Racialize: the buzzword shaking up Spanish politics

Racialize: the term dividing Spain's left

Racialize means nothing. Or it means too much. The neologism has been embedded in Spanish politics for some time, though its pedigree is American: it comes from the proge movement and US university campuses. In Spain, its best-known mouthpiece has been Irene Montero, but the term has now spread beyond the left and is on everyone's lips.

In essence, racializing means classifying someone by their race, imposing a racial identity they never chose. The question of whether racialized people are born or made captures the confusion: if race is a construct, racializing is an act, not a state. That is precisely the first major fault line: some use it to denounce structural racism; others see it as an empty wildcard that only serves to hand out blame and privilege.

The controversy is not merely semantic. It has very tangible consequences. When extra university admission points are granted to racialized people, that is positive racialization being applied. Is racializing bad? It depends on who does it and why, the most cynical analysis would answer. The antidote and the disease look far too alike.

The provisional conclusion: the term does not win conceptual battles, it wins political ones. It is a double-edged weapon that simplifies uncomfortable debates, and whoever wields it should know it can turn against them. At the current level of polarization, the only predictable thing is that the noise around the word will keep growing.