race doesn't exist in france 🇫🇷

Bonjour!

SOURCES/RESSOURCES 📚

French ressources:
The instagram page @decolonisonsnous is a gold mine!
I also recommend @histoirescrepues

English ressources:
How France’s Colonial Past Explains Its Racism Today, AJ+, Youtube.
France still has an empire, Johnny Harris, Youtube.
Franz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 1961.

Other sources can be found throughout the video :)

SOCIALS 👩‍💻
Storygraph: @alicecappelle
Instagram: @alicecappelle_
Twitter: @cappelle_alice

[popps]

As long as France was a colonial power and still gets paid from Haiti for their independence, racism isn’t invisible even though eyes are covered

[issy]

9:46 "That was taken as an insult. Omar Sy was said to be ungrateful, to have forgotten what France did for him. The message was very clear. 'Without France, Omar Sy would be nothing.' The subtext was also very clear. Omar Sy was not considered as a French person – literally born in France, as French as me. 'France is something outside of him. France gave him success.' That is racist." 👏👏👏

[Dham_Pyra]

Honestly ever since hearing about Canada and their racial issues, I've learned no matter the country. It is a red flag if someone says "we don't have racial issues here"...

[kristofermccormack]

The French and the UK share a lot in common about colonialism. In schools in Ireland, we learn alot about English history as well as our own because colonialism tied our histories together for so long. In contrast, the majority of English people and friends I've met don't know anything about Irish history nor the horrible consequences that colonialism caused here. Its quite a jarring experience to see a country fail to step up to the harm they've caused. I obviously wouldn't dare equate what those with French-African background have gone through with their history, but the little bits that overlap are interesting.

[fred]

Having been in a relationship with a Tunisian/French woman for 10 years, and seeing how she and her brothers were treated it was a shock to me just how racist French society was, never mind the history of how Algerians have been treated like the murder of hundreds in Paris in 1961

[alexharbin]

as a white american, i get the desire to want to push back against seeing white as the default and and non-white people as other, so you catch yourself not describing other white people as white and it could feel wrong to not give that same treatment to people of color. but i think it's worse to try and "not see race" and feel like it's a taboo to mention that someone is black. if i'm in a setting where i'm the only white guy in the room, it would make sense to point me out as the white guy. the same applies to describing someone as black if it's a helpful description, just like saying "that bald guy" or "the person with the red hat" or whatever. it just depends on the context.

[pez]

Mexico has a very similar situation with indigenous peoples, we try to act like they stopped existing ages ago and we tell ourselves we are all the same mestizo race so therefore racism doesn't exist here, and we also don't have stats on ethnicity/race (we do have on mother tongue and self reported skin tone though). But still, indigenous people are treated as subhuman and the darker your skin tone, the harder life gets.

I wonder if other latinamerican or latineuropean countries have similar issues

[alpha]

This is my testimony as a Black Frenchman who's lived in France, the UK and Germany: growing up in a working class environment, the only people who would say "Black" instead of "Noir" would be White middle-class people. The same thing happened in London and in Berlin. I don't know know if this is coincidence but these individuals didn't growing having Black friends.
As for the not wanting to say someone's skin color [according to society's color palette] : a White German friend of mine set me up on a blind date few years ago. I was supposed to meet this woman in a park. My friend called me up a couple of hours before I left my place to ask me what I was wearing [...] Then he said, so I'll tell her to look for a Frenchman with a khaki jacket. Me, that's it? Him, well I'm not going to say look for a Black guy! Me, well that would help! How is French a physical feature?
Every time I would land at CDG airport from the UK, the custom officer would always scan my passport to see if it's a fake one. Something that would take more time i.e. I would look at the other booths and see 2-3 people zipping through while I was waiting to be let in back in my native country. Thank you if you made it to the end

[alessandra]

“We feel free because we lack the very language to articulate our unfreedom” - Slavoj Ziziek. I really appreciated this analysis, I’m Italian and there is the same stigma here around the use of the word “race”. Sure, it is a made up concept that is not at all supported by science, but it doesn’t change the fact that many people have used this made up notion to heavily discriminate others. Pretending this isn’t happening now is naive and even dangerous, since is robs us of the ability to express that oppression and fight against it.

[grandsome]

It's a discourse you hear in the rest of the white francophonie, here in Québec you hear stuff like "we gave them success" when talking about minority success and "there's no racism here, any accusation of the contrary is franco/quebecphobia".
It's a "at least we're better than the Americans" attitude that makes progress in that kind of issue very difficult.

[spiffygroove]

it makes me uncomfortable when people are hesitant to refer to someone as “black” or “brown” etc because it feels like they assume these words are an insult or inherently bad. I understand trying not to reduce someone to their race, but when describing someone to someone else, it is just a descriptor. However, talking about someone and mentioning their race when it is not relevant to a story can definitely feel reductive because it implies that white is the default.

[PokhrajRoy.]

In school, there was the need to shelter children from certain sensitive topics but that only made it worse. I was often the target of racist, colourist (maybe even casteist) jokes but I would also behave like that. A sterile environment only causes more harm than good.

[PokhrajRoy.]

10:13 Omar Sy is absolutely right. The war in Ukraine is really unfortunate but we saw the treatment of Syrian refugees vs Ukrainian refugees as well as racial segregation at certain checkpoints.

[MCKevin]

It was illegal in France until the 1990’s to give Breton children Breton names.

[pendragon]

So this is the French version of "I don't see color"? Usually just ends up meaning we don't want to talk about it. When the Cleveland baseball team changed their mascot name to the Guardians, you had all the old white guys up in arms, "Noooo, they'll never be the Guardians to me--they're the INDIANS! I'll never call them anything else, never, never, never!" It's almost like a team's nickname is important to them, something they assured us wasn't true when native groups agitated against the name. Great video, Alice!

[ltlbuddha]

Children are not stupid. If a parent makes such an effort to avoid using an obvious descriptor, the child will understand that the parent sees skin colour as a negative.

[anomienormie]

I have a French friend of Vietnamese descent. She says she never feels homesick when abroad because France never let her make a home of it even though she was born and raised there. Comments from “wow you’re so good at French” to “filthy asians taking our jobs” were constant throughout her life.

I relate to the feeling because I’m queer from a queerphobic country. It’s ridiculous how they demand patriotism and sacrifice for the country while treating us like second class citizens and outsiders. I don’t love my country because my country doesn’t love me.

[thismikewillnot]

It's probably worth noting that France keeps and maintains the largest military force presence in Africa of any NATO member and it's something seldom discussed. Likewise, France keeps around the French Foreign Legion and keeps at it near constant rotation across Africa on peace keeping missions.

[aeolia]

Waiting for a video like this. I grew up in NorCal with mostly POC and immigrants, and I was constantly reminded of that. I meet my now French "white" husband, and he's used those same tropes and talking points other French people use, and it irked the heck out of me because while on the surface it's "nice" to say "everyone is French here, there is only one culture, one language, one thought" (I'm exaggerating on the one thought thing), that's just not true, France is not monoethnic nor monocultural, I hear reasons why none of this stuff is recorded by the government by examples of recorded jewish people during WWII, and yes, that is a good reason for not doing it, but how are certain groups supposed to be helped if you don't have the data to prove something bad is happening

[andysawyer]

Many don't understand that not seeing color is not realistic or helpful. Acknowledging my appearance and culture is actually what many want if you are authentically interested. What we don't want is to be treated with less respect than other people. Racism is usually the benefits you provide to your in group and the lack of a benefit of empathy, reason, and kindness. Obviously, being hateful, spiteful, or sociopathic is what people think of as racism and it is. However, these are often obvious iterations rather than the norm.

PS this video was well made and thought out. Howver, once you reached Cheik Anta Diop i was disappointed. Jean-François Champollion literally said the after he translating Medu Netjer. That Kemet, Egpyt being the name after Greek conquest, came from Kurstul is standard at this point. Look up Oxford, Gresham, UCLA, amoung others. At this point it is not tenable to maintain thise views as they were not based on research. Jean-François Champollion's brother who never study or went to Africa championed the view of hiw you ened your video. Once again thank you for your video.