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In recent years, a discourse of Spanish exceptionalism has arisen, whereby Spain has managed to integrate over five million immigrants in a very short period of time without the kind of social upheaval witnessed in other European countries over the past several decades. Overtly racist and xenophobic discourses have generally been, with notable exceptions, absent in the public domain. However, under the radar, visible minorities frequently suffer ‘racial micro-aggressions’, that is, racially-loaded verbal and other behaviours that are seemingly innocuous but are uptaken as offensive and insulting by the micro-aggressed. More specifically, these racial micro-aggressions are often raciolinguistic in nature, that is, they reflect the confluence of language and race in the unequal positioning of individuals in interactions. In this article, we focus on how young people from immigrant backgrounds tell ‘school stories’, embedded in normative Catalan/Spanish bilingualism in Catalonia, which are raciolinguistic in nature and relate to racial micro-aggressions experienced by tellers. We do this with a view to showing how all is not as well in Spain as many might think as regards the integration of immigrants, and that greater attention to racism is in order.
