“We are thinking about closing for a few months or offering only minimal services,” says President Cheikh Drame

The activist is confident that he can overcome this undermining of “defunding”, mainly due to the loss of a 60,000 euro contribution from the Open Society and the cut in contributions from the city councils and the Generalitat, but he does not hide a certain pessimism and disappointment at the fact that this “cut” comes when, in his opinion, SOS Racisme needs more to defend itself against hate speech from the extreme right. The goal for the future is to “diversify” and stop depending on subsidies, explains the activist. For this reason, for some time now, the staff have been running courses and workshops in the administration and schools to instill the philosophy of equal treatment and non-discrimination. “We often find that we have to explain the problems of immigration law to professors and teachers rather than to the students themselves,” he says, since the classrooms are attended by children who, for example, cannot continue their extracurricular studies because they do not have a residence permit in the country.

Drame suffers first-hand the obstacles imposed by the law. Born in Senegal in 1991, he moved to Martorell with his family when he was six years old. However, he does not currently have Spanish nationality. The rule rejects applications from people who have a previous history, and he has one from 2019. The events date back to 2010 and were his first contact with SOS Racisme. He was 19 years old and, out of a group of friends from the city – all white – he was the only one who, after hearing “Look at that shitty black guy”, was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison for assault on authority, which he did not serve because he had no previous convictions. He complains that he was not believed at the trial and that his reports of injuries were dismissed. He felt so offended by the way he had been treated that a friend accompanied him to the organization’s headquarters in Barcelona, ​​but unable to speak to the family about the incident, she did not pursue the process.

The “House Black”

This is not, however, Drame’s first memory of racism. He was not aware of it, but in elementary school, a classmate – who eventually became a good friend, he says – greeted him with “black shit”, which made the whole class laugh. “Even I laughed,” he admits, stressing at this point that racism – racists – often take advantage of the fact that the victims want to go unnoticed, do not want problems or even accept the strategy he calls “the blacks of the house” and which is nothing other than reproducing racist attitudes, but never against whites, but against Moroccans, gypsies, etc. “The paternalistic discourses, those of the good blacks, are always accepted, but never when you hit back,” he says.

During his childhood, he constantly heard his parents’ advice at home: “Don’t say anything” because, after all, they weren’t in his country and “things like that happen”. Awareness of racism came later, around the age of 12, when a local policeman from Martorell shouted at him: “I’ll make a wallet out of your skin” for not having the necessary documents while he was sitting on a bench with a white friend.

Satisfaction with the expulsion of the bulls

This police violence against non-white people makes up the majority of the complaints received each year by SOS Racisme, especially because of the policy of racial identification. Drame collects a lot and although he says he has learned to protect himself, in the end the overbearing attitude of the officers turns him on. Like this season, when a policeman from Martorell often stopped him to ask for his papers and forced him to empty his pockets. “That leads to being looked at with suspicion by neighbors and pedestrians,” he points out. From here it is only a step to hear the cries of “go to your country.” “But I am Catalan, I feel Catalan. Where am I going?” he asks.

Over the years, it has been his satisfaction that SOS Racism led to the conviction and expulsion by the Mossos d’Esquadra of six officers who had attacked a black boy in Manresa in 2019, shouting “Mico, negre de merda”. For victories like this – he claims – one cannot close the SAiD, the institution’s attention and complaints service, which takes care of around 700 victims of structural racism every year, behind which stands a whole machine in front of a population deprived of rights or stigmatized only because of their skin color or religion. “Our bodies have no validity in this society,” he laments.

On the eve of the European elections, where immigration control will be at the heart of the debate, Drame criticises the left for failing to find the tone and discourse to confront the right, attributing this to the fact that “anti-racism doesn’t get votes, but racism does”. And in the face of hate speech and racist attacks, one wonders how it is possible that there is a prevention programme against the radicalisation of Islam and not against fascism.