Racism: What It Is and How to Deal with It - Uned

A Guide to Talking about Racism | 124
How can we manage to become conscious of things? By observing, reading, travelling,
talking, coexisting. 37 And what should we become aware of? We become conscious of
the distance between the ideas and the images we have of people and things and what
we discover about them by travelling, observing, talking...
“I had never travelled to Latin America, and even though on TV they always talked
about them like our Latin American brothers and sisters, to tell the truth, I didn’t feel
very close to them, except for a certain feeling of fondness I’ve always had for them.
Recently, I took a trip to Mexico and the direct contact with people there has completely
changed the feelings they produced in me. Contact with their reality and their
experiences (so close, on many occasions, to ours) have made me rethink a whole
series of conditioning factors that I was living with but was hardly aware of.” (Doctoral
student, UNED)
Because it is difficult to imagine yourself in that situation if no one has experienced it,
and if you don’t put yourself in that situation, maybe you can’t know what is best for it.
Even if you have experienced it, it might not be, it might still be very difficult, or maybe
you don’t consider it any more, then other things, yes, trips, I’ve seen other ways of
thinking, other kinds of rankings, of classifications, of… or ways of living, things that
there’s no reason why they should make me think… I don’t know, no, not that, I think
that maybe also... no, no, I don’t know, I think that, trips, having lived somewhere else,
and seen other people’s points of view, opinions of other people who haven’t had the
chance to travel or who have used their opportunities in a different way, they’ve learned
other things from them or they have managed these life experiences in a different way,
or they simply took them along the same path, but the road is still different. 38
We are all made up of multiple identities, or rather of an identity that is multiple. Our
personality, the way we are, is the sum of our experiences, of our encounters
throughout life, of our reading, and also of our cultural referents.
“From the moment we conceive of our identity as integrated by multiple belongings,
some linked to ethnic history and others not, some linked to a religious tradition and
others not, from the moment we see in ourselves, in our origins, and in our trajectory,
37 In section 3, you will find resources to help you in this task.
38 Almost all of the interviews quoted in this module belong to the Report on Racism that has already been
cited (INTER Group 2007). When this is not the case, it is explicitly stated.