring: your languages, the experience of having started from scratch, the ability to understand two ways of seeing the world.
And also with accepting something difficult: some people will reject you. Sometimes out of ignorance, sometimes out of fear of what they don't know. That rejection hurts, but it says nothing about your worth. It speaks of their limits.
This doesn't take responsibility away from those who discriminate, nor does it mean putting up with everything in silence. It means not letting other people's eyes decide who you are. For me, that is the deepest way to overcome it: being the best version of yourself, here or there.
From Ubuntu Canarias
At the association we support migrants in their social and labour integration: employment guidance, information on administrative and immigration procedures, and a weekly round-up of job offers in several languages. In that work we see how heavily prejudice weighs, and also how things change when someone decides to treat another person as an equal, and when that person begins to treat themselves that way too.
We don't start from the idea of tolerating difference. We start from something simpler and more demanding: that every person has the same rights, receives the same treatment as anyone else and can recognise their own worth.
Coexistence is already here. Making it fair is up to those of us who share it, to those who have the power to open doors, and to those who, every day, dare to walk through them without asking permission to be who they are.