It seemed surprising that two days before first lady Michelle Obama’s recent visit to Spain, the U.S. State Department removed a warning on its website that stated, “We have received isolated reports that racial prejudice may have contributed to the arrest or detention of some African-Americans traveling in Spain.”
Someone must have grasped the incongruity of the State Department having such a statement on its website when the African-American wife of the first African-American president of the United States was about to arrive in Spain.
The presence of such language on the State Department website should not surprise any minority in this country or any person of a darker hue who has traveled here. Perhaps, a historical perspective about the United States and its treatment of African-Americans and darker-skinned foreigners, especially by the State Department, would be helpful.
In the 1857 Dred Scott decision, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney used the refusal of the State Department to issue passports to Blacks as evidence that they were not regarded as citizens. Then, Blacks could only travel abroad if they received certificates of residence in the U.S. Taney used the State Department’s policy to deny citizenship to Dred Scott. The Chief Justice reasoned that since a passport recognizes the bearer as a citizen of the United States and Blacks could not get passports, they were not citizens.
In 1997, Judge Stanley Sporkin of the U.S. District Court in Washington ruled that the United States’ visa policies, developed and implemented by the State Department, were discriminatory. The ruling was prompted by a lawsuit that had been brought by a Harvard-educated lawyer who, when serving as a consul officer in Sao Paolo, Brazil, was fired because he refused to follow a policy that resulted in denials of U.S. entry visas because the applicants were of African, Asian and Arab descents.
Sporkin wrote that the visa policies “instruct visa officials to rely heavily upon factors such as physical appearance and national origin when adjudicating the applications.” He elaborated by saying the “principle that government must not discriminate against particular individuals because of the color of their skin or the place of their birth means that the use of generalizations based on these factors is unfair and unjustified.” He further cited a visa manual used in the Sao Paolo U.S. Consulate that encouraged special scrutiny of applicants of Korean or Chinese ancestry — “visas are rarely issued to these groups,” the manual said. Further, statistics showed that visa applicants from certain Brazilian cities that have predominantly Black populations had a disproportionately high rate of denial.
Discrimination exists everywhere, including Spain, despite its proximity to northern Africa and the darker skinned Moors’ influence in its history. I was in France in early July to see a stage of the Tour de France. A glimpse of Alberto Contador, who won his second consecutive Tour this year, showed he is a darker-skinned Spaniard whom the U.S. news media largely ignored as they focused on seven-time Tour winner Lance Armstrong.
