Madrid city council is investigating after video messages featuring a white man wearing blackface and speaking halting and heavily accented Spanish were sent to children as part of the traditional 6 January festivities that celebrate the visit of the three wise men to the baby Jesus.
The feast of the Epiphany – or Día de Reyes, day of the kings – is the day when Spanish children receive their Christmas presents courtesy of the three kings, Melchior, Caspar and Balthazar. It is preceded by cavalcades, held across Spain on 5 January, in which the kings parade through the streets, showering the crowds with sweets.
In recent years, Spain has abandoned the old habit of having a white man wear blackface to portray Balthazar, who is usually depicted in art as being black. But the tradition made an unwitting comeback after the city council hired a firm to produce personalised Reyes video messages that parents in the Chamartín neighbourhood could request for their children.
In one of them, a white man, wearing dark facepaint and speaking accented and grammatically incorrect Spanish, sends a message to a child, telling them they can expect presents but need to “be more care [sic] about your school work”.
The video’s contents, which were first reported on Thursday night by the Madrid edition of the online paper elDiario.es, soon spread across social media, eliciting a mix of incredulity and disgust.
Yeison Fernando García López, an Afro-Colombian-Spanish political scientist and head of the Conciencia Afro centre, said the video was not an innocent act. “It’s a calculated racist action,” he wrote on X. “These are the symbolic remains of Spanish imperialism; a reformulation of the notion of ‘clean blood’ that denies the African presence in this country …”
In a post on X, Tesh Sidi, a Sahrawi-Spanish MP for the leftwing Más Madrid party, described the video as “tawdry and racist”, adding: “There continues to be structural racism in Spain even though people carry on denying it.”
Her colleague Lucía Lois wrote on X that the video was one of the most racist things she had seen in her life.
An article in the Spanish daily El País noted that in Madrid, “where there are 120,000 people of African heritage”, using face paint to portray Balthazar was something of a backward step, as was “making him speak like he was dubbed by Tarzan”.
Sources in the city council said six people – “five of them black and one not” – had been hired to deliver the messages as Balthazar but the workload and the fact that two of the men had gone down with Covid had meant “it was necessary to resort to the one who wasn’t black”. The sources said responsibility for the matter lay with the company that had been contracted, and explanations would be sought and apologies offered to the families that had received the offending videos.
Madrid’s deputy mayor, Inma Sanz Otero, said the 20 or 30 videos in question should never have been made or sent out. “It’s a terrible mistake by the company that is responsible for this in the Chamartín neighbourhood,” she said on Friday.
