Antoni Bassas' analysis: "When knowing Catalan becomes a must, the problem will end."

The week ends with a nonsense: yesterday he ran The video of an event held by Barcelona City Council on Tuesday in which the report on discrimination in the city was presented, where a theater group made up of women of Hispanic American origin presented it as a dramatic discrimination that they were asked to know Catalan and they were screwed.

The controversy has two layers. The first is how it's possible that no one at Barcelona City Council had a fit of rage when they saw that at an event about discrimination in Barcelona, a show was being put on against discrimination based on race, gender, origin, and class... that discriminated against Catalan and its speakers. Because it turns out that the 2024 Barcelona Discrimination Observatory Report found that racism, gender, health, LGBTQ+ orientation, and attitudes against the use of Catalan are the main reasons for discrimination in the country's capital.

Therefore, there are two possible hypotheses, both fatal: the first, that the municipal official who contracted this spectacle is not suitable for the job he does or the salary he receives because he has not understood anything, nor has he checked anything, nor has a warning light gone on in the face of the evidence that, if there is a discriminated language in Catalonia, it is Catalan (City Council); the second, on the contrary, that the official is already screwed, from Catalan, because, deep down, how simple would life be if we only spoke Spanish, right?

The other aspect is the content of the sketch. A group of Latin Americans express that they feel oppressed or frustrated when told to speak Catalan. They have a right to do so, and we can even accept that it's based on a real scene. But the overwhelmingly overwhelming reality is the other: how many patients have encountered healthcare personnel who don't understand Catalan and get angry if someone speaks to them in Catalan? And this is because, by law, the only mandatory language is Spanish.

Then, of course, there are personal attitudes. It's a sad irony of history that descendants of those colonized by Castile, which slaughtered the languages spoken in America, end up performing linguistic sketches that could have been written by a Ciudadanos screenwriter, reproducing the linguistic supremacy of the "speaks in Christian".

Pedagogy and seduction in favor of Catalan must always be done, but we now know that these are resources that must be used by those who don't have the laws, let alone the market, on their side. If Catalan were as mandatory as Spanish, the problem would end. And, until this is the case, Catalan institutions, like Barcelona City Council, have an obligation to invest money and political will into correcting the imbalance between Catalan and Spanish and, above all, to ensure that newcomers to Catalonia know they cannot ignore Catalan, much less laugh at it.

Good morning.