“I can’t breathe.” The words have become a rallying cry amid the massive and spontaneous demonstrations taking place against police violence, a violence in which the principal victims, in daily life, are people who are racialised.
They were the words uttered by Eric Garner on July 17th 2014 shortly before he died after a New York police officer placed him in a chokehold as he lay on the ground. They were also the words of George Floyd on May 25th 2020, before he died of asphyxiation after a Minneapolis police officer knelt hard on his neck for more than eight minutes. “I can no longer breathe” were the last words of Adama Traoré before he died when French gendarmes pinned him face-down during his arrest on July 19th 2016 in the town of Beaumont-sur-Oise, north of Paris. American or French, what the three had in common was that their skin was black.
Yes, racism is suffocating us, preventing society from breathing, from thriving, from advancing. Its spread and its expression concerns everyone of us, whether we are victims or not. Because racism is a war machine against the affirmation of popular vitality, a Trojan Horse for its dispossession and submission. By throwing scapegoats to the lions, by normalising discrimination, by authorising violence, it scatters the poison of the belief in a natural inequality, one linked to appearance or origin. With that, it legitimises, on a broad scale, placing in question the notion of equal rights.
All of European history bears witness to this, such as it is that racism went hand-in-hand with the projection of our continent upon the world, in its accumulation of wealth, its appetite for domination – to the point of begetting the monstrosity of crimes against humanity. It is by facing up to this truth, and by so doing bringing an end to its heritage, that we will avoid the inevitably murderous return of a hierarchy among humans. Yes, the path that led towards our modern world is indissociable from the ideology that believed some nations and civilisations were superior to others, and therefore that some peoples and cultures are inferior.
It was paved by slavery (the placing in bondage and forced labour of African populations), by conquest (the violent taking possession of territories on every continent), extermination (the annihilation of indigenous peoples, notably the American Indians), by imperialism (the race for world power which was fuelled by xenophobia and nationalism), anti-Semitism (the crystallisation of imperialist racism into a hatred of humanity via the demonization of Jews – the other, the different, the cosmopolitan, the diasporic, and so on).
Nazism is indeed at the end of the chain here, as underlined the French Afro-Caribbean author and poet Aimé Césaire in his essay Discourse on Colonialism: “It is the major reproach that I address to pseudo-humanism: to have for too long diminished human rights, to have had a concept of them – and to have still – that is narrow and fragmented, partial and biased and, all things considered, sordidly racist […] At the far end of capitalism, anxious to survive, there is Hitler. At the far end of formal humanism and philosophic renunciation, there is Hitler.”
Any tolerance of racism is one further step towards catastrophe. Any acceptance, silence, indifference, minimisation, and negation of racist crimes –all the more so regarding those committed by representatives of law and order – precipitates the arrival of authoritarian powers, which place in question fundamental rights and freedoms. Far from being a side-battle of democratic, social or ecological issues, anti-racism is a universal part of them because it proclaims an unshakable refusal of ideologies that champion inequalities.
The social Darwinism of “winners”, the breeding ground of economic dominations, of the “victorious”, the “powerful” and other notions of those “premiers de cordée” [editors note, a phrase used by French President Emmanuel Macron, loosely translated as “leading the line”, as in alpinism], is the cousin of racist ideology. It praises competition and rivalry, whereas anti-racism defends ideas of solidarity and fraternity. From that point of view, how can one not be struck by the wonderful mobilisation around the case of Adama Traoré with the massive rally held on June 2nd and which was preceded by the success of the march, held on May 30th – and which was also refused official authorisation – in solidarity with undocumented migrants, a group particularly exposed to the Covid-19 pandemic?
Enlargement : Illustration 1
For there was a returning echo between the protest over the invisibility of official reaction towards racist crimes, an abnegation which adds to their violence, and the May 30th March which was that of the invisible – those workers who have no official permits and papers but who turn the wheels of the economic machine. They are those without rights, many of who ensured the daily needs of a nation under the recent lockdown, those who are exiled, migrants and refuge seekers, and who call on us to respect what France enjoys glorifying itself with but does not follow; namely the first article of the 1789 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” by the Constituent Assembly formed soon after the French Revolution. It states: “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions can only be founded on the common good.”
To unfailingly combat racism is to be on the side of those “leading the grind”, by defending social demands, without borders and without a fratricidal war between those who are oppressed, in unison in face of common opponents. Around the world, the mobilisations against police violence are the pathway to this convergence, expressing an acute awareness that state-sanctioned repression seeks to muzzle and to dismiss, in an attempted smothering of the grassroot anger, protestation and revolt. In France, this was the ordeal faced by the “yellow vest” movement, when protestors were left maimed, with eyes lost to rubber bullets and hands blown off by grenades, suffering the same fate as racialised youths in France’s working-class neighbourhoods.
That the recent mobilisations have occurred at a time when humankind is confronted with a worldwide pandemic is no accident, for illness is revealing of social situations. “According to whether you will be powerful or poor/The court’s judgments will make you white or black,” wrote Jean de la Fontaine in his 17th-century fable The animals sick of the plague. That fable about an epidemic, (“They died not all, but all were sick,” he wrote), or, more precisely, the question of injustice and social inequality, is so very telling for us now. The denial that there is systemic racism in France has allowed for making inequalities and injustices according to ethnic origin invisible and, as a result, the unrecognition of the high toll wreaked by the Covid-19 virus among minority groups in working-class communities – the Seine-Saint-Denis, the poorest département (county) in France was the worst hit by the pandemic (see also here and here).
It is time to say “stop”, to bring a definitive end to this rush into the abyss which is accelerated by racism in its acts and words. To encourage or tolerate racism, or to deny its existence arrives at the same result, namely its proliferation. There is only a difference of degree between a US president who is explicitly white supremacist, an arsonist blowing on the embers of racial hatred, and a French president who is indifferent to the fate of numerous victims of police violence, finding no words of compassion or indignation. On the other hand, he is extremely happy to consult with Éric Zemmour (see more here, in French), an ideologue who is patently racist, previously convicted of inciting racism by a French court but nevertheless still courted by sensationalist media.
France has no lesson to give the United States, save to rise up and bring an end to racism here, at home. While emotion over the murder of George Floyd swept the world, the Paris police prefect, who has already become a symbol of a state at war with society, hurried to deny the evident racist practices, behaviour and violence within the police institution, while also banning and slandering demonstrations of solidarity. The successive revelations by Mediapart/Arte and Streetpress over the evidence of appalling commonplace racism present within the police should suffice to disqualify his utterances.
If there was need of yet another symbol that says just how much our common fate is at stake in the combat against racism, it can be found in the role of a free and independent press, one that those powers tolerant towards racism place in question or crack down upon. It is through the reporting of this independent press that the lies about police violence are unmasked, such as Mediapart’s revelations about the case of Geneviève Legay (see more here). It is this free press which documents the daily and sadly ordinary practices of discrimination, as for example our investigations into racial quotas applied in French football (see examples here, here and here), and racial profiling (here). It is through this information that the public is progressively made aware of the common links between all forms of discrimination, whether they be racist, anti-Semitic, sexist, or homophobic, as abundantly proven in the recordings of conversations between police officers in the northern French town of Rouen and revealed by Mediapart (here).
We do this because it is our job, in the name of the people’s fundamental right to know all that is of public interest, and which guarantees the exercise of the public’s sovereignty. We do it also because we believe any form of tolerance of racism is itself intolerable. Because it is our lifelong combat: how could we continue to breath if racism is allowed to suffocate us?
-------------------------
- The original French version of this article can be found here.
English version by Graham Tearse