In under a week's time we will be commemorating in France and the rest of the world the 70th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted on December 10th, 1948, by the general assembly of the United Nations held at the Palais de Chaillot in Paris. France was thus the country where two human rights declarations were made, its own in 1789, and the universal one in 1948. By affirming the equality of humans from birth - “in dignity and rights” says the 1948 declaration – both documents declare that one cannot make a “distinction” between anyone of any kind, whether over their origins, their appearance or their beliefs.
In summary equality means not making a distinction - in other words by choosing, selecting, classifying, creating files, putting in a hierarchy - based on such criteria.
The preamble of the French Constitutions in operation since 1946, under both the Fourth Republic and the current Fifth Republic, states that everyone possesses the same “inalienable and sacred rights” which are “without distinction as to race, religion or creed”. As for the declaration adopted at Chaillot two years later, it devoted all of Article 2 to this same issue of “distinction”, rejecting it entirely: “Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.”
But should France, the self-proclaimed “country of human rights”, not in fact instead be known as the country of human rights declarations, given that these words appear to be like the so-called Potemkin villages, used by courtiers to hide the Russian people's misery from Catherine the Great in the 18th century? For there is still a “distinction” being made between people in France, something that is experienced in the everyday lives of those who are discriminated against on the basis of origin, appearance or belief, when it comes to getting housing or jobs, in dealings with the state administration – the police in particular – and even more secretly in the sport which is the most popular and, in theory, the most open to diversity, football.
That is the worrying question raised by the revelations of Football Leaks 2 about the files on ethnic origins kept by the top French football club PSG (see story here). How, in the second decade of the 21st century, can one explain such a practice as classifying players between French (“Français”), North African (“Maghrébin”), West Indian (“Antillais”), and Black Africa (“Afrique noir”), a practice which reveals the unconscious thought on the part of those who created the files that “French” players would be a particular colour, white, rather than just referring to citizenship?
How can one justify continuing to make a distinction in this way according to one's origins and appearance at the same time as our officials, in the course of great speeches during solemn commemorations, endlessly repeat how this “distinction” made between people was the driving force behind the ranking of different groups of human into hierarchies in Europe, to the point where it led to crimes against humanity?
How, in particular, can one understand why the officials in charge of national football, members of the government and elected representatives of all persuasions were so quick to close the file over the affair (see article in French here), an affair that has only been kept going thanks to a formal complaint from the human rights groups Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, which allowed a preliminary investigation to be opened by Paris prosecutors? This haste to minimise or even deny the revelation of discriminatory practices inside sport – which is the symbolic mirror of our people's diversity - raises even more questions given that the previous quota affair from 2011 should have prevented any repeat of such behaviour in the sport. Back then our revelations on the desire of the French Football Federation (FFF) to recruit fewer black and Arab youths to its training academies caused a scandal, which led to apologies and an internal inquiry led by Patrick Braouezec, an MP at the time.
More than seven years later nothing of the kind has happened in relation to the latest revelations. Doubtless money has had some part to play in this silence, given the crazy sums that have blighted this sport so much that it has been able to buy consciences. The revelations of Football Leaks 2 indeed deal primarily with this issue and demonstrate how, from the so-called financial doping of clubs, to the use of tax havens, not forgetting the dominance of an oligarch over a principality – Monaco – or the procurement of timely and favourable decisions, the commercial and consumer madness of our world corrupts the beautiful game. Nonetheless, the economic power of PSG, which is the property of the Emir of Qatar, should not justify this shameful indifference to the way the repeated practice of discrimination is treated as if it were a trivial matter.
It is not a moral but a political issue. Football is a mirror image of France, not only in what it shows but also in what it hides: its custom over too many years of displaying prejudice in relation to someone's origins. The fact that this prejudice can still infiltrate a sport that is symbolic of diversity and plurality and which, on the face if it, brings people together, tells us a great deal about the stubbornly persistent nature of unconscious thinking in France that is left over from the colonial period. A period that was in the beginning accompanied by a crime against humanity, slavery and the trafficking of black slaves and the plantation economy. It is as if under an appearance of equality, this past still asserts its presence, especially given that France today remains the only direct colonial power on virtually every continent, from French Guiana and the Antilles islands in the Americas, to La Réunion in the Indian Ocean off Africa and New Caledonia in the Pacific Ocean.
Moulded by prejudice based on a person's origins, a form of conditional citizenship is still secretly being created, in which others are persistently singled out and set apart. And then there is astonishment when this other person, in order to fight the discrimination of which they are victim, assert themselves in exactly the same way and proudly claim their differences and distinguishing features to help free and liberate themselves. “Race (of which colour only constitutes the indicator or sign of recognition) is produced from inside citizenship, retroactively, even if it means it finds itself endlessly disputed,” wrote the philosopher Étienne Balibar in his preface to L'Autre Citoyen ('The Other Citizen') published in 2014. He used the expression “differentialist universalism” to describe this outlier, this process of creating a hierarchy of humanity that is still happening in the land that produced the declaration of human rights.
L'Autre Citoyen is a book by philosopher and political expert Silyane Larcher and it analyses the way that a lack of equality can be created within a setting of proclaimed equality, starting with the example of the Antilles islands in the Caribbean after the abolition of slavery in 1848. For though they were freed from servitude in the name of equality, the former slaves were not given political equality. “How can civic equality be consistent with political exclusion? To put it another way, how can civic universalism go along with the exclusion of citizens who are equal under the law?” writes Larcher. By working on these issues from the post-slavery colonial age, the academic examines the internal tensions of French citizenship right up to the current day.
The scandal of the FFF quotas and the files on ethnic origins keep by PSG are not mere anecdotes or minor incidents. They force us to confront, in the words of Silyane Larcher, the “history of the ideological motivation for the externalisation of citizens in France today, in other words the social and political creation of 'internal foreigners', those French people often of non-Western appearance who are reduced to a symbolic level outside or on the margins of the 'national community' for a supposed error in conforming to its social and culture norms,” those of the majority community on a political level.
We can therefore understand why our revelations disturb the dominant political and social order, just as the work of intellectuals and the actions of militants who today place great emphasis on the issue of decolonial thinking (see here, in French, a group who criticise this approach) disturb them. This is because these issues force people, as Silyane Larcher again puts it, to “deconstruct the logics and the mechanisms by which society itself produces and reproduces racialization, in a way that is historically rooted”.
The football selectors are not racists and Mediapart has incidentally never accused them of being so. But they produce racialization – which had been defined as “ascribing ethnic or racial identities to a relationship, social practice, or group that did not identify itself as such” - because they have not paid attention to the distant prejudices inherited from a colonial past which are still active in our society. Frenchman Victor Schœlcher, the advocate of republicanism whose name is linked with the abolition of slavery in 1848, was honoured in 1880 by a committee “bringing together men of colour from Martinique, Guadeloupe and Cochinchina [editor's note, now part of Vietnam]”. His speech of thanks at the time was later published in 1948 in a collection called Esclavage et Colonisation by Presses universitaires de France, with an introduction by poet and politician Aimé Césaire, then a communist MP. Victor Schœlcher's speech was entitled 'Contre le préjugé de couleur' ('Against Colour Prejudice') something which he explicitly associated with the “consequences of slavery”. The word racism, that barbarian modern invention, was not yet in the dictionary. But prejudice, that racism which is unconscious of itself through a lack of awareness, was already at work.
“A Republican since maturity,” concluded Schœlcher, “I was both in mainland France and the colonies a strong defender of equality, I attacked all aristocracies, including the one relating to skin, the most stubborn of all, perhaps because of all of them it is the one most devoid of common sense.”
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- The French version of this article can be read here.
English version by Michael Streeter