wtf: massive blackface in alcoy, spain is their “christmas tradition”

Nowadays, the holiday season just runs together. You’re barely out of your Halloween costume by the time people are caroling in the streets and Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” is blasting from every storefront in town.

But in Alcoy, a town in Valencia, Spain, it all works out, because it’s Christmas that is the time for costumes. And not just any costumes. I’m talking the kind that gets some white frat penalized every year for the sheer ridiculousness of it’s cultural insensitivity. The yearly Moros y Cristianos (Moors and Christians) festival is like all the stupidest racist white frat boys combined their Blackface parties into one.

The festival takes place in from 22 to 24 April, around the Feast Day of Saint George, and commemorates the legend of James I of Aragon reconquering the city from the Moors. Festgoers dress up as either Christian pajes (pages) or Muslim negrets (the little negroes), distributing gifts and otherwise acting like Santa.

The reasons this is offensive are tenfold (Blackface? Mocking the massacre of Black people? Islamophobia?). But according to Afroféminas, the community wants UNESCO to bestow the Christmas tradition with the title of “intangible heritage of humanity.”

“This offense is unworthy of many people,” the authors at Afroféminas write. “It is offensive because it is a stereotype that ridicules, is non-inclusive and falsifies our image. We are real, we are not fantastic characters present in the streets of Alcoy and the rest of Spain. We can not invoke the past to avoid any changes. We are here and it hurts us to be represented as a clown, without matices, without humanization” (Translation: Google).