Blind to Racism, not Race: The Myth of French Égalité
Protesters hold a sign reading ‘Until we have justice, you will not have peace’ during a rally Place de la Republique in June 2020. Source: Marc Piasecki/Getty Images.
According to the French policiers involved with the incident, on November 21st, 2020, Mr. Michel Zecler drew their attention for not wearing a mask and smelling of marijuana. The officers then accused Zecler of pulling them into his music studio by force and violently resisting arrest. Zecler was held in police custody for two days until footage of the incident from a security camera went viral - and showed what actually happened. The video shows three police officers breaking into Zecler’s studio and subsequently beating him for six minutes. Zecler suffered multiple injuries, including a torn tendon in his arm, a head injury, and various bruises. He additionally claimed that the officers used racial slurs against him and that he was targeted as a black man living in a well-to-do neighborhood. Subsequent protests against police brutality toward minorities ensued as well as protests opposing part of the proposed Global Security Bill - a bill from the presidential party that proposed banning footage of police officers from being shared online as well as increasing police mass surveillance abilities.
This movement in France came at the heels of a summer of protests in commemoration of Adama Traoré, a Malian-French 24-year-old who died in police custody after being pinned down and restrained in 2016. The Traoré case came back to the spotlight after the release of a medical report last June that exonerated police from liability for his death. 2020 established a strong French anti-racist movement - one that has been compared to the American Black Lives Matter movement. But is France ready to talk about race?
A Vue Particulière on Race
The first article of the Constitution of the Fifth Republic states: “France shall be an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic. It shall ensure the equality of all citizens before the law, without distinction of origin, race or religion.” However, during his 2012 presidential campaign, François Hollande promised to remove the word ‘race’ from the constitution. From Hollande’s point of view, race does not exist, and therefore should not be mentioned in any official text. While this may sound surprising to American ears, 33% of French citizens do not believe that race exists. This is a view consequence of French universalism.
French universalism is supposed to underlie the republican ideals of “liberty, equality, and brotherhood” (liberté, egalité et, fraternité in French) and is one of the foundations of the French Republic. French universalism discourages identifying with different communities and emphasizes rapid cultural assimilation of immigrants. The goal of French universalism is to oppose any kind of division in society because any kind of difference can create inequality. As such, when one lives in France, one should become French. The legacy of Vichy France loomed large over the establishment of the Fourth and Fifth Republics. Memory of how the collection of data on race and ethnicity was used by the Nazis helped establish a 1978 ban on collecting race-based data without interviewees’ consent or a waiver from a state committee. As such, race has largely been pushed under the table in France as a factor that can only divide.
Opponents to the idea of universalism argue that France must acknowledge diversity and its past of racism to create true equality. While many attempts at getting data on racial inequality in France have failed due to the 1978 law, the few projects that have been completed point to immense inequality between white Frenchmen and their counterparts of color. For example, a 2017 investigation by the Defender of Rights, an independent official body, found that young men perceived as Black or Arab were 20 times more likely to have their identities checked by law enforcement than white men. Other issues, such as wealth inequality, health inequity, and difference in education have been hard to study without government approval. Without measuring current inequities, racism has been swept under the rug. Mass protests this summer have worked to bring racism back into mainstream conversation.
Maboula Soumahoro, a specialist of African diaspora studies at the University of Tours spoke to FRANCE 24 about France’s reluctance to address racism. “I am black and I am treated as such… France is not blind to racism. France thinks it’s blind to racism,” she explained. Soumahoro noted that French slave trading and colonialism “produced race,” but largely outside of mainland France. “Because slavery was illegal on the mainland, people in France have the impression that this hyper-racialized history that is characteristic of the modern world only concerns the Americas, when in fact we have our own history,” Soumahoro said.
Some anti-racist intellectuals in France have looked towards the United States - as a racially-aware society - to express their own uniquely French experiences of racism. “When I consider both countries, I’m not saying that one country is better than the other,” said Soumahoro. “For me, they’re two racist societies that manage racism in their own way.” Pap Ndiaye - a historian who has led efforts to establish Black studies as an academic discipline in France - said he grew aware of his race after studying in the United States in the 1990s. He remarked, “[i]t’s an experience that all Black French go through when they go to the United States. It’s the experience of a country where skin color is reflected upon and where it is not hidden behind a colorblind discourse.”
Recent anti-racist protests and movements have put French intellectuals and politicians on edge, and caused some to blame American academia for imposing ideas of race. Pierre-André Taguieff, a French academic and a leading critic of American influence has condemned what he sees as the “totally artificial importation’’ of the “American-style Black question” that some would use to draw a false picture of a France guilty of “systemic racism’’ and “white privilege.” Emmanuel Macron himself blamed universities last June for pushing “ethnicization of the social question’’ that he claims threatens to “[break] the republic in two.” Some academics have pushed fervently against what they call “decolonialism and identity politics.” An organization called Observatoire du décolonialisme, roughly translated as “Watchdog of decolonial thought,” has “issued warnings about American-inspired social theories.” Nathalie Heinich, a sociologist who helped set up Observatoire du décolonialisme decried anti-racist activism as well as recent disputes over cultural appropriation and blackface in the arts as “a series of incidents that was (sic) extremely traumatic to our community and that all fell under what is called cancel culture.” Anne Garréta, a French writer who teaches literature at universities in France and at Duke University counterpoints skeptics by pointing out that many of the leading thinkers behind theories on race and post-colonialism came from France or French colonies, notable among them Frantz Fanon, as well as the rest of the world. “It’s an entire global world of ideas that circulates,’’ she said. “It just happens that campuses that are the most cosmopolitan and most globalized at this point in history are the American ones.’’
Is Progress on the Horizon?
Last June, mass protests for Adama Traoré and wider anti-racism protests swept the country. Thousands of Parisians marched to protest unjust police killings and institutionalized racism. The French press has begun to refer to the new generation of anti-racist activists as the ‘Adama’ generation. Clearly, there is a distinctly French anti-racist movement that does not stem from American activists and academics. Additionally, unrest resulting from racial discrimination by police in France is not anything new. In 2005, there was a period of riots in the suburbs of Paris where youth of mostly African, North African, and Arab heritage protested over police harassment and unemployment in their communities. In 1998, two days of protests occurred in Toulouse after 17-year-old Habib Muhammed was shot and killed by police during a car theft. The list goes on and on; it is clear that minorities have been drawing attention to racism in France long before 2020.
So what makes the movement of 2020 so different that it is widely feared by the French right-wing? Éric Fassin, a sociologist who was one of the first scholars to focus on racism in France, has pointed to the emergence of young intellectuals of color as something that has fueled the fear of “the American boogeyman.” “[People of color] are not just the objects we speak of, but they are also the subjects who are talking,” he detailed. Rokhaya Diallo, a prominent anti-racism campaigner credits the mass mobilization of last year with bringing the taboo topics of racism to the mainstream. “Racism and police brutality were largely hushed by the media before,” Diallo explained. “The coverage now is still often skewed against the protesters, but at least these subjects are considered worthy of debate.”
Recent protests seemed to have near-immediate - but still minor - effects. The protests of 2020 forced the government to admit “there are racist police officers.” Macron himself admitted, “[T]oday, when your skin color is not white, you’re checked [by police] more often.’’ These are surprising words from the President who has recently been courting the right-wing ahead of upcoming elections. The new director of the Paris Opera has publicly stated that he wants to diversify its staff and ban blackface. He received immediate backlash for these comments from far-right political leader Marine Le Pen who noted that he lived in Toronto and “soaked up American culture for 10 years.” (Apparently, though Toronto is a city in Canada, Le Pen believed that such radical ideas could have been transferred through cross-border osmosis.) French police also were banned from using chokeholds - but only for a few days before the ban was reversed due to complaints from officers. Additionally, Sibeth Ndiaye - a government spokesperson at the time - who was born in Senegal and came to France as a teenager, published an op-ed in Le Monde last June calling for the start of collecting statistics on race so that France could begin an honest conversation about racism. The president’s office swiftly shot her proposal down by stating, “This is not a debate that the president wishes to open at this stage.”
Critics have said that the Macron administration and other institutions are attempting to sweep institutionalized racism under the rug in the hopes that the recent anti-racist movement will fizzle out. Last June, on the heels of the Traore protests, Macron said he would be “uncompromising in the face of racism, anti-Semitism, and discrimination.” In the same press conference, he then praised police and rejected calls to take down statues of figures associated with France’s slave trade or colonial endeavors. Even Ndiaye - who was called too radical for proposing the collection of statistics on race - said, “I don’t believe we can say that France is a racist country. There is no institutionalized state violence in our country. When there are incidents, misconduct by members of the forces of law and order … there are investigations and, if necessary, sanctions when the misconduct is proven.”
Au contraire to the official position of the French government, human rights groups have decided to take on institutional racism within the French police. A coterie of local, national, and international NGOs - including Amnesty International France and Human Rights Watch - filed a class-action suit against the French state on January 27, 2021 claiming that inaction against a “longstanding and widespread practice of ethnic profiling that constitutes systemic discrimination.” The groups’ announcement cites fears that Macron’s approach to policing will result in “superficial and insufficient measures.” Instead, the group has proposed a series of reforms such as explicitly prohibiting discrimination in the Code of Criminal Procedure, providing for an independent review process, and changing institutional objectives of police. In response to this suit and others, Macron complained that France has become “a nation of 66 million prosecutors.” The non-governmental organizations have officially served notice to the French state; this is the first step in a two-stage legal process. French authorities now have four months to talk with the NGOs about meeting their demands. At the end of the four months, if an agreement has not been reached, the suit will move to the courts. It remains to be seen if Macron’s administration will be willing to come to the bargaining table in good faith with these groups - if at all.
Mass demonstrations in France show the increasing awareness and activism in France on race-related issues. Talking about racism in France has finally broken through to the mainstream, but these issues have been in every corner of la vie quotidienne for people of color in France for a long time. The denial of race as a factor in French life will stand as an obstacle to the society of égalité, liberté et fraternité that France claims to be. Progress is likely to move at a snail’s pace as long as those in power continue to deny the reality that people of color in France experience every day. However, there is no denying that this year could be a crucial moment for anti-racist movements in France. If action from grassroots and international organizations continues through 2021, these groups may be able to force France to reconcile with racism in a way that has never happened before. However, despite these issues that have plagued the Fifth Republic since its inception, some still deny that race and racism exist in France and will do everything in their power to squash this movement before it can lead to larger change.