The Boundaries of Belonging
I’ve spent much of the past few days watching the online reaction to Mariano Rajoy’s remarks about the French national football team. Most of the debate has centred on whether his comments were racist or if indeed racism is a problem in Spain. That seems to me to be only part of the story.
What interested me more was what those remarks revealed about citizenship: the quiet assumption that for some people a passport settles the question of belonging, while for others it never quite can.
As I was writing, I found myself returning repeatedly to James Baldwin, whose insights into innocence and denial feel just as relevant today as they did sixty years ago.
The essay was published this morning in El Salto Diario. I’ve reproduced the original English version here for readers who don’t read Spanish.
The Boundaries of Belonging
Troy Nahumko
One of my best friends was born on a night of genuine biblical weather on the shores of Lake Malawi. His parents were there with a Canadian aid program; his mother, a nurse whose specialty was preventative care, made the entirely unremarkable decision not to fly home to give birth, but to do what women have done on that stretch of the Rift Valley since our species first stood upright. He came into the world the way we all did, once, before borders had opinions about it.
Yet look at him, pale enough to sunburn under a reading lamp, a surname built from Lowland Scots and Yorkshire vowels, and no image of “someone from Malawi” assembles itself in the mind. His parents, tender about the occasion, gave him a middle name that remembers the storm: Kalumba, for the thunder that split the sky that night. And yet if you were to open his passport and read the line marked place of birth, no customs officer on earth would blink, would ask him to prove he is Canadian. Geography, in his case, is decoration. His name, his face, and the assumptions people bring to both do the actual work of admission.
I begin here because Mariano Rajoy has just reminded millions of Europeans that citizenship is still, for some people, a costume rather than a fact. Geography is supposed to do the work of belonging, until it’s inconvenient, at which point it is quietly retired in favor of something older and uglier.
In a column for El Debate, previewing Spain’s semi-final against France, the former prime minister, a man who governed a G20 economy for seven years, praised Les Bleus’ quality and then, as if remembering an unpaid debt, added the codicil: they don’t, however, have any French players. He was, of course, alluding to the number of French internationals whose grandparents were born in Dakar or Bamako or Fort-de-France rather than the Dordogne. Pedro Sánchez called it xenophobic. The French embassy felt compelled to issue a small, weary civics lesson: twenty-three of twenty-six squad members were actually born in France; the other three are French too, that’s what the passport is for. That French officials had to say the quiet part, that a nation is not a bloodline, tells you the argument was never really settled, only sedated.
The remarkable thing about Rajoy’s remark is not that it insults France. It quietly empties citizenship of its meaning. Either a passport settles the question or it does not. If ancestry outranks nationality whenever the two disagree, then citizenship becomes less a legal fact than a revocable compliment, extended to some and withheld from others. Liberal democracies cannot function on those terms because they cannot tell their own citizens, with a straight face, what citizenship is for.
Rajoy did not invent this reflex. Argentine fans were often filmed saying the quiet part out loud, very out loud. Then a Paraguayan senator, Celeste Amarilla, having watched her country eliminated by France, described Kylian Mbappé — born in Paris, one of the best footballers alive — as a “colonized Cameroonian who has really pretended to be French.” Pretended. As though citizenship were a costume he might, with sufficient scrutiny, be made to remove.
And here is where the euphemists arrive, right on schedule, to tell us this is all rather overblown — bar talk, they say, the kind of thing men say into their fourth whisky after a match, harmless as it is deniable. But that defense collapses the moment you remember what actually happened: nobody was drunk. Nobody said this into a microphone in the heat of an argument and regretted it by morning. This was composed. Drafted, presumably reread, filed to an editor who read it too, and published under a masthead, in a country with functioning grammar-checkers and, one assumes, at least one person in the building capable of raising an eyebrow or perhaps even a hand. The difference between a slur muttered in a bar and a slur set in type is the difference between a symptom and a policy. One is a man losing control of himself. The other is an institution thinking that there was nothing out of the ordinary here.
That nobody in the editorial chain paused is not incidental. It is the finding.
There is a colorful Spanish word for the social machinery that lets this pass without friction — cuñadismo, the brother-in-law’s certainty, the country-club conviction that one’s own prejudices are simply common sense wearing its Sunday clothes. It thrives wherever the old boys have never had to justify themselves to anyone outside the circle, and it explains why “prioridad nacional” has slid so easily into the vocabulary of a party that still flirts with the idea of calling itself moderate. You do not need a manifesto for an ethnostate if enough of your members already believe, quietly, that the nation is a members’ bar with a strict door policy — Spanish Catholic by blood first, Spanish by paperwork a distant second, and everyone else, however many decades they’ve paid taxes here, permanently in the category of hired help.
James Baldwin spent much of his life trying to explain to people who considered themselves innocent that their innocence was the crime, that the readiness to deny what is plainly in front of you is not a failure of information but a moral choice, renewed daily. Toni Morrison went further, and named the actual function of racism: not merely to wound, but to distract, to keep its targets endlessly occupied in proving their own humanity instead of doing anything else with their lives. Rajoy’s aside is a small, almost administrative example of exactly that function. He was not describing a football team. He was refereeing the boundaries of belonging, informally, and expecting no whistle to be blown.
None of this rests on whether racism exists in Spain or France; the World Cup has simply held up the mirror and let the resolution run higher than usual. The real question is what to do about it, and Rajoy is a poor stand-in for the discontented worker in Extremadura or Andalucía who watches wages get undercut and reaches, wrongly but at least comprehensibly, for someone to blame. Rajoy has no such alibi. He was born comfortable and stayed comfortable, and comfort of that kind should, in theory, leave a person room to notice the obvious: that a liberal democracy runs on the fuel of universal standing, and stalls the moment any group is quietly filed under hired help.
I think again of my friend, born to the sound of a storm on the shores of a lake he has never lived beside since, and of how easily his passport absorbs the whole strange fact of him — Kalumba and all — without anyone thinking to ask for corroboration. Nobody has ever demanded he prove himself Canadian twice. That ease is not an accident of geography; it is a choice a country makes, quietly, about who counts, a choice renewed so often and so smoothly that it stops looking like a choice at all. Rajoy, in one careless, edited, published sentence, showed us what it looks like when a country, or at least one of the main political parties, makes the opposite choice out loud, and showed us, too, the appetite sitting underneath it.
And that appetite, I think, is the real disease, the one underneath the symptom: the imagination of the aggrieved almost never runs toward what a genuinely anti-racist society might deliver — the deeper talent pool, the peace of not needing to police who is real and who is merely tolerated, the sheer relief of an argument finally closed. It runs, instead, toward the ledger of what must be surrendered: a place at the bar, a monopoly on the word native, the quiet luxury of never having to share the definition of home. Loss is vivid to them in a way that gain never quite manages to be.
But subtract from a nation and, arithmetically, you are left with less of it — less talent on the pitch, less brilliance in the laboratory, less of whatever it is a country tells itself it’s for. Rajoy did not defend Spain in that column. He impoverished the very idea of it, and called the impoverishment pride. That a former head of government could write such a thing, file it, and watch it clear an editor’s desk without a single hesitation is not a lapse. It is a diagnosis, of a sizeable group of people still unsure whether they want citizens or merely tenants, and of a man who, having governed millions of Spaniards he would apparently rather not have counted, has finally told us, in his own hand, exactly which ones he meant.
