Tag Archives: Racism

Coronavirus diary day 87 – France’s history of racist policing, toppling statues and doves in Afghanistan

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Worldwide protests over the murder of George Floyd have given a new boost to campaigns against police brutality and racism in France. Ministers have promised action, while insisting that “France is not the United States”. But official France is still in denial over the nature and extent of the phenomenon.

In 1986 I came to France to take part in the massive marches that followed the death of Malik Oussekine, a student of Algerian origin who was killed by police during demonstrations against a right-wing government’s proposed education reform.

It was December and I remember the cold, the crowds and sleeping in a small flat in Belleville along with a crowd of other agitators from various European countries, there, like me, to convert the French to our view of how to fight racism and change the world. Our efforts were not rewarded with great success.

One night a group of us were arrested by cops on motorbikes, one of whom sported a very striking moustachewith waxed points and was particularly indignant about our attempt to flypost the walls of a bank.

We spent most of the night at the commissariat, pretending not to understand French, which wasn’t that far from the truth, and thus avoiding answering questions. The moustachioed cop was furious when his boss decided not to charge us and kicked us out onto the street, to find our way back to base as daylight broke on the boulevards.

The outrage that met Malik Oussekine’s death led to the education minister resigning and his education bill being dropped.

Two of the three cops who beat Oussekine, members of a motorbike squad like the ones who arrested us, were tried and found guilty of involuntary homicide. But they only received suspended sentences and, although disciplinary action was taken against both of them, one continued to work in the police force.

“After this parody of a trial … I have come to realise that in the country where I was born I will always be a second-class citizen,” Malik’s sister, Sarah, commented.

Shortly after I came to live in France, in 1993, a report appeared in the newspapers of a woman who spent the night in the cells after accusing a police officer of racism while he checked a young man’s identity papers.

A little later young black man died in detention in the police station near where I lived in Montmartre. There was a small protest march past the scene of his death but no great scandal.

Since then the deaths of youths from racial minorities have led to many protests and, on some occasions, riots, most notably in 2005 when the banlieue exploded nationwide after two teenagers were electrocuted while fleeing a police patrol.

Recently cops were caught on video racially abusing and maltreating an Egyptian migrant who had jumped in the river to escape their attentions. And the media have uncovered two Facebook groups where several thousand “guardians of the peace” shared racist and sexist comments, several revealing a certain amount of sexual insecurity and one coining the interesting slogan “Make Normandie Viking again”.

According to one study, 54% of police officers voted for Rassemblement National (formerly Front National) candidate Marine Le Pen in the second round of the 2017 presidential election.

This journalist’s tweet shows cops sporting far-right symbols while on duty.

France’s government-appointed rights defender, Jacques Toubon, a former right-wing justice minister who has taken his job far more seriously than many people expected him to, has called for records to be kept of identity checks by the police.

In a 2016 study his commission found that 80% of the blacks and Arabs interviewed were 20 times more likely to be checked than white people.

Toubon has just opened an investigation into the case of Gabriel, a 14-year-old Roma who claims to have sustained serious injuries to the left eye when he was kicked in the head after being detained for stealing a scooter.

Last month he delivered a report that found institutional racism in police treatment of a group of 18 youths, “black or Arab or pereceived as being so”, in a Paris district.

As he approaches the end of his term, he may wish to turn his attention to the case of four families in the Val-de-Marne town of Vitry-sur-Seine who have just filed complaints over the arbitrary arrest and racial abuse suffered by their 14-15-year-old sons last month. One of the boys hopes to become a police officer.

All of which would seem to imply that when mainstream-right politician Damien Abad denies there is institutional racism in the police force, Interior Minister Christophe Castaner accuses actress and singer Camélia Jordana of “shameful lies” when she says she doesn’t feel safe when faced with a cop or Prime Minister Edouard Philippe declares that the overwhelming majority of officers of the law are not racist, they do not have tremendous respect for empirical evidence.

Castaner this week responded to the latest protests against police brutality with a ban on chokeholds, an order that police oficers suspected of racism be suspended while an inquiry takes place, and a promise to make internal investigations more independent.

Despite Castaner’s assurance that “France is not the United States” and “there are no racist institutions or targeted violence”, that sent police unions into a lather of indignation, which ministers greeted with a frenzy of appeasement.

Maybe not all French coppers are bastards, though. A young participant in one of the Facebook groups complained that none of the women at his police station would go out with him if he revealed his fascist sympathies.

Much kerfuffle about the toppling of the statue of a Tory slave-trader in Bristol last weekend.

I seem to remember certain moments when knocking down statues was widely hailed as a Good Thing, in Iraq in 2003, for example, or in eastern Europe after the collapse of the Soviet Union.

A statue of Saddam Hussein is toppled in Iraq in 2003

Read my account of Iraq after Saddam’s fall here.

Members of the French government have assured us that the statue of Colbert, the minister under Louis XIV who drew up the Code noire, the legal framework for slavery in French colonies, will remain in place.

In world virus news, over 1,000 doves are reported to have died in Mazar-e-Sharif, the north Afghan city that is home to a beautiful mosque where they nest on the roof.

Doves in front of the mosque in Mazar-e-Sharif Photo: Tony Cross

They have starved to death because lockdown has meant nobody is feeding them, as they were when I visited the city in 2009.

Lockdown has meant that some 30 doves die every day, according to the mosque’s imam Photo: Tony Cross

Legend has it that they flock there because the mosque was built at the site of the tomb of Ali, the prophet Mohammed’s cousin and son-in-law. His body is said to have been put on a camel that walked to the city and then died there. Historians do not agree with this account.

France’s Covid-19 death toll now officially stands at 29,319, up 23 in 24 hours. 11,678 people are in hospital, down 283, with 933 patients in intensive care, down 22. 71,832 people have been discharged from hospital, 326 of them yesterday.

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Coronavirus diary day 79 – Black lives matter in France, too

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Who’d have thought anything could push a global pandemic out of the lead story spot? Well, a nine-minute video of a US cop murdering a black man has and it’s sparked protests around the world. In Paris yesterday an estimated 20,000 people defied a ban on protests to link the killing to French police racism.

But stop! There’s none of that there here! Not according to Paris Préfet de Police Didier Lallement, who is concerned that such an accusation has hurt the feelings of his troops.

The Paris police force “is not violent, nor racist: it acts within the framework of the right to liberty for all”, he claimed in an email to the capital’s 27,500 cops.

The family of Adama Traoré beg to differ. They organised yesterday’s demo four years after his death in police custody.

Three official reports have cleared the three cops who pinned him to the ground. But a counter-inquiry commissioned by the family on Tuesday blamed their robust technique of detention.

Thanks to the family’s persistence, Traoré’s case has become a focus for “accusations of violence and racism, repeated endlessly by social networks and certain activist groups”, as Lallement puts it.

Regular deaths and injuries in the banlieue, along with videos of racial abuse and brutality, tend to bear those accusations out.

Some French people can get a little self-righteous about racism in the US. After all, wasn’t this the country where black GIs found welcome relief from the Jim Crow South at the end of World War II and where artists like Miles Davis and James Baldwin came to breathe freer creative air?

But they had the advantages of not being from former colonies or living on deprived estates in the banlieue.

“I realise that the Algerian is the nigger in Paris,” Baldwin commented after spending some time here.

Traoré’s family came to France from Mali, a former French colony in sub-Saharan Africa.

Back to the virus. Yesterday was the beginning of phase 2 of post-lockdown.

In Champigny the market had already opened, in a depleted form and the shoppers turned out, mostly wearing masks, and met up with friends

.

Some of the cafés had employed a flexible interpretation of the rules by offering drinks “to take away” under phase 1.

In Ile de France, which is the last orange for not-too-good area left in the country, they can now serve en terasse but not Inside.

Schoolkids and the un- or undereployed are sunning themselves on the banks of the Marne, or even on the river itself.

My afternoon walk took me to the former Pathé studios at Joinville-le-Pont, now a collection of workplaces, some apparently still linked to the film industry, and flats.

They were once frequented by Simone Signoret, Yves Montand, Jean Renoir and other luminaries. They drank in the guingettes, the restaurants along the riverside, and added some glamour to this town on the outskirts of Paris.

Our late neighbour, Claude, was a house painter. He worked on the site once and told me they had conveyor belts going across it to transport the film and special double doors to prevent light entering the processing laboratories.

The 1946 film Les Portes de la Nuit was partly filmed there. This shot is a reconstruction of the overhead metro at La Chapelle in Paris, the set designed by Alexandre Trauner.

Trauner was a Hungarian who fled the far-right, anti-Semitic Horthy regime in 1929 and left a photographic record of the streets of Paris in the 1930s due to his research for his work. Here’s one of his preparatory sketches for another film, Le Jour se lève.


Asylum-seekers, eh?

France’s Covid-19 death toll officially stands at 28,940, 107 in 24 hours. 14,208 people are in hospital, down 260 yesterday, 1,253 patients are in intensive care, down 49, and 68,812 have been discharged, 372 in 24 hours.

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The white working class – does it exist and should you despise it?

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FacebooktwitterredditpinterestlinkedinmailIn the US, the Republican right have taken to sneering at the “white working class”. But they’re not alone. Middle-class liberals same and the media feel free to caricature “white trash” or “chavs”. Class hatred lives on … when it’s top-down.

It’s so difficult to hate in peace these days. Overt racism is generally frowned upon – even by racists (“I’m not racist but …”).  Islamophobia is having a moment, it’s true. And then there’s class hatred, as long as it’s de haut en bas, especially if you target the “white working class”, the subject of sneers from the American right recently but also portrayed by media and liberals as the repository of all bigotry, backwardness and bad taste.

Having created a monster, the Republican establishment is desperately trying to shift the blame for flipping the switch that brought Donald Trump to political life. Two writers in the New Republic have found the perfect suspect – “the white working class”.

“The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles”, writes Kevin Williamson, going on to decry “the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog”.

Cheering him on, David French claims Williamson has debunked “the idea that the white working-class (the heart of Trump’s support) is a victim class”. His church tried to help these people, he reports, but found its efforts wasted because they prefer welfare to work, drop out of education on a whim, shag the neighbour at the first sign of marital discord and neck prescription drugs with the same gusto that respectable people sip Chardonnay.

Reassuringly, French “hate[s] the mockery that poor and working-class people of all races endure” and doesn’t think that the drug-addicted fornicators are solely responsible for their fate. The government, the “cultural elite”, “progressive culture”, “progressive policies”, the “progressive welfare state” and the “elitist sexual revolutionaries” are not blameless, he adds … to no-one’s surprise.

For the New Republic, while both the causes and the guilt seem to be collective, the solutions must be individual – don’t claim disability, be faithful, stop snorting OxyContin move to get a job – and the way to achieve this is to give “white working class” – collectively – a good telling-off.

It isn’t just the right that lumps white working-class people into a homogeneous, contemptible mass.

“[S]ince Donald Trump’s charade of a candidacy caught fire, I have heard many fellow liberals freely toss around the terms ‘white trash’ and ‘trailer trash’,” writes US journalist Connie Schultz. “These are people who would never dream of telling a racist joke, but they think nothing of ridiculing those of lesser economic means.”

Jack Metzgar in In These Times points out that the statistics don’t bear out the assertion that Trump’s support comes disproportionately from non-college-educated whites, the definition of working-class adopted by a Brookings article that says it does, while Charles Davis of TeleSur claims that among white voters who make less than US$25,000 a year, it is Bernie Sanders who is in the lead by a margin of 15 per cent.

But Trump isn’t really the point.

“Every group has its ‘other’,” Schultz observes. “For too many white intellectuals, it’s the working class.”

When Hillary Clinton was fighting Barak Obama for the Democratic nomination, she was accused of playing to racist sentiment to appeal to the white working class. In France the white working class is often blamed for the rise of the Front National’s support, as it is for Ukip’s successes in the UK, where “chav” is now a term of abuse and the poor are the given the reality-TV treatment. These are standard liberal media analyses, repeated again and again in various forms, but generally identifying a hazily defined racial-cum-socio-economic category with whatever prejudice is to be decried at any given moment.

My own experience is that there are selfish shits and bigots in all social classes, although upbringing and level of education may influence the degree of subtlety with which these characteristics are manifested. Generosity and open-mindedness can be found everywhere, too, although I’ve found solidarity, in the sense of standing together in the face of common oppression, is somewhat lacking in the middle and upper classes.

But, however you define it, the working class is not ethnically homogeneous.

So what is that adjective doing in front of that noun?

We don’t talk about the black female gender, so why would a socio-economic category have an additional racial characterisation?

I understand one can reasonably talk about a white bourgeoisie in some Latin American countries, we could certainly talk about a white slave-owning class in the southern United States and the Caribbean in the past but, despite racist employment practices, membership of the working class is not such a privilege that it is restricted to any one race.

When factories close workers of all ethnic groups are thrown out of work. When incomes are squeezed, the banks foreclose with a lack of discrimination that would be praiseworthy in another context.

Some working-class people may react to the loss of relative security with racism or other prejudices – as may middle-class business owners or professionals who feel the pinch – but, when they do so, they are identifying as white, not working-class. When you express contempt for someone who is less privileged than yourself, whether in education, income or status, you’re defining them by class. And that’s a form of bigotry, too.Facebooktwitterlinkedinrssyoutube
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