Introduction: Towards a Racial Turn in Spanish Scholarship on Migration and Diversity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.14422/mig.y2025.i64Keywords:
Race, Racialisation, Systemic racism, Interculturality, National minoritiesAbstract
This special issue aims to contribute to the debate on race, racialisation and racism in Spain from a perspective that combines theoretical analysis and empirical studies. We take a systemic understanding of racial relations as our point of departure and focus on the Spanish context. Our objective is twofold: First, we want to challenge a persistent “colour-blindness” and a widely spread silence about race in European societies (Lentin, 2018; Song, 2018; El Tayed, 2021), as well as in Spain (Rodríguez-García, 2022; Rodríguez-García et al., 2021), which has permeated research on migration, diversity, interculturalism and ethnic relations. As Omi and Winant (1994, p. 159) pointed out “opposing racism requires that we notice race [… and] that we afford it the recognition it deserves and the subtlety it embodies.” This will contribute to a deeper understanding of the processes that shape and reconfigure racial categories. Furthermore, it will advance knowledge on the concept of “race” and its intersections with other social
categories, such as class, gender, and migration status, highlighting how these intersections fundamentally shape social interactions, power structures, and various forms of inequality.
Second, with this special issue we intend to provide a collection of empirically based research about racialisation processes, racial categories and racial relations in the case of Spain. The contributors to this special issue are Spanish and international scholars based in Spain who conduct their research at the forefront of the ongoing “racial turn” in Spanish academia (see, e.g. Hellgren, 2025; Suárez-Navaz & Suárez, 2024; Rodríguez-Reche & Cerchiaro, 2023; Hellgren & Bereményi, 2022; Rodríguez-García, 2022; Hellgren & Gabrielli, 2021). All of the contributors place race, racialisation and racism at the core of migration and minority studies, both in the Spanish context and internationally. This endeavour is necessary to look transversally to the processes of othering, racialisation and hierarchical categorisation that involve at the same time newcomers (migrants and refugees particularly from the global South) and
national minorities. What for some scholars and policy actors is an issue related to the lack of residence permits and recent arrivals from different (and by some framed as culturally irreconcilable) contexts, is in our view part of larger dynamics of systemic racism in Spanish and European societies that affect also minoritised national citizens as the Roma (Hellgren & Gabrielli, 2021). We dare say that through the publication of this special issue, the racial turn in Spanish scholarship on migration and diversity is further consolidated.
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