Spain, Color Border Racism as Symptom of the Necessary Failure of the National Identity

Contrary to popular belief, race is not the womb where racism is gestated, but racism invents race, its condition of possibility. This is the only way to understand how this phenomenon has appealed to different orders of our reality to generate the set of rules, ideas, and emotions that are constantly passing through us as society. In this article, we will try to evaluate the incidence of racism in Spain by analyzing the recent impact of illegal migration in the media. Starting from the recognition of the role that coloniality has played throughout its history as well as of the disturbing necessity it forces of excluding its racialized otherness, we will try to demonstrate the role the country has played as a color border, as a boundary separating the populations from the African and European continents. Our objective is to point out, by the means of the psychoanalytic theory, the contingent nature of racism as a mechanism attached to its national identity, as well as to validate its failure as affluent and as boundary of its symbolic and libidinal condition.