The Limited Times

Now you can see non-English news...

"The American media do not understand the gravity of the struggle in which French society is engaged"

2020-10-31T12:41:55.798Z


FIGAROVOX / INTERVIEW - The American left does not make the effort to learn about French secularism and places the reading grid of “systemic racism” on a very different French reality, laments the American journalist Thomas Chatterton Williams.


Thomas Chatterton is an American writer and journalist who lives in Paris.

His book “Self-portrait in black and white: unlearning the idea of ​​race” will be published by Grasset in January.

FIGAROVOX.- “French police shoot and kill man after deadly knife attack”: this is the first headline given by the

New York Times

to qualify the beheading of Samuel Paty by a jihadist.

What do you think of the media treatment of the terrorist question in France by the progressive American media?

Thomas CHATTERTON WILLIAMS.-

This way of presenting the event really worried a lot of people.

Americans as well as non-Americans, because whether or not it is intentional (and we have to take into account the possibility that it is not, after all, we look at everything very closely today, but sometimes it is just about 'a thoughtless mistake), this title seemed to clumsily impose the American reading grid around police violence and what is called "systemic racism" against citizens of color on a foreign example of jihad.

Worse, he transformed the police into an actor and the jihadist into a sort of purely passive recipient of violence, violence which only deserves close scrutiny and real indignation when it is done by agents of the state.

It erased the reality of his barbarism, as well as the humanity of his victim, Samuel Paty.

The "knife attack" as a description of beheading is so euphemistic that it is in fact a form of violence against language itself.

The "knife attack" as a description of beheading is so euphemistic that it is in fact a form of violence against language itself.

I think what bothered people so much was the failure of the American media to understand the gravity of what France has been going through for years now.

The seriousness and the specificity of the struggle in which French society is engaged.

For better or for worse, it simply has nothing to do with the “Black Lives Matter” movement, and the American media's need to shoehorn French social reality into an American framework preventively no offensive goes so far in the concern of not being politically incorrect that it comes to blaming the victim, a dynamic that we saw with even more effect on social networks after the terrorist attack in Nice that followed.

On Twitter, many Americans I have interacted with have said something like "Look, if you keep posting these cartoons, what are you expecting?"

Not only is it blaming the victim, but it is also dehumanizing and a little racist towards Muslims, from whom we can only expect a violent reaction, from this paternalistic perspective.

"Instead of fighting systemic racism, France wants to reform Islam" headlined the Washington Post.

Do you think that the reading grid of “systemic racism” is relevant to describe the way in which Muslims are treated in our country?

I think it takes proper and precise language to describe what happens in a given society and importing speech from foreign contexts can obscure as much or more than it illuminates.

Is there discrimination against foreigners of all stripes, men and women bearing Arabic names and the poor of all colors, including the lower classes of "native French"?

I don't see how anyone could deny it in good faith.

“Systemic racism” is not a term that deeply captures the different dynamics at play which, in an old European society like that of France, are rooted in class dynamics, and also have to do with vestiges. colonialism, as well as the secular victory of secularism over Christianity, without forgetting the very powerful Paris-Province opposition, the sad fate of large sections of peripheral France as Christophe Guilluy called it, etc.

The language used to imperfectly describe American democracy is even less appropriate for understanding French life.

"Systemic racism" is a term which, although contested even within the American context, denotes at least one reality of a former slave society in which a specific category of Americans were held by law and custom as second-class citizens for centuries.

The residue of such categorical discrimination persists of course, although I tend to argue that tremendous progress has been made and that American society is more dynamic - and more complex - than these totalizing discourses of 'white privilege'. and "systemic racism" do not suggest.

This framework is not a perfect lens for understanding the situation of immigrants who came voluntarily to France, the vast majority of whom arrived after World War II.

This does not mean that these immigrants and their descendants do not have to face all kinds of discrimination, xenophobia, Islamophobia, as well as all the other difficulties that newcomers from less wealthy and powerful countries may be. faced when trying to establish a new life in a foreign society.

It just means that the language used to imperfectly describe American democracy is even less appropriate for understanding French life.

The American left has never had to fight a battle against the Catholic Church.

America is and always has been one of the most - if not the most - religious societies in the West.

More broadly, it seems that there is a misunderstanding between the American left and our secular, republican and universalist model, considered “Islamophobic”.

A part of the French left which distinguishes between Muslims and Islamists does not seem to have an equivalent in the United States.

What do you think are the sources of this misunderstanding?

The American left has never had to fight a battle against the Catholic Church.

America is and always has been one of the most - if not the most - religious societies in the West.

In a way, I think it makes things easier for believing Muslims in America than in France.

The French value system is self-explanatory and the French state can intervene in a way that I think is quite foreign to the sense of the role of government that most Americans have.

Add to that the fact that the American left now tends to want to see the whole world in terms of the often patronizing, albeit well-intentioned and overly simplistic identity politics that revolves around a binary "white" / POC [person of color] opposition. (to the point where Arabs, who are technically "Caucasians" on the US Census, are nonetheless turned into honorary POCs, i.e., they are racialized, by religion and culture), and you Find yourself with a worldview that cannot understand or accept the Republican ideal on its own terms.

On October 28, Turkey issued a statement denouncing the "rise in racism and Islamophobia" after the attack on Samuel Paty which prompted a vigorous response from the French government.

Does the discourse of the “woke” and intersectional left play into the hands of the Islamists?

In the age of social networks, of the constant twittering of a globalized discourse, several things have happened that are not unrelated to each other and deserve to be taken seriously: the language of social networks and more particularly the language of social justice is American.

Even when non-Americans speak in their own language, the concepts they use and, more often than not, the labels they apply are American made.

It is in fact one of the strongest forms of American soft power today.

Dictators, authoritarians, cynical manipulators, have all acclimatized to this new reality and take advantage of this language and their identity categories when it suits them.

If Erdogan or Imran Khan [Pakistani Prime Minister] sincerely cared about the plight of Muslims beyond their borders, they would be far more concerned about the plight of Uyghurs in China than they appear.

The truth is, these men are far from “woke” and that it is a terrible act of self-sabotage for the West to allow them to put on this mantle.

Source: lefigaro

All news articles on 2020-10-31

You may like

Trends 24h

News/Politics 2024-03-28T06:04:53.137Z

Latest

© Communities 2019 - Privacy

The information on this site is from external sources that are not under our control.
The inclusion of any links does not necessarily imply a recommendation or endorse the views expressed within them.