Autora: Emma Porter

8 may 2026 - 11:16 CET

If you have been to a King’s Day celebration in Spain, you’ve likely seen the following: the three wise men on a parade float, dressed majestically in flowing robes, stately beards (whether real or not) and crowns framing their faces. The first time I saw the Kings I did a double take: one of the three was a white man with black paint on his face. I quickly looked around me to see if anyone else was uncomfortable or outraged, but I seemed to be the only one. I remember sending messages to my friends back in the U.S. telling them that they wouldn’t believe what I had just seen, and, what’s worse, that no one seemed to care at all. In my home country, it’s hard to imagine an average person being okay with such a blatant act of racism. Of course, the U.S. has its own complicated and horrific history of racism but, in modern times, it would be difficult to find a celebration for the masses centering a white man in blackface in any major city.

Fast forward seven years, and I am now a teacher at a charter school in Madrid, which is consistently ranked among the best in Spain. On the last day of school before Christmas vacation, I walked into one of the third-grade classrooms among the hustle and bustle of last-minute preparations for the annual Christmas play. A short, blonde-haired student exited the bathroom with black face paint smeared all over his face and neck. He saw me and said, “¿Sabes quién soy?” and before I could respond, answered his own question with, “¡Soy Baltasar!” and scurried off to the corner of the classroom to help one of his friends put on angel wings. This moment affected me even more deeply than the initial sighting seven years earlier. Although I found it hard to grasp the idea of a large crowd watching a grown man on a float in blackface, I found it even harder to wrap my head around an eight-year-old child in blackface in an educational context.

In the years since, I’ve come to recognize that this kind of everyday racism is more commonplace than one would think. In fact, in my experience, many Spaniards might view the act of using blackface to represent Baltasar as a harmless tradition, one that is certainly not on par with the use of blackface to taunt or make fun of black people in general. This brings us to the crux of the issue: is this a harmless tradition or normalized racism? Some might argue that the intention behind the blackface is what matters – if your intention is not to offend or be racist, then the act itself cannot possibly be racist or communicate racist ideas. However, both instances of blackface mentioned above are a form of discursive racism or a type of subtle racism that is expressed through acts of communication (including language and image) and normalizes racist ideology.

The intention behind a white man and a white boy painting their faces black might not be cruel, but these examples cannot be separated from the racial significance and history behind them. Blackface is rooted in a history of mockery, first used in minstrel shows in the United States in the 1830s where white actors would blacken their faces and mimic enslaved African Americans (National Museum of African American History and Culture, n.d.). These shows perpetuated and reinforced harmful stereotypes about Black people that were used to justify slavery and, later on, segregation.

Another example of discursive racism in action is an incident that happened just a few months ago at the same school and in the same class. The third-grade students were beginning a project on cultural diversity, and one of the teachers approached me and asked if he could take my picture as part of the project. When I asked what for, he explained to me that he was taking pictures of all of the third-grade teachers so he could use A.I. to ‘transform’ us into a person from a different culture. All of us on the teaching team are white. I began to protest but he quickly told me not to worry, took the picture and walked away before I could say anything else. About a week later, I walked into one of my third-grade classrooms and was confronted by a picture of me dressed as an indigenous woman from Mexico. Other teachers had been turned into: a follower of the Sikh faith, a person from an unnamed African tribe and a Japanese geisha.

I was floored that a group of adults had allowed this to happen, especially given the central theme of the project, which was cultural diversity. When I tried to say something by asking if using A.I. to turn us into other races was necessary to the project, I was told that I was looking at it from an ‘American’ perspective and that I was being sensitive. I’m embarrassed to admit that from that point on, I didn’t say anything else. I felt alone in my opinion and further isolated by the fact that I was the only foreigner on a teaching team of Spaniards. My picture remained on the wall for several weeks and I was left wondering why a situation that to me seemed like clear racism did not even seem to register with the rest of the teachers. This is a central problem with discursive racism: it is framed as an unintentional byproduct of a harmless act. Racist discourse is so normalized that no one blinks when they see or hear it.

The contradiction between a seemingly progressive project related to cultural diversity and the use of A.I. to digitally change the race of white teachers during the project serves to emphasize the central problem of discursive racism in certain parts of Spain. The country presents as outwardly progressive, often leading the way on a number of important issues including LGBTQ+ rights, gender equality and, quite recently, the regularization of thousands of immigrants. Despite this, there is an underlying truth: at the core of discursive and communicative practice, there is still a tendency to believe that intent matters more than actual impact.

Perhaps most of the third graders thought nothing of seeing their teachers “dressed up” as other cultures; in fact, many of them laughed at the printed-out posters that day when they walked into school. Perhaps the multitude of people watching Baltasar gazing out at them from a parade float did not think twice about the black paint he had put on his face early that morning. The impact of these acts of discursive racism, however, is very real when you consider the history of oppression, violence and mockery that lie at their core. When you imagine children at school who are not white looking at posters of their white teachers digitally ‘transformed’ into other races, when you imagine a Black onlooker in the crowd of parade-goers wondering why a white man has painted his face black rather than simply hiring a Black man for the same job, then you can begin to understand how something that might seem harmless can have a much more profound and painful impact than anyone might have originally intended.

References

National Museum of African American History and Culture. (n.d.). Blackface: The birth of an American stereotype. Smithsonian Institution. https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/blackface-birth-american-stereotype.