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Epilogue The Concept of Race Lingers This book has presented race in late-nineteenth- and early-twentiethcentury Spain as a “mode” of viewing human differences that clearly did not rely on ideas of purity or obvious physical differences in appearance. Racial thought is contextual and dynamic, reflecting both the era in which it is expressed as well as an ever-shifting evaluation of the importance of human differences . Yet, in contemporary Spain, there still continues a strong effort, the legacy of Franco-era efforts to distance Spain from its wartime alliances, to shelter Spanish society from charges of racial thinking or its social practice, racism. As a result, an important impediment to confronting the existence of racial thought remains. A controversy over some photos appearing in a Spanish newspaper in 2008 serves as an important reminder of the complex ways in which the dominant view of Spanish history as magically free of racism collides with events that offer seemingly uncomfortable counterexamples. During the 2008 Summer Olympic Games held in Beijing, an advertisement appeared in a Spanish sports newspaper in which the Spanish Olympic men’s and women’s basketball teams were posed with their hands pulling their eyelids to the side in an apparent attempt to resemble Asian facial features. The international reaction to this advertisement concentrated on whether the act reflected inadvertent or intentional racial insensitivity. Rather than decry the gesture and the advertisement, many Spanish newspapers of different political positions condemned the reaction in the “Anglo-Saxon” press for criticizing a clearly “humorous” but certainly not “malicious” act.1 One player noted that many of his good friends in the Canadian city in which he plays in the NBA are Chinese.2 Another journal defended the act as inoffensive because a Chinese representative of the company for which the advertising photo was taken was not offended. The head of Spanish basketball noted 208 | Impurity of Blood that there could be no racist intent in the Spanish team’s acts because, among other reasons, “the mixture of races in the world of basketball is total.”3 The defenders of the image seemingly ignored any connection between the obvious stereotyping of Asian facial features and the idea of representing human differences in potentially demeaning, grotesque ways. Instead, they defended the image with an assumption garnered from Spanish history: that Spain could not harbor the same racist malice that countries with more racial historical baggage did. According to some Spanish commentators, other nations , the “Anglo-Saxon ones,” with prolonged histories of racism like the United States and the United Kingdom, should not judge another nation’s racial sensitivities. This subtle contrast assumed other nations’ histories of racism left little room for them to condemn a country like Spain with a history relatively free of racial thought and racism. Again, the reaction reflected more the historical sense of Spanish freedom from racism than a more judicious and complex understanding of racial thought and racist stereotyping. One goal of this work is to complicate this notion that Spain is historically free from racial thought. Rather than arguing that racism existed in Spain, this work has suggested that histories of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Spain need to take into account a far more complex relationship between racial thought and historical memory. In fact, some of the most important historical debates in Spain over the last half century have evolved over the issues of race, assimilation, and tolerance even if the participants themselves were unaware of it. These relatively recent debates about Spanish identity have generally focused on far more remote times, especially over the formation of Spanish identity in the ancient or medieval world. For example, Spain’s position as the crossroads of Europe and Africa and its multiethnic society elicited one of the most strenuous debates about Spanish history and nationalism in the 1950s and 1960s. Américo Castro started the historiographical battle in 1948, arguing that different groups, specifically Jewish, Arab, and Christian populations in medieval Spain, all helped forge the components of Spanish national identity.4 Others, even earlier, like Marcelino Menéndez y Pelayo and, in this century, Nicolás Sánchez Albornoz, had made nationalist claims that obliterated the role of different population groups in Spanish history , arguing that the expulsion of these groups in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries allowed the true and original genius of Spain to burst forth from its mixed past. In the end, the debate has been about the meaning of difference and its...

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