Rosalind Williams has a special place in the struggle against
discrimination by European police forces against people of color
and ethnic minorities. Twenty years ago, she was stopped and
asked for her identity papers by Spanish police in a railway
station. An African-American who had acquired Spanish
citizenship by marriage, she was travelling with her husband and
son; they were left alone by the police. The police officer
explained he was obliged to stop people “who looked like her,”
due to an order from the Ministry of the Interior, aimed at
detecting illegal immigrants under the discriminatory assumption
that Spanish nationals could only be white. Thus, the Ministry
ordered that people of color must produce their identity
documents to the police whenever asked. Rosalind was rightly
shocked and angry. She filed a court complaint, which went all
the way to the Spanish Constitutional Court, where it was
finally ruled upon in 2001, nine years after the stop. In the
majority’s view, the stop was not discrimina