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Race relations in France: a history of denial and uncertainty

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“African Americans discover in Paris the terms by which they can define themselves. It’s the freedom to work beyond the assumptions of what we can and can’t do as African Americans. It’s a different rhythm and pace. We can imagine ourselves in new ways in that space.”

—Essayist, novelist, and social critic

James Baldwin.

The recent slaughter of staff at the French satirical periodical “Charlie Hebdo” sheds light upon the issue of race relations within that country; a history of ambiguity and contradiction.

For Americans of African descent, France has long represented a reprise from the grinding mistreatment they’d experienced at home. For the combat hardened “Dough Boys” who climbed out of the trenches after World War I, the prospect of a relatively peaceful existence in the environs of Gallic hospitality were a compelling alternative to renewing a precarious and often hazardous relationship with Jim Crow. The new Black arrivals reciprocated the warm welcome given by their hosts by introducing them to a new and exotic form of music foreign to the sensibilities of the Classical European convention: jazz.

Well before the “Great War,” individuals like painter Henry Ossawa Tanner (who settled in Paris circa 1891) found a congenial atmosphere in which to cultivate their skills in a way unimaginable in the country of their birth; but the convention had been established prior to the Civil War, when French plantation owners from Louisiana would send their illegitimate slave offspring to the “Old Country” to be educated away from the stifling confines of the American South. After the 1918 Armistice, Sepia-toned entertainers like Josephine Baker and Ada Smith (better known by her stage name “Bricktop”) continued this tradition of cultural appreciation during the interval between the World Wars, or Jazz Age.

After the end of hostilities in 1945 and the World War II ceasefire, this artistic nurturing continued, as a slew of African Americans came forth to make their mark as writers of note during that fertile period of post-modern literary achievement. These included the giants of letters like James Baldwin and Richard Wright, but also the less celebrated but no less talented Chester Himes (author of the Harlem detective series featuring “Coffin Ed” Johnson and “Grave Digger” Jones), and William Gardner Smith, who chronicled the experiences of Black GI’s in post war Europe in his novel “Last of the Conquerors (1948).” Scores of progressive musicians too numerous to list, including Los Angeles’ own Dexter Gordon sought refuge in this creatively hospitable environ.

As noted in Michel Fabre’s “From Harlem to Paris: Black Americans Writers in France, 1840-1980 (1993, University of Illinois Press),” rather than a legitimate expression of the egalitarianism France was so anxious to project to the rest of the world, this enthusiasm was probably rooted in the Frenchmen’s animosity towards the offensive behavior of Caucasian Americans, and the natural friction

They had with the darker-skinned natives of countries they’d had a longer, more convoluted relationship with; these stemmed from their colonial ties, especially Algeria, the country of origin of Chérif and Saïd Koauchi, the principle gunmen in the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and the Western African countries of Mali and Senegal, from which fellow jihadist and kosher grocery assassin Amedy Coulibaly traces his lineage.

Social mobility versus urban revolt

“I am very proud to represent a cosmopolitan France. It shows that today’s France is a mixed France, where there is every culture, and I think a lot of people will see themselves in me.”

—beauty pageant winner Flora Coquerel.

Much of the strife witnessed in contemporary France has its counterpart in locals in other parts of Europe. The oppositional response to the influx of foreign nationals may be found in Britain, Germany, Greece, Italy, and so on. France, however, has ostensibly set itself apart from the rest of the continent as a bastion of tolerance.

Examples of minority success in French society abound. Flora Coquerel, a willowy 19-year-old of Beninian (West Africa) descent was crowned Miss France in 2014 amid charges that most of the contestants were “as White as the end-of-year snow on the steeples of an eternal France.”

Award-wining actress Isabelle Adjani is the daughter of a German-Catholic mother and an Algerian Muslim father who grew up in Gennevilliers, the suburb where the Kouachi brothers amassed their arsenal of weapons prior to their Charlie Hebdo attack.

But for every triumph gained in the French minority community, the residue of racism taints the victory. Christiane Taubira, a French Guiananese politician of African descent, is the country’s Minister of Justice, a post roughly equivalent to the United States Attorney General, and has endured multiple episodes where racial slurs comparing her to a monkey were directed at her, an insult commonly used against Black soccer players in matches throughout Europe.

In spite of the French government’s effort to “put its best foot forward” in projecting an image of racial harmony, the problem of discontent with its Muslim/North African population has been a constant in the past half century, with periods of tranquility and flare up. As the 1980s progressed, tensions within this community escalated to the point where disaffected youth devised their own, individual style of acting out. Labeled the “rodéo (riot),” their tactics involved car theft, then driving the stolen vehicles in a hazardous manner to attract the police into isolated slum areas then burning them, before engaging the police in street brawls.

Native Frenchmen responded by assaulting North Africans in isolated incidents, including one in which off-duty French Foreign Legionnaires stabbed an Arab youth to death and then threw him from a train in southwest France. This prompted activists to invoke the spirit of non-violent paragons Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King by mounting a 500-mile march from Marseille to Paris between October 15 and December 3, 1983. Upon arriving in Paris, the group of 10,000 plus youth were greeted by a crowd of 100,000 supporters.

Dubbed the Marche des beurs (a slang word for Arab youth), it has become a landmark in the annals of French civil rights. Yet and still, the specter of conflict remains, with periodic flare ups like the 2010 legislative ban on facial veils, passed as a security measure, but interpreted by the Islamic community as an affront to their religious precepts. The debate on this issue still rages as this article went to press.

The national perception of Muslim and immigrants of color seems to be based on the human concept of necessity and convenience. Whereas American Blacks found acceptance in France due to their comparatively low numbers and status as a novelty, possessing unique talents, North Africans and others were transported for their short-term usefulness as chattel and cheap labor, then denigrated for their “otherness” when their usefulness wore off; these has become a worrisome byproduct of the eternal struggle between multiculturalism and xenophobia.

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