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What’s Happening in France and Why Should We Care
And the government of current President Emmanuel Macron’s government has moved step by step to become a right-wing nightmare for French people whose ancestors come from Northern and Southern Africa.
A lot of Americans love France, especially its food and its politics. But “liberty, fraternity and equality” are slogans, and, as in the U.S., reality differs from the slogans
A racist, Trump-like figure, Marie Le Pen is now leading in the polls for next year’s French presidential elections.
And the government of current President Emmanuel Macron’s government has moved step by step to become a right-wing nightmare for French people whose ancestors come from Northern and Southern Africa.
Like the U.S., France has a police force with a reputation for brutality. Young Black and Arab men are hassled regularly. Police were caught recently on camera beating a Black man for fifteen minutes. Rather than reforming the police, Macron proposes to make it illegal to take pictures of them. And, as in the U.S, cameras are the only way to verify police behavior.
Macron implies that Islam is a threat to France and holds up cases of terrorism as evidence to support draconian new “security” laws. They now investigate 4- and 5-year-olds for “radicalization.”
As in the U.S., when an individual person of color commits a violent act, that whole community is looked on with suspicion, while a white person committing the same act is assumed to have an individual mental health problem.
Thirty-six organizations have made a complaint to the United Nations about Islamaphobia in France.
And, as in the U.S., there is economic discrimination.
The labor of people from the former French colonies was instrumental in defeating the Nazis in World War II and rebuilding the country from the devastation of that war. But whites ignored these contributions when distributing the new economic benefits of the post war world.
A Montaigne Institute study on fairness in employment indicates that a Catholic man named Michel would need to send our five resumes to obtain a job interview while a Muslim man named Mohammed would need to send out 20.
France is renowned for having a militant labor movement. Because of this militancy, the French people have hung on to more health benefits and job security than many other developed countries.
But this militancy has not often extended to fighting racism and Islamaphobia. In fact, a lot of the white Left in France has been silent on the issue for years.
French activist and thought-leader, Yasser Louati, argues that our two countries are headed down a similar political path. Americans may think we dodged the bullet with the defeat of Donald Trump, but the forces pushing toward fascism have not disappeared from either country.
In response, Louati suggests that anti-racists in both countries work together and internationalize the issues.
At first, I thought it might be difficult to involve Americans in such an effort given our general lack of knowledge about the truth of world affairs.
But the paradoxical impact of the pandemic has brought the people of the world together in a deeper way through our common real-world experience.
We’re locked up in our houses, required to mask, unable to travel, worried about finances and the death of family members. And a lot of us have joined Meet-Ups; language groups; virtual college classes and virtual international conferences, where we have been eye to eye with people from South Africa, France, Brazil, Mexico, Algeria, China, and dozens of other countries.
The technology to extend these experiences is expanding rapidly. It’s possible that one result could be an international revulsion against having our governments beat and discriminate against the brothers and sisters of the people we’ve been meeting in their living rooms.
A few possible steps toward solidarity:
- French people have demonstrated in support of U.S. anti-racist movements. We can reciprocate in our protests and our speeches. The French government doesn’t like to have a spotlight on the ways that they do not live up to their slogans.
- On an individual level, we can hunt for news about the struggles against racism and Islamophobia in France and elsewhere. A couple of links in English are: @yasserlouati on Twitter: CJL organization — https://www.cjl.ong/en/publications-en/, and CAIR.com
- We need to get a deeper understanding of the struggle against Isamophobia and teach it to our children: https://educators4sc.org/topic-resources/teaching-about-islamophobia/
- And more of us can start meeting our international neighbors from our living rooms: Here is one resource: meetup.com.
Kitty Kelly Epstein is a professor, the author of three books, and the host of Education Today on KPFA 94.1 FM
