Emmanuel Macron is alarmed by a "society which is racialized"

When do we grow out of our differences, when do they refer us to a majority, dominant, or a minority, crushed?

This is the whole debate of racialization or racialization, a concept born at the end of the 1970s and which “amounts to putting the quotation marks to the term race”, according to Canadian sociologists Sirma Bilge and Mathieu Forcier.

In the big interview he gives this week to ELLE magazine, Emmanuel Macron is worried about seeing French society gradually become racialized.

“I am on the universalist side.

I do not recognize myself in a fight that refers each to his identity or his particularism, ”he begins, about feminism.

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The journalists answer him that the Afro-feminist director Amandine Gay says "I am black and a woman, if I forget it I just become human, but that does not prevent me from having difficulties in finding accommodation and a job" .

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I could introduce you to young white men who are called Kévin, live in Amiens or Saint-Quentin, and who also have immense difficulties, for different reasons, in finding a job ”, replied the Head of State. .

"Social difficulties are not only structured by gender and skin color, but also by social inequality, house arrest, among others."

"We re-essentialize people by race"

“I see society gradually becoming racialized,” he continues. "We broke away from this approach and now we are re-essentializing people by race, and in doing so we are assigning them totally to residence. (…) Intersectional logic breaks everything. The illegitimacy of someone who is other than me to represent myself, me and my subcategory, which can be broken down into as many sub-genres, is the negation of something universal in the republican, national and human adventure ”. Lover of philosophy, the one who tried the entrance exam to the École normale supérieure distinguishes "the part of the irreducible which participates in your own identity" and "the part of common that I have with you". It is this part "which matters to me the most",and "the battles that I will wage on your behalf to enable you to achieve a dignity equal to that of your neighbor".

Surprisingly, the Head of State does not mention the great consultation launched, very discreetly, in April, on discrimination. Speaking at length about his record in terms of violence against women, the day after the UN forum for gender equality, Emmanuel Macron claims that resources have been put on the table, that there are "advances" but it recognizes that the actors, police and justice in particular, must better understand the tools at their disposal. He acknowledges that anti-reconciliation bracelets, put in place since September 2020 against violent spouses, are still too little used. “It is gradually increasing, even if 145 bracelets are installed, it is too little,” he said.