David Isaac Haziza is a doctoral student at Columbia University. Regular contributor to the blog The rule of the game since 2015, he is also the author of Talisman sur ton coeur. Polyphony on the Song of Songs (éd. Du Cerf, 2017).
Until the thousandth generation, America has curse race. Shining and Amityville told us about the torments inflicted on an ordinary family by the avenging men of Indians on whose graves his house (the Overlook Hotel in the case of the first of these two films) was built.
This story is true. America will never escape its fatum. There is no procrastination. The murder of George Floyd is unfair: one does not die for a counterfeit note; and racist, because if Floyd had not been black, he probably would not have suffered such treatment. It is the vestige of a long tradition: police cruelty is the norm in this country, and in recent years have also seen the explosion of that of supremacist, neo-Nazi or nostalgic groups of the Confederation, which we can guess the diffuse influence.
The murder of Floyd remains an American event, which is explained primarily by causes specific to this country.Other causes are probably involved. All the potential for brutality that, to use François Sureau's words, security ecstasy, appears more and more in the open. The “Patriot Act” has initiated, all over the world, a progressive abdication of freedom and its values in the face of the imperative of “safety”. And if it starts in an innocent, almost insensitive way - fingerprints do not hurt, neither does digital tracing -, it is necessarily in barbarism that this playfulness must in the end be accomplished: we do not give innocently police have the right to monitor the population they care for without reservation.
That being said, the murder of Floyd remains an American event, which is explained primarily by causes specific to this country. Unlike France, whose soil emancipated anyone who set foot on it - so that, although slavery was practiced in the West Indies, it could not structure the mentality of the metropolis in the same way - history of the United States is entirely divided by race and its conflicts. Besides the Indian genocide (whose commemoration is not recent: "I did not, like the American colonist , said Chateaubriand, robbed the Indian of the Florids "), there is slavery indeed, in which one would be wrong to see only a deprivation of liberty: it was uprooting, abolition of name and kinship, murder of ancestors and beliefs. It was, for the whites who practiced it, moral corruption and spiritual defeat. Then there is segregation and the not so distant time, my New York neighbors remember, where restaurants and hotels could refuse their entry to blacks - or, moreover, to Jews - without having to worry to justify ; it was, in the South, the influence of the "invisible Empire", it was the endemic misery of the ghettos of the North and the Midwest. Faulkner had seen, and it must be read more than ever, that the specters of the plantation would not stop haunting the descendants of the masters like that.
Obama did not want to be the first black president of the United States, but the first president beyond the race.The more recent era of which I speak was also that of the struggle for civil rights, but this struggle knew, as we know, its own tensions and dissensions: the opposition of the model embodied by Pastor King to that of the Black Panthers then of Malcolm X continues to this day. This is the second model, I will come back to it, which prevails today. It was a time already, already, of racial riots, and two years before the Cielo Drive massacre, they were to put an end to the utopia of the 60s, ravaging the city of Newark, in response as today to racism of the police.
And yet we thought we were done. The election of Barack Obama was the victory of post-racial America, announced in the famous speech of Philadelphia (March 2008). When we look at the path followed since then - however admirable the sense of justice and pluralism he has recently expressed - we are taken in disgust. Obama was not, or at least did not want to be the first black president of the United States, but the first president who was beyond the race; able to look her legacy in the face without getting bogged down in it, which meant denying neither her friendship for Jeremiah Wright, a black pastor furiously hostile to white people, nor her love for her white grandmother and racist, to deny neither without necessarily spoiling himself for their evil passions - to take, in short, history and man as they are, without judgment, without servility either. This effort to free oneself from a blissful moralism and a destructive cynicism, one would have dreamed that it would bear fruit: the end of the Obama era marked the bloody return of the race, with the assassination of Trayvon Martin and the subsequent acquittal of his murderer. 2013 thus saw the birth of the Black Lives Matter movement; three years later, Trump was elected.
In 2016, Donald Trump addressed a single community, that of the Whites, Hillbillies and other "White Trash", that his opponent despised.When I met this country, we still found people for whom post-raciality was a dream, but a lawful dream. Not only was white racism a specter they thought they had exorcised for good, but they also did not want to endlessly atone for the crimes of the past, which we took as scapegoats for these crimes, white people in general , music, for example, or "white" literature. We smiled politely at those who still spoke of "Dead White Males" to describe the legacy of Shakespeare or Bach: we understood them but we would not have made this kind of excommunication a dogma. And no one would have even thought of blaming Benny Goodman for doing jazz. It was less than ten years ago.
I am talking about the academic environment but at the political level, Sanders' first campaign is paradoxically a vestigial example of this ethos. The America of Roosevelt and Kennedy or, for the right which could claim that it had been republican, that of Lincoln. In contrast, the fight between Hillary Clinton and Trump marked the cataclysmic end of this consensus. The first was aimed at an atomized nation, fragmented into a multitude of communities and identities - among which the whites, especially the poor, did not seem to have their place -, the second to a single community, that, precisely, of these Whites, Hillbillies and other "White Trash", whom his opponent despised, implicitly identified by him to the people in their entirety. As Mark Lilla has shown, his election marked, in his own way, the triumph of communitarianism. The Ku Klux Klan, after all, is it not one of the oldest examples?
On the contrary, it is to all of the European, "white" culture that we would like to give back throat.Get Out was released during the first year of Trump's tenure. This film, incidentally masterful if we consider only its form, shows that post-raciality is impossible. If racism consists in rejecting the other by the very fact of his race, Get Out is a racist film: the interest that a white man can have for another culture there necessarily, inevitably comes from "cultural appropriation" , the he attraction felt for a black man can only be an extension of the plantation and its legal rapes. The curse is there: the "bad guys" in history are models of liberalism, anti-Trump democrats, perfectly hostile to racism, lovers of jazz and primary arts ... But unlike Devine who comes to dinner (1967), this will not be enough to save the young couple whose love is ultimately denounced as the most atrocious of deceptions. This is the America in which I live.
The murder of George Floyd heralds the most brutal return of the ancient curse. The race left for good the chains which retained it, very badly, at the bottom of Gehenne: it is there, and it is to stay. There will follow other riots, more and more violent, and an intellectual, artistic, academic response, more and more tense, hateful in return. The coming years will give Get Out a reason. Policeman Chauvin will pay what he will pay - probably too little in relation to his crime - but we will in fact have forgotten it as quickly as his colleagues kneeling in protest and brotherhood.
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On the contrary, it is to all of the European, "white" culture that we would like to give back throat. Its singular relation to the flesh, to evil and to redemption, to truth and to dialectic: all of this will be silenced or declared secondary, spent by profit and loss. From Hell to Blake and Baudelaire, Essays to Kafka, P rometheus chained to Paradise Lost , counterpoint and opera in chiaroscuro or Bernini's Daphne, civilization will pay in place of the barbarians .
I remember that a few months ago already, in a similar incident, the most "advanced" students of Columbia proclaimed that it was necessary to do away with the core curriculum, a teaching program whose "whiteness", to believe them, explained the persistence of racist murders. Yes, Montaigne - and with him, the possibility of any wrenching from the demon of race and belonging - will expire at the end for Chauvin.
And forever America will remain the Pandemonium, "thick swarm'd, both on the ground and in the air," as it always was.