France is blighted by “deep-seated racism”, the country’s most prominent black newsreader claimed yesterday, following outrage over “monkey” comments concerning the black justice minister, reports The Daily Telegraph.
Harry Roselmack, 40, became the first non-white presenter of a French mainstream television news programme when he stood in seven years ago on the evening broadcast of the country’s most-watched channel, TF1.
But yesterday the poster boy for Gallic multiculturalism said that for all the country’s supposed advances, “racist France is back”.
In an opinion piece in Le Monde newspaper, Mr Roselmack lamented “the deep-seated racism that withstands time and words of order, not just within the FN [the far-Right Front National] but in the deepest parts of French society”.
While the values of the republic allowed him to forget he was black “most of the time”, recent events have “reduced me to my negro condition”, he said.
He was writing after Christiane Taubira, the justice minister, was racially abused several times in recent weeks.
The first incident came when a National Front mayoral candidate likened Miss Taubira to a monkey, and later said she would “rather see her in the trees than in the government”. The FN suspended the candidate, but Miss Taubira said it exposed the true nature of the party.
“We know what the FN thinks: the blacks in the branches of trees, Arabs in the sea, homosexuals in the Seine, Jews in the ovens,” she said, describing the party’s policies as “deadly and murderous”. The FN is suing her for libel.
In a separate incident, a group of children as young as 10, part of an anti-gay marriage protest, waved banana skins at the minister when she visited Angers. They shouted: “Who is the banana for? It is for the monkey.” The abuse was filmed by France Television.
Read more of this report from The Daily Telegraph.