France: Grappling with a surge in racism

“Is France racist?” asked Libération (Paris) in an editorial. “No, but some French people are.” Last month, a far-right politician publicly likened Justice Minister Christiane Taubira, who is black, to a “monkey.” An outcry ensued, but the ugly attacks continued. Demonstrators protesting France’s new gay-marriage law, which Taubira passionately backed, chanted racist slogans, and at one rally a young girl presented Taubira with a banana. “These racist attacks are an attack on the heart of the republic,” Taubira said. “Our social cohesion, the history of the nation, is placed in question.” In response, the far-right weekly Minute splashed the justice minister on its cover with the headline “Clever as a monkey, Taubira finds her banana.” The government has launched an investigation into whether the magazine committed “a public injury of a racial nature.”

We seem strangely unable to face up to the “vexing little detail” that racism is well grounded in our national character,said Christine Angot also in Libération. Instead of speaking out with a loud and clear voice against these offensive incidents, our politicians deny and minimize them, acting like “virgins scandalized that anyone could attribute such thoughts to their dear little French people.” Yet racism’s resurgence is undeniable, said Alain Jakubowicz in HuffingtonPost.fr. Reported acts of racism are growing exponentially, totaling 1,539 last year alone. This can’t go on. The prime minister should declare the war against racism to be “the great national cause of 2014.”

Of course comparing a minister to a monkey is odious, said Benoît Rayski in Atlantico.fr. But isn’t it a bit of overkill for Taubira to have called the slurs against her “an attack on the heart of the republic”? Is she really the heart? Of course there’s racism in France, and there has been for years, much of it exercised by blacks against Jews and other white people. But “the republic is not in danger; France has not lost her soul.” Taubira says she wants to “do battle” with racism, and the Socialists plan a giant “march of the republicans” next month, said Ivan Rioufol in LeFigaro.fr. But this response reeks of opportunism. They know full well that taking advantage of these utterances “just lowers the tone of our politics even further.”

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Make no mistake: “Racist France is back,” said Harry Roselmack in Le Monde.These incidents are not “slips of the tongue” but rather the unvarnished expression of a worldview widely shared by an increasingly vocal part of the population. I have rarely thought of myself as a black Frenchman. “I am first a man, a son, a brother, a husband and father, a citizen, a journalist.” But a growing minority of French society is eroding the best of what the republic has to offer:“a sense of belonging and national attachment among people of different social classes, different cultures, different colors.” Our society is becoming confused about its own identity, and these latest incidents have forced me to embrace my own “Negro condition.” In modern France, the color of my skin is no longer a fact I can naïvely forget.