Philosopher and secretary of the Besançon section of the PCF, Florian Gulli wrote on Marx, Engels and Lenin. He publishes
L'antiracisme betrayed (
Éditions Puf, September 2022).
FIGAROVOX. - Your book outlines an abandonment of the defense of the universal in favor of particularist claims, including in France. How do you explain this alignment of our country with Anglo-Saxon countries?
Florian Gulli. -
Today, the universal has become the target of part of the anti-racist discourse.
We readily speak of white universalism, we point out the presumed links between universalism and European colonization, universal declarations of rights are perceived as masks of Western domination, etc.
Yesterday it was not so.
Toussaint Louverture, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Thomas Sankara, etc., none of these big names fought the idea of universal principles.
Toussaint Louverture was not fighting the declaration of the rights of man;
he was fighting for it to finally be applied in the French colony of Santo Domingo.
The problem was not the universal but the restrictions that accompanied its application.
I don't know whether this critique of the universal should be linked only to Anglo-Saxon countries.
There is indeed a European tradition that is radically critical of all universalism.
And this is the paradox: believing to break with "
the West
" by criticizing the universal, political anti-racism is only part of a Western tradition, which runs from counter-revolutionaries to the New Right of Alain from Benoist via Heidegger.
European anti-universalism was at first fiercely inegalitarian (in the absence of any universal principle,
"the strong wield their power and the weak must yield to them"
).
More recently, he has become a differentialist, praising difference justifying erecting walls between individuals because of their origin.
I don't really understand what anti-racism has to gain by being on such a terrain.
Anti-racism in general, insofar as it fights for equal rights, equal dignity for all, etc., can only be universalist.
If there are no universal principles, can we even claim universal equality?
We must, however, be vigilant on one point: speaking of universal principles does not in any way imply that these principles are realized.
Thus, the proclamation of equality does not make society egalitarian in practice.
Equality can be asserted and discrimination still exists.
We must then try to fill the gap between the real and the value and not dismiss the value as a lie.
Your book begins by opposing moral anti-racism to political anti-racism. What distinction do you make between these two notions? Who benefits from this appropriation of anti-racism?
It is no longer possible today to speak of anti-racism
as
such .
And that's a good thing: it indicates the existence of several analytical grids and several political strategies.
In the debate on the left on anti-racism for fifteen years, it has become customary to oppose two forms of anti-racism, moral and political.
This opposition was forged by political anti-racism to set itself apart from traditional anti-racism organizations like SOS Racisme and consensus campaigns led by big business and public institutions.
According to political anti-racism, moral anti-racism would be a kind of abstract sermon, a call to fraternity, doomed to remain a dead letter.
Political anti-racism is defined by opposition: it is divisive, it prefers the autonomy of the “
first concerned
” to fraternity, and it says it wants to transform state structures from top to bottom.
Political anti-racism is then positioned as the only true anti-racism.
At the beginning of the 20th century, lynching was a very popular spectacle.
We go so far as to free the children from school so that they can attend.
Slavery brutalized American society.
Florian Gulli
The book offers a genealogy of this so-called political anti-racism, and a critique of its political impasses.
He also tries to show that this opposition is a false dilemma, that it hides a third form of anti-racism, which I call socialist anti-racism.
This intellectual tradition that starts with Marx continues today, for example, in the United States, in the work of academics and activists close to Bernie Sanders.
This anti-racism has a double objective: to reduce racism, and to unite the different fractions of the working classes.
He is keen to offer a common story to the working classes, a story that does not, however, cover up their differences.
You suggest a difference in reception between the slavery exercised
"on the very soil of the United States"
and that exercised overseas by France.
Can you develop this difference and its consequences?
Should we read and be inspired by American authors to think about what is happening in France in terms of racism?
There are, it seems to me, two pitfalls.
The first consists in refusing to read on the pretext that the national situations would be too different.
Some even go so far as to use this argument to downplay racism in France, with racism becoming an exclusively American problem.
The second pitfall consists of unwisely applying US analyzes to our national situation as if the differences between countries were negligible in terms of racism.
In the book, I point out two major differences which explain why racism is more deeply rooted there than in Europe (which is not to clear Europe of all racism).
First American specificity, noted among others by James Baldwin:
“the American black is a unique entity.
It has no counterparts anywhere and no predecessors
.
Why?
Because he arrived on American soil as a slave and not as an immigrant.
It is therefore necessary to read the texts written in the United States, but taking care not to simplify reality.
The “
minorities
” in Europe arrived in Europe by immigration and not by deportation.
It is symptomatic that by speaking of “
indigenous
”, one represses the moment of immigration to go directly to the colonial situation.
However, if the first was largely suffered, the second was partly chosen.
Second difference, the one you mention: the specificity of American slavery.
France practiced slavery overseas, in the West Indies.
But the metropolitan population was not directly confronted with the violence.
Slavery in the United States was at home.
The people was thus built in the presence of slavery violence, violence redoubled by the fear of generalized revolt, the planters' fear of being poisoned, etc.
At the beginning of the 20th century, lynching was a very popular spectacle.
We go so far as to free the children from school so that they can attend.
Slavery brutalized American society.
Reading American authors, in their diversity, is necessary, but we must be careful not to make the United States the model for thinking about racism.
Depending on the authors, we could accuse the elites, employers, such a president, the media, CNews, of making people racist.
The question is whether racist propaganda from above is the cause of racism.
Florian Gulli
You note that the anti-racist jargon has been renewed in recent years. We talk about structural racism, racism indeed… For what purpose? Do we change the words to feign the renewal of a struggle that is running out of steam?
Conceptual innovations can be a good thing if they improve our understanding of reality.
I therefore sought to find out to what extent the new terms that have appeared in recent years (structural racism, whiteness, white privilege, etc.) increase or decrease our understanding of the social world.
Of course, you have to judge on a case-by-case basis, but often these terms seemed to me to add confusion.
Consider the concept of “
institutional racism
” coined by Carmichael and Hamilton in their 1967 book,
Black Power.
For a Politics of Liberation in the United States
.
The authors want to think about racism in a post-segregationist society, without reducing it to individual violence and insults.
Henceforth, write the two authors, American society unanimously condemns the bombing in a black church in Birmingham perpetrated by a white supremacist.
But at the same time, she ignores or tolerates the high mortality rate in black maternity wards in the same city.
This last fact, which goes unnoticed, is an institutional racism.
This meaning of the expression was able to seduce sociologists who then had a tool to understand the functioning of such and such an institution.
However, in the same book, we witness a shift towards another meaning of the expression “institutional racism”.
The expression makes it possible to put the whole American society on trial without nuance:
“America, say the authors, is white power”
.
There are French versions of these formulas:
“France is structurally racist”
,
“the Republic is white power”
, etc.
These caricatural formulations evacuate the complexity of a story, the internal contradictions of a national tradition.
They obscure reality by simplifying it.
And we must remember an essential point: a large part of the militants of the civil rights movement refuse such rhetoric, because they are perfectly aware that it is a political impasse.
Can we build a political majority in a country based on the wholesale rejection of the history of this same country?
I don't know if the proliferation of these new terms is a sign of running out of steam.
On the other hand, it testifies to the importance taken in the public debate by slogans and shocking formulas whose media resonance is not always proportional to their theoretical relevance.
The anti-racist movement questions the source of racist discourse. You recall in this respect the “
ideology
” whose speeches come from the popular classes, and the “
propaganda
” whose speeches come from the elites.
According to this definition, is the anti-racist movement an ideology or a propaganda?
The problem, in my view, is that political anti-racism pays little attention to the sources of racist discourse.
One finds ready-made explanations which are never based on any empirical investigation: the present racism would be explained by the colonial unconscious of our society, people would be racist because victims of racist propaganda, or even because their hatred would give them a positive image of themselves, etc.
I have nothing, at first sight, against these explanations, provided that they are supported by field investigations.
To distinguish between ideology and propaganda is to ask the question of the sources of ordinary racism.
We find this distinction in the work recently translated into French by Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields,
Racecraft or the spirit of inequality in the United States
.
It is a question of contesting an understanding of racism which would make it the result of a discourse coming from above (propaganda), without any relation to the life of individuals.
According to such an understanding, people are racist because racist ideas have been put in their heads.
Thus and depending on the authors, one could accuse the elites, the employers, such a president, the media of making people racist.
Of course, racist propaganda from above is something very real in history.
The question is whether it is the cause of racism.
Ideology, here, does not designate something abstract, tacked on to reality.
It's quite the opposite.
Ideology designates the interpretation of a lived experience.
Racism, according to this reading, is the (erroneous) interpretation of an experience lived by individuals or groups.
It is pegged to their existence and not instilled from above.
And there are many experiences, inequalities or conflicts that can lead to racism.
Competition for scarce social goods in times of crisis (housing, employment, etc.) is one of the great experiences fueling racism.
The problems of public tranquility linked to urban segregation can easily be decoded in a racist way, etc.
Florian Gulli,
Anti-racism betrayed
, Puf, September 2022, 224 pages.
poof