The extreme right can celebrate: its strategy of cultural hegemony has notched up another success. Having succeeding in turning crime, immigration and Islam in to media and government obsessions, pushing to one side ambitions to improve society and democratic aspirations, it has managed to downplay and undermine the issue of racism by promoting the idea of 'anti-White racism'.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
It just took comments from former French football international Lilian Thuram, about the racist insults endured by black players in football stadiums, to launch an erudite public debate – from France Inter public radio to Mediapart – about the supposed failings of an anti-racist movement that is apparently blind to the new 'anti-White' racism which publications such as the right-wing Valeurs Actuelles naturally claim exists (see right).
No individual is immune, whether through their culture, their race or their origins, from the discriminatory, scornful or violent prejudices of other cultures, races and people of different origins. The law, which is supposed to apply to everyone, rightly punishes such racism whether it manifests itself through words, behaviour or violence.
Thus after a final appeal the writer Éric Zemmour's conviction in France for provoking racial hatred (against Muslims) has been upheld, after he had already been convicted for a similar offence in 2011 (against black people and people of North African origin). But one simply has to point out that these convictions have not harmed the career of this commentator and media figure – quite the contrary – in order to grasp the fact that talking about 'anti-White racism' in France today is an ideological construct that bears no relationship to reality.
This is precisely because racism cannot be summed up as an ideology: it is a system, something that happens in society, an institutional reality, cultural background. No white person in our country suffers what black people, people of North African origins and others – who are themselves all testament to a pluralist and multicultural France – still habitually suffer: namely identity checks, job discrimination, refusal of housing, rejection by society, cultural mistrust, inappropriate remarks, the invisibility of their history and so on. No white person has to face systematically, because of their appearance, a world which excludes, rejects or harms them. A white person has never felt a foreigner in France because they are white, because of the colour of their skin. To advance the idea that 'anti-White racism' exists is not being aware of reality; on the contrary it is to deny reality, by erasing, through a supposed reciprocity of discrimination, what black people and people of North African origin have suffered and still suffer from the white world, with complete (un)awareness on the part of the individuals who form it.
In short, it is playing down real racism by inventing an unreal racism. In several very well argued pieces, (see here, here and here) the journalist and essayist Rokhaya Diallo has highlighted the fact that racism is defined by its systemic nature and that on this basis there is no discernible 'anti-White racism'. “If some white people are the target of prejudice, attacks, of insults because they are seen as whites, that should be condemned,” she writes. “But you just have to remember that there is no theory which places Whites at the bottom of a racial hierarchy and which results in institutional practices. That's why we can't talk about 'anti-White racism'. Racism is a system of domination which is not confined to individual interactions.”
Another feminist and anti-racist campaigner, Mélusine, a blogger on Mediapart, has shown (read here in French) that this casual talk of 'anti-White racism', on the pretext that racism is just an ideology of hate to which no human group is clearly immune, is based on the same ideological approach as the legitimisation of Islamophobia. By presenting it simply as secular criticism of a religion, one manages to make former anti-North African and anti-Muslim racism presentable and acceptable, including on the Left who has made anti-racism one of its hallmarks.
“Racism,” Mélusine writes, “did not necessarily have to be a white hegemony. But it turns out that it is, because history as it transpired made it so.” Since then, white people have themselves been trapped by this social construct, she suggests. “Whites are a social group produced by racism itself: they are white because they maintain a particular relationship of domination with racialized groups, because they are distinct from non-Whites, because, all other things being equal, they occupy a social and symbolic position which is superior to them.”
Mélusine, who speaks from experience, notes that for those who have suffered and continue to suffer racism the “description 'white' does not designate an attribute of the individual but of a social attribute: it speaks not to individuals' identities but to their position in society, in the racist relationship of domination”.
It was in that context one should understand the comments made by Lilian Thuram in an Italian sports newspaper the Corriere dello Sport on September 4th. “When you talk about racism in Italian football, you have to understand this isn’t about the sport. There is racism in Italian, French, European and in general ‘white’ culture,” said the former French international. “Some whites have decided they are superior to blacks and can therefore do anything to them.”
White people today might certainly misinterpret this, seeing these comments as unjustifiably lumping them all together in a form of supremacy against which they are themselves also fighting. But their concern would be a little more credible if they were able to recognise the extent to which, during the long period in which France and Europe acquired their power and wealth, what Lilian Thuram says is true – absolutely true.
'The title of French citizen will only be held by Whites'
For more than five centuries colonisations, conquests and slavery created Europe as it imposed itself on the world. The independence of the former colonises, which have taken place recently, has not stopped this story from continuing, in particular through Western economic predation on the former Third World. And in the wake of this continuing domination, by a France and Europe seeking to be powerful, there also lingers the traces of what accompanied the colonisation in order to justify this violent submission of peoples and territories. And that is the systemic construction of Whites as a “superior race” and of others, Blacks in particular, as inferior or barbarians, and, worse as an exploitable and disposable tool. The writer Patrick Chamoiseau joined in the current row when he summed up this view in a scathing Tweet:
Enlargement : Illustration 2
As long as this truth is not accepted, spoken about and acknowledged in political discourse and public debate, the colonial issue will remain an unresolved question that France has failed to tackle, a wound and a fracture. It is an understatement to say that this has not yet been done. The issue of colonialism in France is still waiting for its 'Vél d'Hiv' moment, that is to say the decisive speech given by President Jacques Chirac in 1995 about the role of the French state in the genocide of Jews in Europe.
The issue of slavery, meanwhile, is still waiting for a museum in Paris (the Mémorial ACTe remembering the slave trade is at Point-à-Pitre in Guadeloupe in the Caribbean) when in Liverpool in Great Britain there is an International Slavery Museum. In France the 2007 report by writer Édouard Glissant detailing plans for an ambitious project for a 'National Centre for the Memory of Slavery and its Abolition' has not come to fruition. And, unconcerned as they are about historical truth, the continuing media and political references to the “positive results of colonialism” (recently stated again by a former government minister Jean Leonetti) have continued to cause offence rather than seeking to bring about reconciliation.
The fact that the colonial issue not been addressed or resolved is accentuated by the fact that, of all the European empires with the exception of Portugal, France's decolonisation process was the latest and most painful. Moreover, France remains the only colonial power in the world, with its flag flying on every continent, from Guiana in South America to Nouvelle-Calédonie in the South Pacific and La Réunion in the Indian Ocean. How can one fail to see here a relationship of cause and effect, in which France is deaf to the colonial issue at the very same time as it stands as a monument to European colonialism, with 18% of its territory overseas (though just 4% of its population) and the fact that thanks to its overseas territories it is the second largest maritime country in the world?
Lilian Thuram himself is from the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe which France took possession of in 1635, the same time as its neighbouring and fellow French island Martinique, from where Patrick Chamoiseau hails. Fifty years later, in March 1685, the French king Louis XIV issued the Code Noir “Édit sur les esclaves des îles de l’Amérique” ('Black Code: Edict on the Slaves of the Islands of America', which institutionalised the superiority of Whites by codifying the servitude of Blacks.
In passing, and it is worth highlighting this to understand the criminal consequences in Europe itself of this catastrophic institutionalisation of hierarchies based on appearance and origin, in its very first article the Black Code exhorts French officials to “chase from our islands all the Jews who have established residence there” referring to them as “declared enemies of Christianity”.
This crime by France's Ancien Régime skipped over the French Revolution to become a hallmark of the infamy committed in the modernity of Napoleonic France. Having been abolished belatedly by the Revolution on February 4th 1794, as a result of the revolution in Haiti led by slaves in the very place where France had built up its slave population, slavery was re-established in certain areas by Napoleon Bonaparte on May 20th 1802.
Napoleon, who at the time was First Consul in France, and who had come to power on the back of a revolution that had declared that “Men are born and remain free and equal in … rights”, insisted that this principle did not apply to all men and in particular black people. “The slave trade of the Blacks and their importation into the said colonies will take place in conformity with the laws and rules existing before the said era of 1789,” said the official decree.
On the eve of this decree Napoleon had founded the Ordre de la Légion d'Honneur. This juxtaposition of an award designed to honour men and the embracing of a hierarchy of human beings underlines the extent to which the glorification of the Napoleonic heritage can lead to indifference as to its crimes. During his attempt to reconquer Saint-Domingue – the future Haiti – in a terrible war in which the Black Jacobins were victorious, Napoleon's envoy General Antoine Richepanse accompanied his decree re-establishing slavery in Guadeloupe in July 1802 with the words: “The colonies are nothing other than establishments organised by Europeans who take Blacks there as the only individuals suitable for the exploitation of these countries.” The first article of the decree is a condensed form of racism: “The title of French citizen will, in the area of this colony, only be held by Whites.”
Three years later, on November 7th 1805, Napoleon 1st - as Napoleon Bonaparte had then become - promulgated the country's Civil Code in the colonies by decreeing that its laws would only be carried out “between Whites and Whites, and between freed slaves or the descendants of freed slaves, without these said measures being able to proceed from one class to another, whether directly or indirectly”.
So the United States does not have a monopoly when it comes to inventing racial segregation. It is worth citing the legal preamble of this Bonapartist decree because it shows how, on top of the spread of the slave trade and slavery, colonialism was also the original laboratory for modern racism, which would later return to Europe with devastating effect. The preamble read: “Taking into consideration that in the colonies one has always recognised a distinction [between] colours, that it is indispensable in our countries of slaves, and that it is necessary to maintain the line of demarcation which has always existed between the white class and that of their freed slaves or their descendants...”
Far from disappearing when the French Republic was finally permanently established, this poison quickly contaminated it. The colonial turning point in this saga occurred in 1885 during the vote on funds to carry out the conquest of Madagascar and Indochina. This was the construction of a colonial empire initially started by the Restored monarchy (1814-1830), with the conquest of Algeria starting just before the fall of that monarchy in July 1830. This empire had then been added to during the Second Empire (1852 - 1870) under Napoleon III with the conquest of Mayotte, Tahiti, the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific, Nouvelle-Caledonie, Senegal, Cochinchina (now part of Vietnam) and Cambodia.
It was the French statesman Jules Ferry (1832-1893), whose name is forever associated with free, mandatory public schooling in France, who led the colonial charge. “It has to be said openly: the superior races have a duty in relation to the inferior races. I repeat that the superior races have a right, because there is a responsibility on them. They have the duty to civilize the inferior races,' he told French Members of Parliament on July 28th 1885. Ferry, whose political career was effectively ended by the Tonkin Affair, named after a French protectorate in what is now Vietnam, even went as as to assert that the Declaration of the Rights of Man of 1789 was “not written for the Blacks of Equatorial Africa”.
Grand principles did not survive the lure of profit: the spread of modern racism, with its ideological and scientific alibis (the theory of races and their different classifications) went hand in hand with colonial expansion, which provided justification for and legitimised them. This expansion made France (and Europe) rich, through the unequal trade imposed on the people who were conquered, with its litany of pain, occupied territories, confiscated lands, forced labour, civilisations destroyed, unpunished massacres and tormented peoples. The fact that there might also have been meetings, relations and exchanges, between individuals and cultures, which were sometimes for the better, cannot take away, still less excuse, the reality that colonisation was a European crime, accompanied by crimes against humanity, of which the first one was the black slave trade.
'I want only this: that the enslavement of man by man cease forever'
No country colonises another with impunity, declared the poet and politician from Martinique Aimé Césaire in his 'Discours sur le colonialisme' ('Discourse on Colonialism') published in four successive editions between 1950 and 1962. To re-read it now is a much-needed escape faced with some of the relapses we are currently witnessing. He wrote: “Colonization: bridgehead in a campaign to civilize barbarism, from which there may emerge at any moment the negation of civilization, pure and simple.”
Enlargement : Illustration 3
This powerful work, whose strength and beauty remains intact, was addressing a France which was at the time rejecting the right of other peoples to control their own destiny. The author pointed out that the Nazi barbarism which which had just ravaged Europe had found its origins, anger and energy in colonial violence.
From this point of view Aimé Césaire was not saying anything that different from German-American thinker Hannah Arendt, whose book the The Origins of Totalitarianism, published in the same era in 1951, sees imperialism as the moment of tipping point towards totalitarianism. This is precisely the key point which remains unresolved in French public debate: there would have been no Hitler without colonialism, no European catastrophe without colonial savagery, no Nazism without racism, and no genocide without an ideology of superior civilisations and races.
Césaire, who does not hold back, addresses himself directly to the “very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century”. He writes: “[W]hat he [editor's note, i.e. the very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois] cannot forgive Hitler for is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the 'coolies' of India, and the 'niggers' of Africa.”
This immense poet, who enhanced political discourse, then hammered home the point: “...That is the great thing I hold against pseudo-humanism: that for too long it has diminished the rights of man, that its concept of those rights has been - and still is - narrow and fragmentary, incomplete and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist....At the end of capitalism, which is eager to outlive its day, there is Hitler. At the end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.” France, whose people are forged from a diversity linked to its colonial history, past and present, will not get back on its feet until these painful truths are part of a shared political conscience.
The year 1894 – less than a decade after the colonial turning point under the Third Republic - saw the start of the Dreyfus Affair, the birthplace of modern anti-Semitism set against a backdrop of ancient Christian anti-Judaism. Out-and-out colonialists, the anti-Dreyfus group were the intellectual vanguard in imposing the poison of colonialism on Europe: the subordination of man to the point where their very human essence is denied.
In her response to the proponents of 'anti-White racism', who seek to annex the Jewish tragedy to their cause, Rokhaya Diallo cites this anti-Semitic diatribe from March 31st 1939 by the collaborator Robert Brasillac in the newspaper he edited 'Je Suis Partout' ('I Am Everywhere'). “What country would dare condemn us if we denounced the extraordinary invasion of Paris and France by monkeys? You go to the theatre? The hall is full of monkeys. The bus, the metro? Monkeys ... In the provinces, in the markets, fairs, some entire stalls are occupied by monkeys with saucepans at discounted prices and fabric taken from liquidated stock... The female monkeys that accompany them have pilfered fur coats, pearl necklaces, and they simper in an almost human manner. That which we will call anti-Simiantism (I beg you to read carefully) [editor's note, the writer was using a grim play on words between Simian and Semitic] becomes, each day, a more urgent necessity....”
This is where we find the “Negroid Jew” of the anti-Semitic pamphlets written by the novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline. The colonial mind that is racist towards “Negroes” certainly fuels the craze for annihilation in relation to Jews, whom for anti-Semites are not white. “An anti-Semite is necessarily a Negro-phobe,” warned psychiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon in his 1952 work 'Peau Noire, Masques Blancs' ('Black Skin, White Masks'). And the reverse is true. Must France be so lost that we have to recall all these obvious points, these facts and these realities, which should be part of our common heritage!
But there is indeed a danger as, once again in this country, the ideological weapon of murderous racism is being developed, this time under the name of the Great Replacement, a theory which calls for the expulsion, removal or destruction of a part of our own population. Is not 'anti-White racism' just its acceptable form, something doubtless unknown to those who discuss its aims? A way of saying that we, the Whites, are discriminated against, victims, occupied and so on by others against whom it it time to rebel? And is it not accompanied by supposedly scientific theories about 'cultural differentialism' (see article in French on this here), as was the case in the past with colonialism and its hierarchy of races?
Finally, let us look at the start of Aimé Césaire's 'Discourse on Colonialism' where he writes: “A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization. The fact is that the so-called European civilization - 'Western' civilization - as it has been shaped by two centuries of bourgeois rule, is incapable of solving the two major problems to which its existence has given rise: the problem of the proletariat and the colonial problem...”
Though dated by the context of the period – Césaire was a communist Member of Parliament at the time - these words are no less pertinent today, particularly in France, Europe's America in the make-up of its population, where the issues of society and colonialism are permanently interwoven. Not confronting the latter issue means ruining the former. That is what we have learnt over the last three decades from the sight of various parts of the Left being won over by identity-based tensions, turning aside from society's requirements as they shy away from the need for truth about the issue of colonialism, past and present.
Yet we just have to listen to those voices who, refusing to be defined by constraints, have shown the way, the way of genuine humanism, the way of humanity and civilisations that are equal, with respect for their plurality and their differences. At the end of 'Black Skin, White Masks', Frantz Fanon tells us: “I, the man of colour, want only this: That the tool never possess the man. That the enslavement of man by man cease forever. That is, of one by another. That it be possible for me to discover and to love man, wherever he may be. The Negro is not. Any more than the white man....Superiority? Inferiority? Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself? Was my freedom not given to me then in order to build the world of the You?”
In this very year, 2019, Bordeaux in south-west France, one of the main ports of the black slave trade which created the wealth of that city's bourgeois shipowners and merchants, refused to allow one of its streets to bear the name of this dangerous humanist, Frantz Fanon. That same Frantz Fanon who fought with France Libre ('Free France') in World War II and who, in pursuing the values of resisting Nazism, logically chose the side of the colonised populations, those people who are, to use the title of Fanon's best-known work, the wretched of the Earth.
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- The French version of this article can be read here.
English version by Michael Streeter