A few days ago, the social media content creator Ángel Gaitán said on television, and in prime time, “I’m a facha.” He haughtily claimed the term, explaining that it was if being a fascist means “being normal, being Spanish, loving your country, working, doing things for others (…) and I believe that there are many more fascists than we thought. “In Spain, what happens is that we had the wrong word.” That is to say, it would seem that Gaitán and other Spaniards, before their appearance on television, thought that “being a facha” was something that they should not boast about in certain contexts, but that, after the resignification of the term proposed by himself, they could begin to raise the flag with the same pride with which he showed the Spanish flag while making his speech in prime time. The constitutional one, by the way, which would have been different to do with the chicken. This speech left me stunned, confused and almost sad. Does it occur to anyone that in Germany, on a Sunday night after a natural disaster, a person who is successful on social media goes on television saying that yes, he is a Nazi, and that is a big honor?
Until that moment, the reappropriation of terms that I knew was what had been done, for example, by African Americans within Hip-Hop culture at the end of the 20th century with the term Nigger (“black”), used disparagingly by European slaveholders towards enslaved Africans almost from the beginning of the human trade across the Atlantic, in the 16th century, passing through the white Americans of yesterday and today with supremacist and racist beliefs. The idea of the resignification of derogatory epithets by oppressed groups is simple: if you call me a nigger to insult me, I appropriate the term by calling myself a nigger and thus it loses its intention to hurt me. A closer example of reappropriation of an adjective initially used to offend is what homosexuals did in our country with the term “faggot” or “dyke.”
#fachas #niggers
