It took just a few minutes for those who hate otherness to unleash their bile. No sooner had the historian Pap Ndiaye been appointed minister of education and youth then the French far-right vied over the best insults with which to describe and discredit him.
Marine Le Pen, president of the far-right Rassemblement National (RN), depicted him as a “self-acknowledged indigenist” while a few minutes later her vice-president Jordan Bardella spoke of him as a “militant racialist and anti-cop” and the future architect of the nation's “disintegration”. The party's official spokesperson Julien Odoul chose to speak of him instead as a “militant immigrationist”. Polemicist and defeated presidential candidate Éric Zemmour, the head of the rival far-right party Reconquête, meanwhile predicted that the new education minister was going to “deconstruct the History of France”.
In the wake of the two far-right parties, a section of the mainstream opposition Right also got involved, in a form of grim dance between rightwing factions that is as dangerous in spirit as it is fruitful at the ballot box. The senior MP for the rightwing Les Républicains (LR), Éric Ciotti, summed up Pap Ndiaye's supposed stance in a Tweet: “An enthusiast for Islamo-Leftism and militantly anti-cop! Terrifying!” His LR colleague Julien Aubert preferred to describe the historian as a “Trojan horse for US leftism”, who supported “wokism” and “racialism”.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
As with the appointment of high-profile environmental campaigner Nicolas Hulot in 2017, then prominent lawyer Éric Dupond-Moretti in 2020, with this nomination Emmanuel Macron has managed to hog media attention by bringing a recognised personality into government. Unlike his two predecessors, however, Pap Ndiaye is black.
In a political class so unused to seeing someone from post-colonial immigration emerge into the front line, the appointment of the historian has hit home like a slap in the face, reminding us of a reality that time and a blinkered approach sometimes make us forget. That reality is one of a deeply-rooted structural racism that exists in a section of French society and its political classes.
The shock of this wake-up call is even greater because it contains a story within a story, a mise en abyme, involving exactly what Pap Ndiaye himself has written, thought about and demonstrated in the last 20 years. Ndiaye, the director of the Museum of Immigration History in Paris, is one of the greatest specialists in France on the Black condition, the situation of black people in society, a subject area he has illuminated with talent, on the one hand through a comparison with the United States and on the other through shedding light on postcolonial history. In doing so he is following in the wake of politician and poet Aimé Césaire and political philosopher Frantz Fanon.
The utterly caricatural nature of the attacks of which he is a victim would almost be laughable if they were not so dangerous. Those who paint a picture of an extremist and dangerous historian have surely never read or heard Pap Ndiaye, a calmly-spoken intellectual with carefully-balanced theories, a person who weighs every word to the nearest ounce.
In 2014 he was a guest in Mediapart's studio (see below) where he analysed the racist attacks on Christiane Taubira, who was then minister of justice under President François Hollande. Though an expert on the subject he acknowledged he was surprised at the level of racism to which the justice minister was then being subjected.
“I wasn't expecting that,” he told Mediapart's Joseph Confavreux at the time. “I thought that neo-racism or cultural racism, which highlights culture rather than race, had in a way won out in the public arena, consigning the old forms of out-and-out racism to our country's history for good.”
He highlighted with clarity the distinctive nature of anti-Black racism in France - “a racism generally described as treating others as inferior, with scorn” - in contrast with anti-Arab and anti-Semitic racism, which has taken different forms.
At the time Pap Ndiaye, who was then a professor at Sciences Po university, could surely never have imagined that he would be the next black minister in France to hold major office after Christiane Taubira.
Though he was only appointed last Friday, it is interesting to note the subtext of the attacks that are already being made against him. The Right and the far-right depict him as a threat to France, its “civilisation”, its “values”, its “history”. As a “Trojan horse”, to use Julien Aubert's phrase. It is as if, deep down, Pap Ndiaye was not really one of us, as if his blackness had placed him in the ranks of 'others'.
Christiane Taubira had been subjected to the same time of attacks before him, and these were fairly direct. Each of her political commitments – fighting for slavery to be remembered, the law authorising same-sex marriage, her own vision for the justice system – was depicted as “anti-France” in nature. This kind of rhetoric, which stretches back to the end of the 19th century and the early 20th century, contains the vile notion that when it comes to the discussion of minorities there are some who are in effect the “party for foreigners”, working against the country's interests.
After a political coup, the need for a robust response
Several years earlier, during the presidency of Nicolas Sarkozy, it was Rama Yade, then junior minister for foreign affairs and human rights, who was on the receiving end of such attacks. “I know what it's like to suffer microaggressions that humiliate and dehumanise you,” she told L'Express news weekly in November 2021. Since that time, she said “I have to point out that....Afro-descendants are not exactly everywhere in government. The political elite has become incredibly intransigent.”
In the same interview Rama Yade summed up her place in the government led by prime minister François Fillon under President Sarkozy. “I was an anomaly, not a prototype in any way” she said. When Mediapart discovered the name of Pap Ndiaye in the new government announced on Friday May 20th it was indeed the word “anomaly” that we also used.
“Why the devil would he get on board?” wondered Member of Parliament Clémentine Autain of the radical left La France Insoumise, quoting a famous line from the playwright Molière. There was indeed some rather incongruous about seeing Pap Ndiaye standing next to the outgoing education minister, Jean-Michel Blanquer, in the traditional ceremony passing over of the reins of power on Friday. What will Pap Ndiaye do in the place of his predecessor whose only contribution to political debate in France remains his attack on “Islamo-Leftism”, the headscarf and “wokism”?
And what is Pap Ndiaye doing getting on board a government where the minister of the interior, Gérald Darmanin, “chokes” when he hears the expression “police violence”, and under a president who considers the university world to be “guilty” of having encouraged “social issues” to become “ethnic ones”? What room for manoeuvre will the academic have in a political camp that has downplayed all the issues that he has been raising for two decades?
The response to this last question will serve as a first test for this new presidential term. It is now down to the government to stand shoulder to shoulder and attack without equivocation the racism that is already on display. This requires more than pompous and all-encompassing expressions such as those used by new prime minister Élisabeth Borne on the TF1 television station on Friday evening, when she spoke of her attachment to Republican values.
The government must resolutely abandon all the grubby little electoral calculations, the discreet nods to the far-right and the stigmatising that marked Macron's first presidential term. If not, then Pap Ndiaye will be subjected to the full hateful depths of French society, just as Christiane Taubira was in the past and as the new minister of culture Rima Abdul-Malak and sea minister Justine Bénin will be in the future.
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- The original French version of this opinion article can be found here.
English version by Michael Streeter