The Success of Diversity Policies Depends on Efficient Anti-discrimination practices

Keywords: Anti-discrimination, Anti-immigrant discourses, Ethnic equality, Racism, Xenophobia

Zenia Hellgren
(Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Stating that the success of diversity policies depends on efficient anti-discrimination practices (not only policies) implies placing a large share of the responsibility for this task on the ethnic majority populations. Just as elsewhere in Europe, anti-immigrant sentiments and support for xenophobic political agendas have increased in Spain in the last years. This poses additional challenges to the pending task of transforming the intercultural ideals that dominate the Spanish policy approach to diversity management into practices with a socially transformative potential. Simultaneously, the political awareness of the huge challenge that racism and discrimination pose to interculturalism, and indeed to integration as such, has recently grown significantly. At present, new laws against racism and discrimination are underway both at the national, Spanish level and at the autonomous level of Catalonia. These laws go much further than earlier anti-discrimination regulations, and explicitly address both structural, institutional and social discrimination, and its specific expressions such as islamophobia, antisemitism, antigypsyism, “anti-migrant racism”, afrophobia, and others. 

In this context, I myself participate as the expert in charge of designing a Catalan general survey about racism and discrimination, which addresses both ethnic majority and minority inhabitants, with the aim of capturing both self-experienced discrimination, and gather data on who discriminates. And, as the data collected in the PLURISPACE project also imply, the challenge of coming to terms with ethnic discrimination, segregation and inequalities and construct a more fertile ground for the successful implementation of diversity-friendly policies may very well depend, ultimately, on the non-immigrant population’s readiness to make this possible. Racism and ethnic discrimination indeed pose central challenges to any model of diversity management. In the case of interculturalism their existence undermines its very essence, since they make egalitarian and constructive forms of interethnic relations de facto impossible.     

The conclusion that discrimination hinders integration is indeed neither new, nor specific for the Spanish context. I conducted research in Sweden in 2005, on the gap between anti-discrimination policies and the persisting, even growing, racism and discrimination in practice, within a European project that aimed to evaluate the results of the then still comparably new Anti-Discrimination Directives. And what we found in that project resonates in present research by myself and others, in Spain and elsewhere in Europe: the gap between anti-discrimination policy and practice depends to a large extent on subtle forms of exclusion or preferences, by which the native population differentiates between “wanted” and “unwanted” people in a wide range of everyday situations. These preferences, in turn, are clearly racialized. The Spanish intercultural project overall recognizes this central dimension. In Barcelona, for instance, municipal initiatives such as the ongoing Anti-rumour campaign directly target xenophobic attitudes, aiming to educate the citizenry in anti-racism in a highly sensitive fashion that includes raising awareness on “micro-racism” and racial biases. Such biases, which often operate at the unconscious level, reinforce inequalities between natives and the immigrant-origin population through common practices such as teachers who by default recommend vocational training programs for racialized students, and academic programs for white, native majority students. There are also recent testimonies by municipal policy-makers in Barcelona on how ethnic majority families in some neighbourhoods have protested against intercultural agendas in schools and demanded that teachers stop implementing this perspective. 

This kind of diversity-related tensions at the micro level reflect perhaps more clearly than anything else what I identify as the main challenge for any pro-diversity political project: its success ultimately depends on the broad citizenry’s support for it. The efficiency of diversity and anti-discrimination policies is largely defined by how willing the native population is to implement the ideals of non-discrimination in a wide range of situations. But the citizenry is indeed, and apparently increasingly, divided in this respect. If we add the dimension of power, the matter becomes increasingly complex, and contentious. Successful integration depends to a great extent on the majority society being willing to let people of immigrant descent be a part of it. This implies giving up some privileges and allowing for ethnic diversity to permeate also its public institutions, power structures and decision-making positions. And in Spain, where ethnic stratification is strong and most non-western immigrants and their offspring remain in highly precarious positions, there is a long way to go before this becomes reality. Hopefully, the ongoing mobilization of anti-racist actors in politics and policy-making, civil society, and academia will keep anti-diversity and xenophobic tendencies at bay, and contribute to the necessary mainstreaming of ethnic equality at all levels of society