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NEWS & LETTERS, February-March 2006Black/Red ViewBlacks in Franceby John Alan When two French youth, one of North African and another of West African heritage, died from electrocution as they hid from police in an electrical substation, a youth rebellion broke out all over France, starting in the Paris suburbs on Oct. 27, 2005. It spread to 300 towns. One person died and 1,500 were arrested. The youth who rioted are mostly third generation French citizens. They are the progeny of what the revolutionary philosopher Frantz Fanon called the “wretched of the earth,” which was his characterization of those who struggled to assert their full humanity in the face of the brutal French colonialism of the 1950s and '60s. The youth are very direct about the object of their wrath--the constant police harassment of anyone with the “wrong” skin color. French of North and West African descent are still referred to as “immigrants” though they know no other society. The hated interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, whose policies have shaped police behavior, is the son of a Hungarian immigrant and, like many from other parts of Europe, has thoroughly integrated into French society. The youth of the suburbs, however, are called “visible minorities.” The colossal unemployment rate of 40% among these youth reveals the pervasiveness of French racism, a continuing legacy of its colonial past. The law the government invoked to impose curfews in selected areas dates back to 1955 and the war in Algeria. The French façade of equality of all its citizens has been exploded as a myth. It is an abstraction of French capitalism, which has no place for this huge minority. The cars that burned are a symbol of affluence and mobility, which the ghetto youth lack. Though “visible minorities” make up 10% of the population there are none in parliament. For many years talented Black artists from the U.S., such as Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, and Richard Wright, were drawn to Paris, which seemed enchanted with Black American culture. France’s interest in culture doesn’t extend to recognizing the full humanity of the African French in their midst. The solution some French bourgeoisie now propose is no better than what this country did back in the 1960s: affirmative action. As we have witnessed in the U.S., without a full revolution that overturns capitalism and its racist core, these half-way solutions unleash a racist backlash in the name of color-blindness and abstract equality. Born in the French colony of Martinique, called a Department of France, Fanon dealt with the specifically French form of racism. He challenged the notion that freedom simply meant turning colonized people into Frenchmen. Those few elite who bought into that myth merely had a “white mask,” while real freedom could only be achieved in a struggle through the particular circumstances oppressing them. Thus, he saw a reach for a much deeper concept of freedom coming from the revolt of those “wretched of the earth.” He immersed himself in the Algerian revolution against the brutal French colonial rule but was ruthlessly critical from within the revolutionary process. He criticized the prevailing ideas of the Algerian leaders as well as Black intellectuals who looked too much to culture and the past. He said, “we don’t want to replace one form of barbarism with another form of barbarism.” Fanon’s concept of a “new humanism” as the absolute opposite of capitalist racism can help today’s French African youth as they look for a way to find a new freedom from within French society where narrow concepts like Islamism pose a false alternative. Fanon saw the colonial revolutions reaching for something totally new, which he called an “untidy affirmation of an original idea propounded as an absolute.” He said Blacks shouldn’t try to be white in a system where just because you’re white you’re rich. That would reproduce the old system. The African revolutions did get sucked into the old as African leaders turned to neo-colonialism and looked to technological development and not mass creativity as that which determines the future. The discontinuity today is that the French African youth in the midst of French capitalism are still trying to find a human pathway out of the legacy of the failed revolutions of the past. They are challenging abstract concepts of freedom like “color blindness” of French democracy, which is concretely experienced as racism. It means being invisible when it comes to employment, educational and housing opportunities but being a “visible minority” under constant police harassment. |
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