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." 👏👏👏
So Pierre Bourdieu was wrong all the way when he said that the environment had a major role in the future of individuals? Being born in a country with infrastructures, a functional education system, access to culture has nothing to do with the way the people living in France succeed? By the way, isn't he living in the US now? And you should know that many people born in France, who can speak french, aren't french. The people born in Alger in 1950 stopped being french in 1962 apparently. And you should try ask Corsicans whether they are french. 😁
Wild, totally forgot thats still a thing. Does somebody know what would happen if Haiti just stops paying that? Would France heavily insist on that money? Like: "Hey Haiti, sorry to bother you, but it seems you havent payed your monthly fees that we forced on you when you wanted to gain freedom from our oppressive colonial rule. So uhm, better pay up or we colonize you again."
@@pinotpinotpinot Haiti finished paying reparations to France in the 1930s. Though at that time it was under US military occupation so they had other problems to think about by that point
I am happy to tell you all the Haitian debt from the freeing of the slaves has been payed (Yay !)... but more seriously the country and the people are two different things, Poland wasn't a colonial power but I'd say it's pretty bad to be black down there. You can't put it all on colonialism, it's more of a power dynamic and nationalism thing to me.
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"...
I’m Canadian (Pakistani Canadian) and Canada is mostly not racist yes a handful of white people might be but as long as you pull your own weight people generally don’t care
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.
I think the Ulster Plantation is comparable to other colonization's, it just didn't effect as much for as long. In terms of war crimes, the English don't usually discriminate.
I've always wondered if Spain, France or Italy helped back Irish Catholic rebels at any point in their history of fighting against english protestantism? It seems like they'd have to have gotten help to hold back the English.
@@jjoohhhnn There were a bunch of (abortive) attempts by France and Spain to aid Irish independence, such as the Spanish Armada and French support of the 1798 rebellion. You may need to read a history book.
@@jjoohhhnn Also, Protestantism wasn't a "problem" in Ireland until the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion. A massive chunk of Irish rebels have always been protestants of various traditions. One of the approaches taken by the British government after 1798 was to stoke and weaponise sectarianism to keep prevent future rebellions, leading to the rise of organisations like the Orange Order in the 19th century. It was never about religion.
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
I'm from Paraguay and we definitely have the same issues, and it's so weird because literally 70% of Paraguay has indigenous roots, but still most of us are pretty racist against indigenous people except when it's about our football team playing - then everyone is Guaraní. Indigenous people here also lost their land during the far-right dictatorship and with that means of survival, which means they need to go to the city. Where life is even harder as opportunities (which are not many) are reserved to people that "is from the city" in a way, which is even smaller. The worst is that they have no voices, and no one seems to care, most protests are just another "inconvenience" in the way to work. The one country I know is doing well on this in LATAM is Chile, they even had an academic from Mapuche origins leading the re-write of their constitution in 2021. The one thing I'd like to add though is that intersectionality exists across races and also across classes. And discrimination is heavily attached to class in LATAM, if you're not indigenous, but poor, you still have it really difficult, and people still looks down on you and it shrinks your opportunities (as far as just having a "countryside" accent, which exposes your lower-class origins). Now, most indigenous are poor and anyways - you can imagine how hard they have it.
The first time I went to Mexico city I was not expecting that. I'm black and for some reason, I thought I would be able to blend in, like in Cuba or Brazil, but nope lol I got a lots a looks, kids wanted take pictures of me, even in the circle of my very rich white friends. They all nice, but I felt like an attraction, and whether in the streets or in the house, it was very obvious who what background the maids and the poorest people were from. I try to go every 4 or years since a a decade, so we'll see how things change...
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
They call you black by respect because today european people are accused of racism for litteraly nothing, because some black people love being offended and playing victim a lot so people need to be careful when addressing to them not to sound racist. Because they know that a lot of non-white ppl love to play victim and get offended for nothing.
je comprends le point de vue qui doit rejoindre celui dit en vidéo (que j’ai pas encore finie) mais finalement si ton ami ne t’a pas décrit comme noir c’est peut-être parce qu’il n’y a pas pensé, parce qu’il s’en fout juste ? et il a dû pensé que ton date allait aussi ne pas prêter attention à ta couleur de peau ?
To be fair people starting to use the word black instead of noir because it was pushed forward as cool and progressive by antiracist associations. The “black blanc beur” is an example of that.
“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.
@@antlerbraum2881 It reminds me also of the goal of newspeak in 1984, give people fewer and fewer words to express and conceptualize their thoughts, and at some point it will make thought-crime impossible.
There’s an excellent NYT article titled 'How Italians Became 'White'' which really summarizes the process of outgrouping to ingrouping with labor exploitation as the throughline.
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
The algerians that have been killed were litteraly supporting terrorists groups that were killings innocents french citizien in algeria only because they were ethnic french.
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.
I think that "not seeing race" should mean that we don't see them as entirely different, but we recognize their differences in culture, and we can acknowledge their skin color without it being a taboo to some extent. Racism shouldn't exist. We should be able to see all of the differences but ignore them in favor of our similarities, or even better, embrace the differences and similarities by simply acknowledging that even in our own demographics, people are not the same. I'm just as different from most of my own culture as I am from any other, so what is the point of looking at skin color as the primary difference, when someone can be good or bad no matter the color of their skin, and often times the "most dangerous races" in the minds of whites, are far less dangerous than the white people who oppress them.
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.
I can second that experience from the 'other' side, no one was educated or talked to us about race and we were really racist as kids even though we would all claim we were not. Ignorance made it so easy to hurt people in a way I never would now that I have been able to learn. And it puts people speaking out against discrimination in a doubly awkward spot because discussing race at all is already taboo.
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.
They're not better they just get fewer headlines because there are fewer and no country is as important as the USA to the modern world, so everyone hyper-fixates on the USA.
yeah my dad and his sister have stories about how they weren't allowed to speak breton at school, a langage that they used to talk with their parents at home
@@MCKevin289Ridiiculous : That not Brez langages that was prohibed but all dialectes in France...before 1900 some ...90% people in French republic did not speak French but dialectes ...that is républican Scholl very strict in those Times that made all puppils speak French ...
France is based on racism, my family is from Alsace and if some know their history it belonged to Germany so we had German names, it took us years to be considered as "assimilated".
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.
I'm from a country where almost everybody is mixed, and I feel uncomfortable refer to anyone as black or white, we say things like "she is wearing a red tshirt and is a little darker than me" But black and white feels racist like I'm reducing that person to that. We don't say things "like white people stuff" I remember when I heard of the concept the first time I was in shock because I thought they were literally white like paper 😅 I was a child around 10.
A couple years ago it felt taboo to call someone black (Schwartz) in Germany. I remember a classmate being (half) jokingly called a Nazi because he described someone as black. Many preferred to use dark-skinned as a descriptor, me included. I only started using it because black people told me they identify most with that term
I mean no one is actually black, and no one is white- they are pink, cream, dark brown, brown, tan etc as a kid I never understood the word for this reason as no one is actually literally white or black
I guess I really have a nice image about life in Germany. I’m born and raised here as half german/ half tunisian with an arabic surname and I never faced racism really. Could be bc I live in southwest Germany and in a diverse city with many people of different ethnicities tho
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.
It angered me so much how Poland was praised (on the social media site I frequented) for taking in the Ukrainian refugees, but everybody conveniently forgot how they let Middle Eastern refugees starve and freeze to death in the woods just a few weeks earlier. And when I said as much, I was drowned out in a wave of hateful and dehumanizing rhetoric against Middle Eastern refugees.
@@johannageisel5390 I didn't feel much if sympathy for the Polish government, considering what it had done when a similar situation presented but with Middle Eastern migrants. As an Italian I'm profoundly disturbed by similar attitudes too common among my countryfolks.
@@marcello7781 It's the Catholicism. :P JK, we have our share of racists in Germany too. To be fair, though, there are always people who actually do help, may that be in Poland or Italy or any other part of Europe I have great respect for the activists who try to combat the crimes against humanity that happen at the outer EU borders every day. Just earlier today I read an article about refugees being abducted on Lesbos by the Greek coast guard, forced onto inflatable rafts and then being pushed into Turkish waters. Some activist was able to record it so there is finally proof.
@@johannageisel5390 I completely agree with you and that's why I wrote "government". I feel a deep respect for all those activists that offered shelters to the victims of war and other civilians in need.
@@johannageisel5390 I also think here the issue was much more political and complex. It wasa much harder for Poland to accept them as it would give in the Blackmailing of the Belarusian dictatorship just shipping refugees from the middle east to them to the woods to cross the Polish border. But yes Indeed very perturbating
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.
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.
@@simon_777 same. It’s only a product of luck, hence I don’t understand why I should be proud about my country (especially when it constantly discriminates me btw)
you can just say you're from a homophobic country. there's no such thing as "queerphobic". Do you hate gays so much and are you so narcissistic that you want to pretend homophobia doesnt exist?
She’ll never be ethnically european, that’s why there will always be something to remind her that she isn’t entirely from France. Because the history of that continent was mostly made without her ancestors. And everything in Europe will always remind her that. That’s very different from the countries of the New World, where all those societies were made by immigration.
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!
Usually hypocritical people in France will say “je suis universaliste” to say they don’t see color. The funniest (and most dangerous) thing about this is that an organization called “le printemps républicain” was born and it’s just people earning money to say the filthiest things about antiracist activists and poc public figures (especially in politics / journalism) but it’s okay because they supposedly don’t see color.
No it’s just that the concept of race doesn’t apply to human beings, black and white people are the same races but have a different ethnicity. The concept of black ppl being a different race as white ppl was popularized by Europeans to justify crimes against black and particularly the slave trade. I’m sure many people don’t want to use the word « Race » cause they think being white in France doesn’t give them any advantage, in that case they’re wrong.
Scannavian, has done nothing against POC starting to speak of that will only lead to racial tension. Scandavian country are alreading turning into trash with this whole recent mass immigration thing.
scandinavia need to stop to be colorblind on streets rapes/sexual harassement, and crime, look in sweden it's mostly arabs and blacks who are the perpetrators, same in all europeans country. we need to stop with colorblindness
Im a white american and I was shocked to find how tabboo race was. Many french people told me saying le racisme was fine but ça se dit pas La race. And they would always explain that word is used for genus of animals, but I also hear a lot of insults like ta geuele and escèce de… use animal related words to dehumanize people. Is that true? I was mostly in Normandy in 2010s but I was always suspicious of that correction. What no one ever talks about is the dehumanized Romani people across Europe. I’d love a video on their rights!
Americans like to bring up discrimination against Romani people as proof that Europe is just as racist but it's apples to oranges, and when Americans bring it up they actually don't give two fucks about Romani people; they use it as a "gotcha" point, which is kind of ironic how you're arguing about racism but using the plight of a group of people and dehumanising them for a mere checkmate to argue with people online rather than actually show concern. You guys also are pretty incapable of showing how to navigate the situation of Romani discrimination as well which shows a lack of interest in the discussion and more so just wanting to crap on Europeans. The plight of Romani people is more so under the umbrella of xenophobia rather than racism; people aren't discriminating against them because "they aren't white" but because of cultural differences, much like you see in Europe between other European ethnic groups, as notably seen in the Balkans. Doesn't justify anything, but explains a lot. Europe suffers primarily from xenophobia and racism is really an afterthought. The US has copius amounts of both and pillars of its culture are founded on nazi-tier ideology. People like to forget it often but Hitler himself mentioned that the United States was one of his primary influences for how to discriminate against Jews, which says a lot about American society then and now since the majority of the thoughts about race are still upheld.
Espèce there doesn't mean the scientific meaning of species, it's the word that preexists the scientific use. Just like there was a word "race" before racism, and like species, it meant just "type" of anything.
The concept of black and white people being of a different race just isn’t real, it was literally invented by Europeans to justify crimes against black ppl and It’s not supported by any scientific evidence. The right word to use is ethnicity, it’s way better cause it doesn’t put people with different social status and amount of privileges in the same category just cause they look the same color.
the things is complicated : Races don't exist as a real biolocial reality, they are merely a social construct. Therefore, people saying that races don't exist and that using races is racist are right, from the point of vew that : "races don't exist as a biological reality" But races exist as a social construct. Basically, races exist as long as racism (and the stigma and historical consequences that go with it) exist. But for understanding that you need some basis on sociology Which make both french and american biew on racism incorrect. Americans because they too often treat race as if it was a biological reality (i have head for example some americans saying "latino is not a race because is black and white latinos" which is stupid because latino IS clearly a race in US society, as race is a social construct, and not a physical fact). But french are incorrect when they say races don't exist in general, because they only don't exist from a natural standpoint (they are a product of society), but this mean they still exist from a sociological standpoint, like nationality exist as social construct. But as most people, no matter the country, have a limited understanding of complex social issues, the discussion is hard, therefore educating them about those subjects is important. Some french peole deny that racism exist in France, some admit racism exist in France, most don't know what "systemic racism" mean tho, as it's also a sociological term, and agan, most people have no knoledge of sociology (no matter the country, even in countries where sociology is a prominent university field like France and the USA ironically enough)
My grandparents are harkis , i'm fully Kabyle (not mixed with white). What the french mean by "integration" they mean racial integration, you can be a 3rd gen nonwhite "migrant" with 0 ties to your country/culture of origin and you will be othered because of your race. i've been spit at after the bataclan terrorist attack despite not being muslim, i've been accused of stealing plenty of times after buying things. Racist comments like "you speak french so well when did you arrived here ?" or "i thought you were here because of racial quotas but you actually study" are really common. People who believe that race doesn't exist in France don't know any POC or if they do, POCs don't trust them enough to share their experience with them. Thank you Alice
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.
Of any NATO member other than US perhaps. The US, as should be no surprise to anyone, has the largest number of forces deployed to the African continent [officially & who knows how many are there without being acknowledged.] I think we officially have something around 6,500 forces in Africa atm vs. the 5,000 or so France has.
@@jeffersonclippership2588 Right one official, formal US base. However as of 2019 it also had 28 other locations for a total of 29. They are separated into either "enduring locations" or "less permanent 'contingency locations.' " Enduring locations were in: Djibouti - Chebelley & Camp Lemonnier. Uganda - Entebbe Kenya - Mombassa & Manda Bay Gabon - Liberville Ascension Island - St. Helena Ghana - Accra Burkina Faso - Ouagadougou Senegal - Dakar Niger - Agadez & Niamey Chad - N'Djamena Less permanent "contingency locations" were in: Tunisia - Bizerte Niger - Arlit, Dirkou, Diffa, & Ouallam Mali - Bamako Cameroon - Garoua & Maroua Libya - Misrata & Tripoli Somalia - Baledogle, Bosasso, Galcayo, Kismayo, & Mogadishu. Kenya - Wajir Those 29 are down from the 34 "locations" they had in 2015. From 2013 through 2017 US Special Operations forces saw combat in 13 different African countries. This stuff just isn't widely known & the government/military are unwilling to answer questions about it. I know about it because a reporter named Nick Turse has been covering the US military's presence in Africa for over a decade now. He has never gotten an answer from Africom about its locations in Africa & has been trying to FOIA request the information since 2012. He's managed to get his hands on some classified documents on the subject a few times which is where the above information about the locations in 2019 come from.
The military thing is not the real issue, since without that governments/regions would fall to islamist insurgents like Afghanistan. And yes, some of that instability obviously stems from consequences of colonialism. The real issue is the economic and fiscal power France still holds over western Africa, which makes some of those countries not really economically independent. The french central bank still dictates their currencies. France needs to give that up if it wants to see these countries stand on their own feet. The military missions are more an unfortunately necessary thing and well meant. Compared to Wagner, for example. While France clings onto its last bit of remaining colonial influence, Russia is behaving like the West did in the 1800s.
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.
Hey, german here. We have something similar going on: People with a "migration background" here get seperated into well integrated ones and not so well integrated ones. Which is kind of a sham. Like it suggests that people theoretical can be german, whoever they may be, or wherever their ancestors came from, but in the end a huge part of german society and german institutions will always define them as foreign. It puts a huge burden on those humans, to try to adjust as best as to what they believe the german society expects them to be. But they can never really reach that, while they are still being told to strive for exactly that. Either they succeed and become kind of a model foreigner, or the fail and are labeled as unintegrated. Either way, they stay as foreign. I came to realize that this society as it is currently structured is not able to really offer a way for "integration". It is inherently closed and yes, it is inherently racist. And when you point to specific failings of this system of "integration", like Alice said, people will make it out like pointing that out is the real problem. They really dislike it when you critique their myth. In the end I really started to dislike the whole notion of integration. I mean what does it even mean? Integrate into what exactly? Humans are humans and should be valued as such. There is no sense in forcing people to adhere to some mystified notion of homogenous "german culture" that frankly doesn't even exist as such. Even more so when a large portion of people in this country will never really see humans with a migration background as real germans anyway.
Yeah. It starts with the entire system that people have to go through when they arrive here. Nothing is structured in a way that can quickly integrate them into German society. Quite the opposite: They are being kept separate and the state tries very hard to find a reason to get rid of them again. It's disgusting. :(
@@wesleymatthews6356 If you could read, you would realize that they wrote "some mystified notion of homogenous "german culture"". And they are correct: There _is_ no homogenous german culture. A punk in Köln is completely different from a farmer in Bavaria or a former industrial worker in Saxony who lost their job after the reunification and never got anything worthwhile since then.
another German here, and I was about to comment about the similarities as well! As well as the "you have to integrate!" narrative it's also the denial of colonial history that really annoys me. The only thing I learned about our colonial history in school was "yeah we only had really few colonies anyways and the British Empire was much worse" when Germany literally committed a genocide in what is now Namibia. Absolute disgrace, thankfully I think this is slowly changing (my much younger brother at least learned a lot more about colonial history in school so that's a ray of hope)
@@wesleymatthews6356 the point is not so much that German culture doesn't exist, but that there is not one homogeneous culture that all German people (or even a solid majority) can or want to actually claim/identify with. There is this idea popular among some (conservative) German politicians of a "Deutsche Leitkultur" (like a leading or most important culture) that usually consists of Goethe, Bach, Mozart, Dürer... I'd wager that less than 50% of our population have actually read more than one or two poems by Goethe and assume that an even smaller percentage genuinely like his writings. Same goes for Bach's and Mozart's music or Dürer's art or any other example. What counts as important culture was for a long time decided by a small elite (usually white, male, straight, Christian or non-religious, able-bodied, and upper (middle) class. I don't think it was ever representative of what culture the majority of the population was living in. And that is the second big criticism - German culture is also not homogeneous in terms of all the different regions we have. E. g. so many people from other countries associate Lederhosen and Dirndle with "Germany", when they are actually Bavarian and you hardly find them in other areas of the country. The cuisine is also really varied depending on where you go, as are dialects/accents. To me it really makes no sense to try and come up with "the German culture", it's only ever a construction, usually erected by people in power, often with the explicit aim of excluding minority/marginalised groups from "being cultured".
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
The first thing you should know about this country is the following: France adminstration records everything. They've been doing this for centuries. To be clear they have a very efficient (domestic) intelligence service. Better than the US or Israel for ex. So, regarding the ethnicity/diversity data they know everything they need to know. But officially it does not exist. It's as simple as that.
France has always been a mono-culture and mono-ethnic and its not 2 millions italians workers who have fully integrated and eventually returned to their home country who will change this reality. That said, the mass immigration encouraged by our globalist elites, who are looking for docile new slaves and to destroy all national and cultural identity in order to make people ever more malleable, are gradually destroying French identity and culture, for the greater good of their capitalist interests.
Germany does better then the sithole state USA and it doesn't have racial statistics because we know that implementing racist policies like the US is a bad thing
The thing about the data. Thing you have to understand is that WW2 highly impacted the country. It happened only 80 years ago !! The country was separated in half, there was a lot of d/th and destruction, the country was in literal shamble. Should I also mention the fact that the race categorisation/concept was made up by a german n/zi ? Also recording ethnicity in France don't make even sense. France is not like America. Administratively Black don't mean anything just like white don't mean anything in France. If we had to go by ethnicity they would have to record all of the african ethnicities groups. You don't group a senegalese and an egyptian together, it's just not the same. Especially when immigration in France is from pretty much all over the world. Big community of vietnamese, chinese, bosnia, congolese, senegalese, etc. Let's not even bring french islanders ! It's just going to be a mess because you can't group together people who don't even share the same origins culture and religious beliefs just by their skin colours to begin with (especially knowing that countries in North africa like Morroco also have black populations or French islanders for many which are melting pot). Data collected is country/origin wise not "race archetype" wise. Here what data is collected by the government for every french citizen : - Where you are born - Where your parents are born - Where your grand parents for each parent are born - And if you have it, your more updated family book And I precise government. These info are only also shared with the health. Things like school or watherver only ask for where (country + city) YOU are born and that it (because it's written in the ID card). It's more logical and more administratively helpulf, makes more sense than what the heck america is doing. Especially when the race cases don't even fit for many people (especially for people from asian and african continents). How do you place a black man that is morrocan ? Especially when many american states put magrehbi as being white. And unlike american who are 1% irish, it's not rare for white french person to be more than just french. It's not rare for many to be half spanish or half an other surrounding country. Also, in France, you don't help a certain group based of their ethnicities. You help a group based of their social statues. Anyone of low social statues can get help, liteally anyone, because that is how the free social security work. + The free food ticket that ayone with very small income can get. Health is literally free or cut 50% (if you make less than 500€ per month). And if you are beneficiary of that health category also get cheap ride from the train (you get around 60%-80% off, paying 9€ instead of 25€ for a ride). Young adults literally can get free holidays budget payed by the government. And homes that never had any computer can get their first one paid by the government. Let's not even forget, the government granting EVERY students from 15 to 18, 300€ budget each year to buy and do cultural stuff (concerts, cinema, books, events, arts, etc). I know all of that because I'm literally a black (congolese/angolese) girl from a mother who immigrated here 22 years ago. When we were kids she didn't have enough income, she and other people like her were following courses to help them find jobs, in french or informatic, etc. We lived in specialized appartement and houses for immigrants family (that we shared with a bosniac and morrocan family at that time) called "Armée du salut", us kids and lived for a moment in a foster home for a short while so my mom could have free time doing administrative papers/french/math evaluations (granted she already spoke belgium french and was a merchant in angola) for 4 year until she got a better visa an a permit to live in the territory. And even by then she still got help times to times for food for free something call "resto au coeur" and "secours populaires" same for health until 2010 when she started having a better job and until 2018 when she got her nationality card and we are now middle class french citizen. (for minors they automatically have french nationality when they reach 18 and grew up in the french school system at a early age or if they are born in the country, one of my classmate who is from tunisie origins was in the same situation as me + it's not rare sometimes in elementary school to have a new student coming from another country, that almost the norm) Sorry for the novel
France is one of the few countries I’ve visited where you pretty much don’t see white people talk to black people outside of work settings, same for arabic descendants. It’s the wokest place in the world in every other sense and it’s still more racist than anywhere in the Americas.
As an Algerian person we’re taught a lot about French actions in Algeria how they used to massacre us and the horrors that we had to go through for our independence war. A lot of what we learn of the history of our country is French dominated because the majority of our modern history was under colonial rule obviously so we are very much inclined to dislike the French. France continues to take advantage of our country to this day and I personally hope we can coexist and have a strong partnership if France acknowledges its wrongdoings.
An African Union is the only way out, and the colonial powers will keep trying to get you to fight each other. They do the same thing in US ghettos, they get the community support networks to sell drugs and shoot each other over turf. This was basically admitted to by Nixon's drug Tzar in the early 1990's, and again confirmed by a journalist who found the CIA designed crack cocaine and shipped it to the US to sabotage african american communities. China will probably aid in this, but they'll want to incorporate it into a piece of their BRICS banking system, as opposed to truly uplifting africa.
Well france has already escuse himself for colonialism action in algeria. But algeria is not all clean and did the same during it's first independance time and forget easily (it's one of the reason why french and algerian can't get it). From what i can see, french government have done everything to improve their relation with algeria, but algerian don't even try from their side. Algeria use this hate for keep it's government in place. And when you see how algerian immigrate people are in other country most of the time, you can understand why other don't want to improve their parthnership with algeria.
@@florex5480 '' Well france has already escuse himself for colonialism action in algeria '' I guess it says a lot. Personnaly, I don't really see what's different when we still get Le Pen, Zemmour and all the other colonial products imported in the french political scene.
@@huriale1617 France didn't "excused itelf" this would be indeed ridiculous, self centered and stupid. What France did was the only thing they would do : recognize their crimes, admit that they did wrong and bad things. They din't say "we are excusing ourselves form the crimes we commited, so we are no longer to blame." They said "we did this and we did that, it was bad and we acknowledge it." The only one that could do (or don't do, it's on them to decide) the forgiveness part would be Algeria. But Algeria can also refuse to forgive, it's their right afterall and were the ones wronged, France is not entitled to be forgiven by the victim, but they recognised their fault, which is wat should be expected from their part. Regarding LePen and Zemmour, hopefully they never get elected. The far right scores are growing, at least for the moment they never gained power, but the trend is worrying, especially as it's not just an isolated thing, but a global trend in most of the world of seeing rising far right demagogues (From Trump to Bolsonaro, the Ukip party in UK, far right catholics PiS in Poland, Orban in Hungary, the Fascists in Italy, new right coalition un Sweden, far right in Israël, Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey, etc... So honestly i am worried to see the far right taking power into France at it would make everything worse. Especially now that Zemmour managed to popularize actual white supremacist talking points (like the "grand remplacement" conspiracy theory) in the media or wanted to rehabilitate Nazi collaborationist Petain as a national hero (despite the fact that he was a traitor)...
@@wikipiiimp9420 his mentality reminds me of an episode of metalocalypse: Basically character has trauma because of an incident that happened with his brother when he was young This character goes through a whole therapy and rehab session to get over his trauma and forgive his brother Then he goes to his brother and forgives him, then his brother WHO CAUSED HIM TRAUMA refused his forgiveness.
For anyone into movies, Caché (Hidden) is a very well done film centered around how the effects of the Algerian War are repressed and denied by almost everyone except those who were directly targeted/oppressed. Still present for all, still relevant for all, just “hidden” by those who can’t face that they may be benefiting from something so terrible. 10/10 would recommend!
So, as a brazilian white male, and a leftist, I watched your video and I can say we are years ahead of france in this matter. We've been through this phase, like 10 or so years ago, where calling people "black" held an offensive tone to it, tied to the slavery times where black people were treated as objects. But after a few years of cultural turbulence (not only political btw) black movements in brazil started to proudly call themselves and ask others to call them "black" because why wouldn't people call them black?! Of course, it's not as simple due to the fact that the term was given a new meaning, of the history of their people as slaves who, through literally countless brutalities, were capable of reforging themselves with their now "african" culture, and are now bringing more and more elements from a lot of ethnicities and history of africa. They kept a lot and now "have a home in two continents", as I've been told by a black activist. From my pov, it's different than the current use of the n word, because calling someone "black" is not a taboo (except among the political right, i'd guess) but is something which is seen as a form of recognition of their culture and heritage. It's not forbidden for white people to call them "black", but it's is respectful. They know very well they owe nothing to anyone, that their ancestors are as responsible as white people for the building of this country, so they are a-ok for us calling them by their skin color. Some actually love, like literally, love it.
thats so interesting!! thank u for the insight its rly cool to see brazilian history as someone who doesnt know much (and even then its mostly abt slavery and thats rly reductive) i feel like younger and i guess more left leaning french ppl have an easier time with saying "noir" to describe a black person compared to older ppl who have been used to calling different ethnic groups by "nicknames" that are in some other countries slurs (and now in france we r starting to reconsider how they have been used as slurs as well as being the default name we used for these groups)
What I struggle with in this topic is how cyclical it is. It makes me sound like a conservative sometimes but when you learn that "black" used to be a term that was considered rude, so it became negro, which was not considered rude. And then you learn that black was reclaimed and preferred. But then at least in the US African American became the preferred term. It starts to feel really futile to argue over which term - excluding obvious slurs - is proper and correct and not racist. I mean LGBTQ people are struggling over the reclamation of the term queer. It was used as a slur for so long by so many that older people don't like it's reclamation into official discourses. It's one thing to reclaim a slur, another thing to make it your identity and include it in the name of organisations etc. Language matters so much, but at the same time is so slippery it begins to feel futile to fight over it when it can literally divide marginalised groups against themselves over what's the correct way that "we" should refer to ourselves.
@@IshtarNike I see what you mean. But here in BR negro (it is spelled the same as English) was always used as a "technical" term, but it now comes close to the current meaning of "black". Not as strong, not as culturally weighted, but either way is not just a way to "define" someone.
Black people call themselves black in French and in France, too. Actually, it's white people who are uncomfortable about calling us "noirs" they rather use the english word for it. Also, she's mainly talking about the black people who are French because of immigration and not those from overseas France who mostly are because of slavery. Both are really different, and both receive different treatments. Even though we're still similar, we also have different histories and then customs and behaviors. She's talking about colonisation, not both, unfortunately. France is a complex country, and her video, while still informative, lacks clarity since she's only a spectator of all of what she's talking about, and she missed a lot about how and why France is still a racist country even though it doesn't realise it. It's true, though we don't see race, but it's not in the sense that skin colour doesn't exist and it's not used as a tool to discreditate or to automatically be racist. I'm a leftist, too, and I too think that americans are wrong about how they deal with it. Race is a controversial word in france not because we don't want to bring it up but because it's widely accepted and taught in France that race does not exist in the sense that the only human race alive is homo sapiens and that the only difference existing between us are our ethnicity and phenotype, melanin levels and personality. That's why the far right will not be talking about race either while being racist but more so about ethnicity in France. It is indeed an american belief that's impleting itself in France that they do exist when they really don't. Basically, we as a country believe that race equals human and that we then have different skin colours and facial features, etc... Whereas in america, its race used the old way, but instead of saying white humans and black, brown animals, it's black humans, brown humans, and white humans. That's also why when a french african guy or woman does something bad, we'll have french of senegalese origins, whatever or french of algerian origins, whatever did something bad. Ps: I'm black and from the French West Indies.
As someone who doesn't know a lot about race relations in Brazil, thank you for sharing that! Do you think that in Brazil, there might even be a change when it comes to the use of the word Japa? I've heard it's common to call asians this but wasn't sure if it's derogatory?
I'm a linguist and France is the one single worst example when it comes to the suppression of regional languages - most of them are well gone by now. It just showcases the French mentality of 'we're all French therefore we can only have one single identity' which is super toxic and inherently against multiculturalism - that's why nationalism keeps being a major force in politics. It takes such a long time to get out of this mindset and bravo to all the souls that spoke up.
its actually much more of left wing concept than right wing. I think this issue is mucccch more complex than a mrere will to supress differences. First of all, France contrary to most EUropean country has always been centrlized and also actually independent. A lot of regional disparities have also disappeared with the fast development in the 19th century of inter regional migrations and the very quick spread of norms. Of course in some areas speaking in local language was eventually forbidden for a time. But the very concept of the french republic was never about race that means it was about the language and culture and not the blood. This waa still a very novel concept than goes much further than an ethno-nation. THe trade off lays there , since its not about race or lineage then you need to display your belonging to the nation by speaking the main language. THis idea is rooted very deeply. BUt the issue of culture and identity and why the far right is rising goes much more deeper. What differentiates West european countries from the US and UK, is the double fear to lose your culture from both migration and intense anglicization of arts/Litterature/Education, this puts countries as France Italy and co to have fringes of their population much more anxious than their American counterparts, and thats an issue not often discussed.
@@tayloryoung9803 yes, look at l'academie and we find a form of linguistic purism as kind of 'resistance' but also this standardisation is at the expense of diversity. French is among the first languages if not THE first to be standardised. To make my personal position crystal clear I hate nation states to the bones, so I'd rather countries like France to be more decentralised and there's eventually no need to display you belong somewhere. I didn't mention left/right wing because there can be both. Italy was way more fractured so it still has immensely better linguistic diversity, and there's not quite as severe a push to prove that you're Italian according to my experience.
@@quain5063 Well there is always and benefit/advantages to it. Again the advantage would be that belonging to the nation is easier as it goes through set values and less about ethnicity., heritage of the revolution. Of course regional differences still exist. Another element that has made france more willing to centralize is the fact that compared to italy/Germany or Spain regional disparities would be much bigger if there hasd not been a push to a common norm. Basque country or French Flanders, Brittany and eslace or Savoya display much bigger potential disparities than would extremes such as galicia and Andalucia display in spain or Pedimonte and sicily in Italy. France bordering most of other "big" europeans. would have its border regions subjected to stronger independism probably, making the centralization rational very valid. Still, many regional accents disapeard without any state intervention druing the 1950-1980, as television and movement increased normalization, moreover the quicker move away from religion in france compared to southern neigbors and even west germany has made certain local traditions obselte quicker than some other places.
What French suppressed through harsh violence in its colonies, it suppressed it through harsh education in its own territory. The "french national identity" has always been wielded with pride by nationalists, but it is a fairly recent concept, not older than the Révolution (at most). The whole ideal of "unity through common identity" has been the sources of both terribles actions and today's toxic denial. We are in denial about the failure of this ideal in the integration of foreign population, and we are in denial about how this ideal has crushed and erased almost all of the linguistic and cultural wealth of the French regions (which makes most of its territory). And strictly linguistically speaking, I think we may be the only ones (atleast in Europe) who don't call our various French or Occitan dialects as "dialects" but as "patois", which is supposed to mean the same thing, but is actually a kind of condescending/degrading term ("oh it's not a dialect, it's just a 'patois' "). Thus, lot of french people grow with this whole idea of patois, which is less than a dialect, just a "peasant-thing" of bad french, which gives them a denial that modern French is just a dialect among others.
I can't say anything about racial tensions in France but let me point out an observation I made when I visited Paris a few years ago. Am American and am originally from the Caribbean. I live in NYC and when i visited Paris i was surprised by the parralles between the two cities in terms of how the demographics were spread around in the city. Anyone that lives in NYC knows that while the city is diverse, you could take a very confident guess as to where someone lives based on the color of their skin. You will have a chance of being even more corrupt if you know that person's ethnicity for sure. From there, you can go and make more guess about their social economic status. I was very surprised to see something similar in Paris and while i won't make any guess because I don't have much context, the fact that people of color appear to live in the more dilipated parts of the city made me feel right at home.
Here in Spain it's also common (at least for me and people my age) to avoid using race as a descriptor when talking about someone else, not entirely a French issue. I don't think it's incompatible with addressing racism and colonialism however. I just don't like to make the non-white people I know feel as if they are being singled out.
I am a non-white French man. I have many White friends as I happen to belong in the liberal upper middle class (where Arabs and Blacks are still rare). Believe me, it is not my friends recognizing the differences in our experiences that would make me feel singled out. I already feel singled out by these differences. It is actually the other way around: what is jarring is having my worries about discrimination and racism being shut down by well meaning friends who ignore the obvious fact that we don't exprience racism in the same way.
You're not singling anyone out by acknowledging their race. Unfortunately we live in a world where white is seen as the default race so by denying other people their race you are in fact erasing them from the social landscape.
@Tarak Bouacida I am a white french man, from the upper middle class as well, and I'd be interested in hearing more about your perspective on the matter. I personally feel like our social circle is one where most people are not "actively racist", but due to growing in a sort of comfort bubble where - as you said - there isn't that much diversity yet, there is a lot of "implicit racism" in that we tend to ignore or discard the existence of racism just because we don't see it in our circle.
@@tarakbouacida746 as a south asian in the uk, I also feel the same way about being shut down when I bring up genuine issues but I also do agree with the commenter, I dont like being singled out and seen as only "nonwhite" by the kinds of people that think every aspect of my existence is altered by the fact my skin is different colour from theirs. Like there is a way of showing curiosity without making someone uncomfortable
I lived in Brest for 2 years and worked in the university there. Although the city was full of Arabs and black people, I barely ever saw a student who was not white. Black people and arabs lived in different neighbourhoods. My left wing French friends there told me to stay away from certain arab areas of the city. I was absolutly shocked by the inequality in France amongst the different races. Maybe it's just the city I was living in, perhaps it's not like that throughout France.
Yeah the US is also pretty segregated too by neighborhood. One thing is that for post secondary in America - you do get more of a mix of races and cultures and people are more open to making friends regardless of background. Europeans are much more standoffish and cliquish when confronted with diversity of people.
That is a complete lie. French universities are full of black and Arab population. Not only as students but also as faculty. I know this well, I live here since 15 years ago. I read your comment and I could not let it by. If you teach or study in France there is a high chance that at least a quarter of the students come from African or middle Eastern descent
French and international migration is very new to the city of Brest and to the surrounding region. It is not representative of the rest of France. Racism though is very real in France and also very taboo. It is going to be hurtful to address it. At least the big majority of french people know that races are a social construct and have no scientific value (because of ww2) so I think it's a good start. The rampant racist ideology in France definitely comes from colonialism and capitalism.
@@TeddyAura Hello Teddy, 1/4 of Black people in university is way more than the actual amount 😊 I've been living in France my whole life, and the more you go up in the studies, and the more prestigious studies you do, the less Black people there is. In none of my school years since the end of high school there was more than 5 poc in my year of studies.
@@julietomiche6219 I don't say only black, please read my comment. If you put blacks and people from the Magreb and the middle East it is at least 25%. How many students/ professors are from Algeria or Morocco? . With regards of Brest, I have never been there but I had been in Caen and Rennes which are cities not that far away and what I have seen is the same. 75% of "white French" and 25% of mixed origin. Please don't promote misinformation by exaggerating the current situation in France
You nailed this. I appreciated how you mentioned the West Indies. In school, we never had courses about the Antilles and it was truly a shame because it's part of the French history too. I think it says a lot about our current political climate. Avoiding certain topics in the curriculum and only associating slavery to the American territory was the starting point. France was NOT innocent in the Atlantic slave trade. We as a society should acknowledge that and the media should address this more. Another interesting point is the fact that the Cannes festival denied the movie "Chevalier" any promotion, when it's about the Chevalier de Saint-George, a mixed half French half Afro-Guadeloupean fencer and musician. The movie not having French releases was a big shame.
Great video, would love to hear your thoughts, or just the French perspective, on the movie La Battaglia di Algeri (1966). This "colorblind" perspective is very common here in Brasil too, it's how folks try to get away with their racism.
There is implicit assumption in the video which is we can only talk about racisme if we talk about race. I personally don't like the word race, it is a made up concept with no basis whatsoever and we are still using it in 2023 which is absurd to me. Racisme and Xenophobia in France is very different that in America. I know, I lived in France for a while, and can count many times I've witnessed or been on the receiving end of racist, xenophobic comments, and discrimination. The reality is, by americanising the discourse in France we are not helping combat racism in France because France is not the US, has a different history, a different population of immigration, a different cultural and societal structure. A simple example is, discrimination by name. I can assure you it is extremely prevalent in France, if you are black, but you have a good nice french name you will get less discriminated than if you're "white skin", whatever than means, but have an "exotic" name. You will systematically get more job opportunities, get accepted into better schools, get bank credit, rend apartments if you have a nice french name. It is really problematic, and sometimes it feels like everyone in France is in some kind of denial and doesn't want to say it and to actually deal with it because they are the land of "Les droits de l'Homme". That being said, americanising the subject will not help solve France's problems. Talking about people's "race", a made up concept, that we should all stop using, because it doesn't mean anything, will not help. Being black, doesn't really give any indication of your ethny. You could be Berber living in North Africa, be Middle eastern living in Yemen, south African or Brazilian. I understand why it is important in the US, because discriminating laws based of skin color have been implemented until fairly recent history, but that's probably not the focus European countries should be looking at if they want to combat racisme and discrimination.
Race is real enough to impact people's lives and identity. Different countries have different dominant racial groups that form the main identity of their nation. Would Nigeria still be Nigeria if it wasn't black dominant and anyone could live there and be called Nigerian
@@TerraiderRace is an outdated, offensive, colonial racist concept, and phasing out and making this word taboo is a good thing, just as phasing out words like Negro is a good thing.
@@kingkong-gn6oiMost Nigerians in every day life don't use categories like "black", it's something literally made up by Europeans and that didn't exist before colonization.
je suis d'accord avec la grande majorité de la video toutefois j'ai tout de même un énorme problème avec le terme de "race", les catégories qu'on désignent comme races comme "blanc", "noir", "asiatique" etc mène à plus de stéréotypes qu'autre chose. Comme tu le pointe dans la vidéo tout les "blancs" ne sont pas les même que ce soit ethniquement culturellement etc et il en va de même pour les noirs, mettre tout le monde dans le même panier avec "race" dessus amène a une généralisation qui amène a des stéréotypes racistes. De plus, il n'y a qu'a voir le système américain de race pour se trouver rapidement face à un problème, on retrouve les catégories noir, blanc et hispanique mais on ne prend pas en compte qu'une personne d'Amérique latine peut être noire ou blanche et n'est pas forcement juste " bronzée". Ainsi je pense qu'il est plus pertinent de parler d'ethnies plutôt que de race puisque cela permet plus de précision et cela permet d'englober les nuances culturelles
which is complete nonsense anyway because we have a fuck ton of rich or famous celebrities that are black or much more dark skinned. so much for that supposed "racism".
There's nothing wrong with noticing differences, the issue starts when you weaponise it. I don't mind being called black cause I'm black just don't use my skin colour to push your agenda and this is to both white and black people
I’ll preface this by saying that I’m French and currently living here. I think many people don't know why or understand why France doesn't really talk about "race". Since 1872, France has enacted a law that prohibits the collection of data based on the race, ethnicity, or beliefs of a person. This sentiment was strongly reinforced following WW2 when people around France had a firm conviction of "never again". With the majority of the French people at the time having supported the Vichy government, (That is not to say that there weren’t people in the resistance or that there weren’t people who didn’t disapprove of it) who had played a significant role in the deportation of Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and non-hetero people around France, that law made in 1872 played a pretty big role in safeguarding the aforementioned minorities. This is because, censuses of that sort weren’t uncommon around Europe, in fact, this type of discrimination was present throughout all of European history. However, the ones that had begun to use those surveys in order to discriminate on a massive scale had begun with the Nazis in Germany. (I’m sure everyone here knows how the Jews were forced to wear the “Star of David” on their clothes at all times when they left their houses in Germany) Through them, they were able to find the majority of Jews residing in their country and send them to death camps. With that in mind, it is now easy to see why France refuses to conduct surveys based on someone’s race, ethnicity, or religion. Additionally, as mentioned in the video, people in France don’t really like to use the word “race” either, because that implies that not all of us are human and instead, are genetically distinct enough from one another to the point of being a new “race”, which we are not. There is this prevailing idea in France that we should prioritize collective rights over individual rights. This can be seen through its secularism and non-discussion of things regarding the color of one’s skin or background, as before any of that, we are French. While I do agree that discrimination in France exists and should be talked about, we must always remember why this law was put into place in the first place; to prevent the discrimination of minorities.
'Black' isn't a dirty word, describing people as they are doesn't connote slight, having prejudice on the basis of them being 'black' or Arab and what not would be the slight, the dirty act
I once had occasion to be in a situation that allowed me to spend time with different people from different countries, and I remember that a friend from Australia said the same thing, that they don’t say “black” in Australia. With who Americans would describe as a black person, they refer to that person’s country of origin. She used the example of saying that they would say that someone is Cameroonian if they were from Cameroon, and so on.
As a Belgian Afrocentrism sickens me because we divided the people of Congo and Rwanda in tribes that were closer or further removed from the white men to conquer them. And the story was that some where more white and came from Egypt. And we have our part of responsibility for the Tutsi genocide. I won't say more about afro-centrism but it is not the paradigm shift it's supposed to be.
I have a complicated relationship with race being used as a defining factor . As a brown person coming from India, I am too tired of brown “intersectional “ feminists taking over us in the west and also assuming a moral superiority as they are brown themselves. Most of the time it has opposite intended effects but i can understand why we need to talk about race because it does impact experiences
I would not consider those to be real "intersectional" feminists. Intersectional is just a cool thing to say, because it makes it sound like you've read books by women of color, but a lot of so called progressive/leftists in the west don't do any work to deconstruct their internalized western chauvinism and they have a complete inability to understand that people can experience the world and their feminism in a way that's completely different than their perspective of what feminism is supposed to be.
@@Bojoschannel but nobody actually uses brown for a specific group. White and black are the only colors used for specific groups. Other people who are commonly brown are referred to as just “Asians, Native American, Arab, Latino”
I feel like a lot of Europeans tend to look down on America’s race issues without ever really understanding the difference. America actually TALKS about our issues. Constantly. We are always striving to move forward in that respect and because other countries are constantly hearing our discussions they assume that it’s an extreme issue here. Honestly I’d say it’s not that bad as an African immigrant, that is, compared to my cousins who live in Austria and Germany. Its not hush hush and it’s something people can and will talk about. The problem is you can’t just IGNORE race, it will always be there even if its a created term; not talking about it will not make racism disappear it will just halt and stagnate important discussions leading people to hold things in without considering other perspectives.
Saying that race doesn't exist isn't the same thing as saying that racism doesn't exist. These are 2 very different things. Race is a social construction, it's like gender, it doesn't exist but was created as a way to maintain the current dynamics. Racism, on the other hand is discrimination based off that social construction. I applaud you friend who refuses to teach racialism to his children because until like the 19th century, it wasn't a thing. It's something created to prevent European workers from organising with African slaves. It is not a coincidence that places where people are very ready to call each other by their races are also the most racist societies in the world; in the US, the police shoots "black" people indiscriminately and get away with it - in the US, you have Black Lives Matter, a PR initiative that went very wrong (or very right if you are antiracist) and brought about one of the biggest insurections in the history of the US, bringing mighty USA down to its knees only to die in a fart because they organised along racial lines instead of according to their social class. On the other hand, here, in Africa, nobody calls themselves "black". "Black" insinuates that we are a monolith but that's not true, we are thousands of cultures speaking thousands of languages. Heck, even the formerly enslaved communities in French colonies, like Reunion Island don't even call themselves "black" - they call each other Kafre, Zorey, Malbar, etc, each with very specific meaning as to their ancestry, culture and language. "Black" and "White" are western inventions, kindly keep them in the west, please. And maybe learn from leftists in your own country instead of bringing the racialism of the US to spaces that are trying really hard to destroy it.
Thank you, This racial ideology fuels more discrimination and racism than anything else. It's so reductive and makes no sense. It's very upsetting to see it get more and more popular.
So what is the moral problem with having a conception of nationhood that is based on ancestry? Seems to me like a very common thing throughout history to have more loyalty to ones family than to strangers.
you exclude people who are also French but whose parents were perhaps not. You create an idea where some people are "more" French than others, meaning they have more rights to be there, more legitimate etc. and of course, this inherently is based on racism in the end. Because the easiest way to spot who is less French than someone else is based on their look, religion, languages they speak, names etc.
All descriptions are reductive, though. Making "race" or words related to it a bad word is not a good thing and suggests you are trying to avoid race issues and racism rather than being truly tolerant.
Tolerance isn't good either, honestly what are you trying to "tolerate" about another person's skin color and culture without being racist, the same logic applies to any other form of bigotry
What do you think of the fact that "Negro" became a bad word in English? Why is it bad that France is phasing out an outdated and offensive concept used to oppress entire populations and justify racism? Or is it that Americans decide what word is problematic and what isn't worldwide?
I think the problem is that we tend to mix up racism with dislike with foreigners. Racism is an ideology based on appearance while dislike of foreigners (which exist in every country in the world) is a sense of them not being us. As long as we have countries, there will always be a them and an us. They don’t share our history and our experience, just as we don’t share theirs. There are over lapses, especially if a country has some kind of connection to another country, and your skin color makes it easier to see if you aren’t from this country or not, making it easier for someone to single you out, but in most cases I have to wonder if the hostility comes down to race or just a dislike for “them”. I as a Swede would face hostility in France if I moved there because I’m not French. Someone from Japan would face the same “not French” attitude but people tend to sum that up to racism despite it being no different from my encounter. Sure, I would most likely be French passing if I learned the language perfectly, while the looks of the Japanese would ensure that Frenchmen could single them out as not french but the starting point here wouldn’t be racism. That said, saying there are no racism in my country is definitely an overexaggerating. Racism exists in all countries, among all people, but I do believe it is far less the culprit of hostility then people seem to assume. Hostility towards foreigners has existed since the rise of civilization, (long before racism was invented) we can see that in, for example, ancient Egypt toward the jews (and later in African countries where they were called werehyenas) and in Ancient China toward the “barbaric tribes” (such as the mongols). My fear is that, though we should fight against racism where it shows its head, but if we mix up the two then one will go unaddressed. Fighting racism when that isn’t the culprit will not ease our hostility toward foreigners, or our tendency to think they are less for this country because they weren’t born in it.
Too many words, didn't read. Doesn't refugees constantly rape your women and Swedish have no future and are being sanctioned. I heard you are also a minority in your own country lol
Thank you for your video! As a Brazilian, whose country used to be thought as 'a racial democracy', I commend your for your video. Discussing white privilege, racism, slavery, eugnenics, xenophobia, present-day fascism, feminism, homophobia, the rise of the far-right around the world, conservatism, zealous orthodox christianity as well as islam, colonialism and imperirialism is a much needed practice among those who would like to see a freer, a more egalitarian and a more just world! If we let these ideas silence us, we risk losing the rights we have today. I believe we need to study all of these issues through the lens of intersectionality of race, gender, class, politics, histories, economics and religions. Love from Brazil.
I am black American and just got back from a two week trip to Paris and the racism I experienced was honestly very unsettling. I would say it border on more microagressions but it was still a very different experience I was there for a study abroad program where we visited different businesses and the answers I got to question were icky. I had asked at a bank visit if the prestige behind European ivy leagues(as the presenter put it) lived up or if it was just the name they were after when picking candidates and then got an answer about the lack of racial diversity. We had gone to Unesca for a visit and they talked about how the place is supposed to represent all the countries in the world but I asked why they had a statue praising Christopher Columbus and was given an answer about how I basically needed to shut up because they don’t have racial issues there and they teach about s*avery Also there were so many racist art depictions just in the streets. We went down this market place street and on the wall was a mosaic of a slave feeding their slave master. And a lot of other statues or books on display that presented Black people in very dehumanizing ways. I was also a little taken aback by how common the word oriental was to refer to Asian people. It was even in the Louvre and on restaurant menus. Also a group of 4 men were catcalling my group and they chased after us making monkey noises. I was the only black woman in my group and I am still pretending I misheard this because I can’t believe someone would do that
Oriental isn't an offensive word in French. It isn't even used only for Eastern people or cultures but the East in general. It literally means Eastern just like Occidental is Western. For example Western culture is Culture occidentale. Just because you find something offensive means the entire word needs to change it? Do you know how many words are potentially problematic in other languages? I want Americans to stop using the word race, it's racist. Also stop using the word Jew, it's a slur in Russian. French isn't English, France isn't America, get over it.
I find it crazy that this kind of discussion is literally that exact same thing we're having here in Canada, mostly focused on the indigenous community
I’m canadian this is definately a thing here also, I notice myself trying not to refer to people by skin colour and its not something I ever intentionally decided to do
I love that you made this video, and how you made it. I can recommend to all Europeans to try and find the social movements for racial equality in your own country because they're there! American understandings of race and racism can be helpful and are important. But understandings of race and racism are different here, and people who have to face racism here know a lot about it. I learned so much from May Ayim for German Black history, for example. Editing to say that I subbed and am looking forward to watching all of your videos and as a German, we do ignore a lot of our colonial history and only recently recognized the genocide we committed against the Herero and Nama, and we still have a lot of pro-colonial sentiments in museums and an unwillingness to give back literal human remains in a lot of places. I'm still waiting for more of a thorough reckoning with our colonial past and an understanding of race as it pertains to Germany, but I'm hopeful more people want to learn.
I watched an intetesting youtube video by Rebal D an Egyptian himself on the Nextflix Cleopatra documentary, it was very very insightful as he highlighted the diversity of race in africa alone and that the theory of Cleopatra being Black is actually offensive to many Egyptians as it suggests Egyptian citizens now are descendants of colonialists. I really recommended further research into that theory as all evidence suggests Cleopatra was a Macedonian woman. I'm not denying that history is notoriously recorded in a eurocentric way but for this specfic example I think its quite complex
An idea: since we started caring so much about preserving indigenous cultures, which is great, how about we start addressing how the indigenous populations of Europe are literally disappearing ( if we look at Govt statistics ) ? I mean it’s great that we talk about the decolonization of India or Algeria, and I’m all for it, but why are we overlooking Europe? Europe is for europeans, just like India is for indians and so on. Why does wellbeing for Africa and South East Asia have to mean that something bad has to happen to Europe? Imagine if indian Govt. statistics would show that in 20-30 years ethnic indians are gonna be a minority in their own country! Or if indians were only 36% of the population of THEIR OWN CAPITAL!!!! I suppose that would be a problem you would address. I’m sorry but the double standards are crazy. I really like your essay videos, but there is obviously a little bias in them.
i think the one thing that holds all of us back from having productive and useful discussions is the reoccurring sentiment that we (non francais de souche) are trying to erase french people’s identity by always bringing up all the stuff that france owes us from a legal and moral standpoint, which only reinforces resentment. also i feel like one of the reasons why race talk is considered taboo is so that those who are privileged can say that the only reason why most people that are part of a minority struggle to live is because they aren’t doing enough to be better and live better, if race doesn’t exist then they get to pretend that racism is a myth and that minorities are just ungrateful people praying on the downfall of the good french. i as someone who’s from a country that was unjustly turned into a colony, don’t understand why we don’t have the right to talk freely about this very traumatizing past and don’t even get to voice our struggles due to discrimination without being labeled as lazy or a threat to the republic. i never felt like i belonged here despite living in france for the past 8 years, and i never expected to feel welcomed or at home, what i did expect though was simply living without my life being made harder due to the constant racism and islamophobia, and apparently that was too much to ask. i did survive a majorly white people’s high school and have experienced first hand the insensitivity some people show in regards of actual crimes against humanity all because they have the privilege not to experience any remains of them of being constantly reminded of what happened in the past. and to be frank i have no idea how i survived. hearing white people calling black people the « n word » with no consequences, and even people doing the nazi salute or voting « h*tler » to a class president vote…yeah i really don’t know how i kept going the last straw for me was when someone made a joke about the algerian people who were murdered and thrown in the seine saying « couldn’t they just swim back? » and since this one was a very personal one it made me feel really really bad for days. no one did anything about it, the kid never got suspended not even those who did the nazi salute or pulled the vote « prank ». it felt like hell truly, but the worst part i feel is how most of the students there did things that if it were me or my black friends who did them would’ve guaranteed a background check of our parents, the involvement of police or trying to link theses events to our religious beliefs. also did i mention that a student got shot? the only non white person at a school protest? yeah that too.
I lived in France between 2001-2006, I've always loved French culture and language, so I was very well integrated as I am a white eastern European that spoke without an accent. That meant that if I didn't explicitly state that I am not French people wouldn't know. I used this to observe the different reactions I would get from different people. There has been quite a few times when guys from older generations completely changed the way they spoke to me when knowing I wasn't French - they would start saying things like "Tu bien parler". It was so funny for me but again, as a white guy there wasn't any risk or heavy prejudice. I couldn't imagine how it would feel for people of color or any apparent physical difference.
I don't think most former colonial empires have really dealt with their own racism. In Spain we've just had the leader of one of the biggest parties claim that we are not a racist country right after a football player complaint about the insults he keeps getting for being black
I must say, I very strongly disagree with most of what you say. I am a French young man of "mixed race" and with left political opinions, but also a student of rhetoric, linguistics, and semiotics. Race in France does not exist. Ethnicity does. Since the Enlightenment, our philosophers have been fighting against this word, which suggests that we can't really "breed", that we are more different than what we really are. And yes, I hate that the American ideology of race is coming to France because we simply do not have the same history. While slavery for black people was still a thing, the mayor of Paris was a black guy. We even had a black deputy in the late 1700s, just after the revolution. How can we compare countries where black people have been free and of equal rights for over 200 years with one where laws were different regarding the skin color 60 years ago? Our parents were alive while Jim Crow's laws were still there. This is absurd and I will not hear that. Yes, racism is alive and kicking in Western Europe, I've been a victim of it. But it is way different than the racism I have seen living in the US, and by all means, do not compare us to Americans who had Jim Crow in the 60s, where the KKK is still legal today. And I will never stop fighting about the word "race" in French. I see skin color, but I give it as much importance as hair color, I just don't care, so does my French family who dates to the 1700s and all of the people around me.
@@riyadougla539I don't know if it's the least racist, but if it was the worst in the world, the world would have been better. Uk is also pretty good
@@riyadougla539"race" is a racist concept and a slur in France. Why is France phasing out an outdated and offensive concept seen as problematic instead of a fight against racism? Ah yes, because only the American perspective matters. I want to see one day Brazilians come to the USA and say they NEED to use the word NEGRO and if they don't THEY'RE in fact the racists because they're denying the history of black people! See how ridiculous that sounds?
Yet another brilliant video. I don't have much to say other than that these patterns are unfortunately quite common across countries with a history of colonisation. I live in Aotearoa / New Zealand and so many of the things mentioned in the video are mirrored here. I mostly wanted to comment to boost engagement and hopefully recommendations for others to see it, but the struggle really is a complex and widespread one for communities all over the world, so I'm glad people are talking about it.
You really hit the nail in the head when commenting about having to prove that you are French enough. As an asian raised in Spain, proving that I'm Spaniard enough is my defense mechanism and it is always activated(except when I'm with trusted people). For many people, the impression that they have of me, will be the impression they will have for all asian people. Great video!
Maybe just maybe. No matter how much mental gymnastics you do, no matter what the magic piece of paper says, you'll never be a Spaniard. Your blood, your genes show that you belong to a population group that evolved in a completely different part of the world from the Spanish ( castillians, aragonese etc) and that can never change no matter what. So embrace your true actual concrete biological identity and kindly get out of a nation state build as a home for it's indigenous people like Spain and go to some country of immigrants like Canada or sth.
1:31 It’s not exactly the same thing but in India, we’d say the same thing about Caste and now there are public discussions on a caste census to help identify systemic inequalities.
I'm a white American and my parents aimed to raise me and my brother as being "colorblind," which I think was more harmful than helpful. While children of color around me probably experienced racism to a certain degree, I believed that racial discrimination ended after the 1960s. When my brother described a TV character as black, my parents told him that he shouldn't describe a person by their skin color. As a kid I assumed that talking about race was inappropriate. Teaching kids to be colorblind doesn't help them but instead teaches them to avoid sensitive subjects that they may need to face in order to understand other people.
Talking about racism in France, some time ago I finished reading perhaps one of the worst books by a French author I've ever read, "The Camp of The Saints" by Jean Raspail. Apart from some truly disturbing and dehumanizing characterizations, what stroke me out was the constant reminder of the author that West, Christianity and Whiteness are one singular concept. At first I thought it was nothing but outdated ideas held by a tiny minority, but after seeing the many cases of double standards of many people that claim to have nothing against legal migration, I kind of suspect that Raspail's notions of what constitutes "the West" aren't too far fetched from the minds of said people.
Really enjoyed this video. I’m an American but am a secret francophone 🤗 America has its problems too. A lot of people will think we’re post racial after Obama. We’re not. But the dream lives. I often think because France had a different path and Liberty, egalitarianism and fraternity can be used as a cover so people don’t have to look at their racial past. Bravo for the youth and forward thinkers of France who are trying to change things!!
I’m an American (ironically with both French and Algerian Berber ancestry). And when I went to France as a teenager, I was appalled by all the racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia I saw there.
I think when we're talking talking about racism, it's important to realize that one if the reasons slavery in the US at some point turned to almost entirely African based people is exactly because you could visually identify them. There had been a lot of white (indentured) slaves as well, who could just run away, whether you branded them or not. The people and especially the slave owners in the US just didn't have the capacity or the institutions in place to find escaped slaves on this very vast new continent. They had also tried the original peoples, who just ran off as well or died. But black people were great for the purpose of slavery. Those who survived this terrible sea/ocean journey were genetically very strong and mentally hardy and you could very easily identify them due to their skin colour. Problem solved! Anyone who was black was a slave. And groups of men could earn money by going out and find the black people who had escaped. And when the US got to the point where it wanted to and could organize a police force, in a lot of places they started with this network of groups. Which is why there is still such terrible racism in the police force specifically in the US. It doesn't help that they get very little training, average of 21 weeks, don't want to waste those tax payer dollars! So please realize that there are a lot of people for whom seeing people as black, not as one aspect/characteristic of their appearance, means they are seeing them in a way to identify them and brand them slave/wrong/other. When they were young, someone/people around them pointed out black people to them and described them in a negative way. So they were taught that as soon as they saw a black person, what to think about them - and this was very negative and therefore racist. So when people refuse to identify people as black, they are honestly in their minds breaking the link between their taught racism and the people they see. Based on where they are coming from, what they were taught, this is an amazing feat that they consciously worked on. They now also see racism as bad, so they literally internalized that racism is bad so seeing colour is bad. To now call them racist feels very hurtful to them, both because of their efforts to change themselves which aren't being seen nor recognized, and about the internal discomfort they feel around the fact that they are also seeing still that there was a valid reason for racism - which they get fed a lot of on places like Fox. It's a complicated mess that is being exploited for financial gain. But do realize that it is thanks to their efforts to not see race and not describe people as black that this link is less strong now for us. Which is why we can now say: but that is a characteristic and it's not bad, so why are we not using it as a word to describe these people. This characteristic ought to be as neutral as other characteristics. And that's definitely the next progression. Just do realize that the people who can't follow us there, can't because they were taught to link racism directly to the visual cue of the skin colour.
Just this month an elderly moroccan-french citizen was arrested because someone falsely claimed she was shoplifting, the police tackled her to the ground and the poor lady was screaming that she was innocent, the only one who stepped in was an Algerian man who deescalated the situation. Tells you everything you need to know about france and Europe's fantasy of "equality"
One bad thing happening somewhere in Europe and automatically all Europe is like that ? It's like saying "In New York I saw a Karen, that tells you a lot about North America"
Je me permets de commenter en français parce que flemme de sortir mon plus beau anglais ^^' Je trouve ça quand même dommage que dans une vidéo qui parle de race, il n'y aucune allusion au fait que scientifiquement le concept de race est aussi controversé et sans fondement pour les humain. Je pense que prendre conscience que oui, socialement et culturellement, il existe des groupes de population (des "races") qui ont des vécus communs, des traumas générationnels etc lié à cette catégorisation humaine (aka racisme etc); c'est aussi important que prendre conscience que la catégorisation en "race" est arbitraire, historique et n'a enfait pas de fondements biologiques. Tant qu'on accepte pas ce fait, on aura tjs des gens pour prétendre qu'une "race" est meilleure qu'une autre et faire des hiérarchies (cfr histoire du racisme scientifique et par ex, les commentaires sous la vidéo nota bene concernant la série netflix cléopatre ou certains propos tenus par l'extrême droite ). Pour le passage sur la guerre d'Algérie, il y a un enjeux aussi pour les historiens actuellement, c'est que les documents officiels sont encore classifiés, mais plus pour très longtemps si je ne m'abuse. Ca va etre très intéressant quand on aura accès aux archives de voir ce qui va en sortir (pas des trucs jolis j'imagine). Pour le reste, très intéressante vidéo. J'ai remarqué aussi cette tendance au color blind aussi récemment en France et ça m'a mise très mal à l'aise. Cette volonté de ne pas voir les "couleurs" me semblent lié à une volonté de ne pas vouloir s'occuper des effets et dégats bien réels du racisme.
Mais merci!!! Je suis surpris qu’il ait fallu que je descende aussi bas dans les commentaires pour trouver quelqu’un qui parle de ca (le fait que le terme ‘race ne signifie rien biologiquement)
L'hypocrisie raciale qui règne en France depuis des décennies est en train d'être mise à mal par les gens de ma génération. That's why they maaaddd. Je pense toujours que le racisme en France est beaucoup plus profond que ce qu'on essaie de nous faire croire.
Hello ! I am french and I loved your video. It is totally hypothetical but maybe the fact that french people don't want to use the term "race" is that it also mean animal breed and so it is maybe one of the reasons why it is seen as negative.
I disagree with you. "Race" doesn't exist in France, especially "skin color based" like in the US. Ethnicities and nationalities do. Race isn't a scientific or objective concept, it's cultural. Just because racism exists doesn't mean that we should attribute a race to people or that it represents an objective reality.
I really appreciate listening to your French perspective. We need more of these perspectives, coming from other European nations. Speaking as a German, we have kind of the same issues. Our terrible European war history usually overshadows anything that has to do with colonization. Many people don't even know about the Herero and Namaqua genocide and our colonial past - me included, I know way too little about it.
As a white French woman, I feel like I would also try to avoid using skin colour to describe people when I was younger, I studied in the UK and had friends from all over the world and it's really just a colour, I don't really think about it nowadays honestly. France's way of handling the issue of race never made sense to me, like you mentioned, the whole 'no getting data on ethnicity' just feels like they want to sweep it all under a rug. It's just like if I stuff all the mess in my room under my bed, it's not going to make the mess disappear, it will still be here and even get worse with time, even if it's out of sight. I feel similarly about France's take on secularism, I feel like France is always out there mentioning that they're a secular country and have been for over a century when they don't allow you to wear any sign of religion in schools and some other places, it feels counterintuitive to me? So much for Liberté if you can't wear what you want to wear As for colonialism, I have strong feelings about it. The vast majority of my mum's side of the family was born and grew up in Algeria when it was a colony, my grandparents and aunt who was a newborn left right at the end of the war and had to start anew on the mainland. I know there's some resentment against the French state for the lack of help they got when they arrived back in France with nothing. My grandma ended up very racist. I remember as a teen we had arguments about race and immigration, but I started avoiding politics like the plague around her because I knew there was no point, none of us were going to change their mind, it was a dialogue de sourd. I remember once asking her "what about if someone American moves to France" and she told me it wasn't the same (how is it not the same?). I moved abroad to study when I was 18 and stayed there afterwards, I am a migrant too although I didn't move to get away from war or in hopes of a better life, I still got some benefits from that country as a student, as well as from France. But now, like the vast majority of people who migrated to France, I pay my taxes and do my bit in society, I just don't see how skin colour or religion are important? I actually hadn't heard about what Omar Sy said (I've been living abroad for years) but honestly, I feel like it doesn't just apply to France but the entire Western world. Only what is happening near us or has direct consequences for us is going to be talked about, a lot of conflicts around the world are just ignored because it's happening far away
D'accord avec toi mais c'est pas contre productif juste différent et défectueux. C'est un truc que je remarque beaucoup mais en vous éloignant de la France vous en oublié la France ( dans le sens où vous en oublier que les règles d'aujourdh'ui sont informé par l'histoire de celle ci) . Je comprends ce que tu veux dire par contre productif pcq l'on aurait pu etre laïc comme les autres le sont seulement aucun pays anglophone ojd à un rapport à la laicité comme le notre. Au US et en grande bretagne la laicite à été introduite pour protégés les minorités religieuses en france elle a été imposé pour retirer son pouvoir à l'eglise mais plus largement à la religion. Au US le président jure sur dieu lors de sa cérémonie d'inauguration et en grande Bretagne le roi il est fait roi par l'église encore. La laïcité française est même dites comme n'ayant pas de traduction car c'est quelque chose de propre à la France. En France tu peux être musulman, juif, chrétien, bouddhiste, taoïste, hélleniste ce que tu veux à partir du moment où tu mets pas les règles de ta religion au dessus de celles érigé par la démocratie c'est pour ça qu'un chrétien ne peux pas porter de croix à l'école, que les musulmans pose problème avec le voile, les juifs avec la kippa etc... Le problème c'est pas la religion en soi mais le degrès de visibilité des signes en lien avec les religions. La protection des musulmans , juifs etc... c'est secondaire et involontaire dans le contexte français de la laicité. Bref, la laicité c'est de gauche faut pas l'oublier, la loi n'est pas mauvaise ce sont les droitards qui utilise le manque de clarté du concept à leurs avantage. Sur ce point là on a besoin de clarté et donc de modification. Pcq la loi ne servait et ne sert à protéger personne d'autre que la république française et son pouvoir. C'est similaire mais pas la même chose.
The difference between moving Algeria to France and you moving to America is the history of french colonisation in Algeria. As an Algeria, you would expect to country that colonized and fucked over your country, and has ongoing relationships with Algeria, to recognize that. You would expect France to take particular care of immigrants of former colonies because they are already French in a way, and your country helped make France wealthy and powerful at the colonies own expensive
When I was living in Paris I met a group of Parisians and everyone in the group was a different race, but grew up in Paris. They told me in France they do not address someone as we do in America such as "Asian-American". They say we say we are all French. Even if their descendants originate from the Middle East of Africa. They say we are ALL French. I love that.
The French establishment has shut down discussion of these issues through their control over the media, government and schools. Europeans like to criticize Americans regarding their obsession with race but Europeans like to pretend everything is perfect and dismiss issues when people raise them. Not sure the younger generation is all that different.
I agree, and I also think the younger generation is not that different, the far right movement is growing with young people especially with the young white people in France
As a french anarchist who is aware of what occurred to my people during the french Third Republic with the bloody Adolphe Thiers as a commander of the Versaillais soldiers, I would argue French Republic has always been anything except Liberty, Equality or Fraternity... While at the opposite, libertarian socialists always have given their lives for these typical values in fighting the Bosses, their Estate troop, and thus the so-called "Republic" ( same in Russia, Ukraine, Spain, and pretty much everywhere ). "Republic" is a "Potemkine" word used by politicians, the same way there were "Potemkine villages" ( fake painted villages on cut wood ) along the Tsar's russian rails to hide the real state of the dying-from-hunger russian country side... Except in France this "Republic" Potemkine word was intended to hide the increase of all unequalities and, more recently the rising of a pre-war last-century authoritarism, and when it comes to "fraternity", they don't neither bother any more to fake anything since a few monthes : All people seeking ayslium are now publicly treated either as future slaves or as possible terrorists... Here is the french "Republic". P.S. Human "race" is not a thing in France because scientists use to speak about the "human specie", which is not scientifically subdivided into races because it does not pass the needed differences. Instead, we rather speak about "ethnic groups" when it comes to ancestors genom... That's the main explanation of why there is not such a thing as "human races" in France ! ...Then only comes into play social tendancies to speak or not about something taboo which is... Just not a scientific reality, while it is indeed a sociologic one implying racism.
There is a museum on immigration, but it is purposefuly called "Musée de l'immigration", the title of the muséum doesnt mention colonialism :) and knowing France, they would NEVER add colonialism in the title of a public muséum. Once again, not putting words on our past.
@@julietomiche6219 Ive been there at it talks a lot about colonialism, this was 5 y ago. The name.. I didnt care that much. I actually forgot the name, so I had to google it to post it here correctly. Generally, I understand the author's point, just wanted to mention the museum as an educational checkpooint.
The problem with talking about race is that once race is part of the discourse you can't control what disparities people are going to notice and politicise. You might want to be talking about discrimination and police violence, but others will quickly notice disproportionate black crime and IQ gaps. So, you either choose not to talk about race at all, or you choose to politicise it and risk the discourse not going exactly your way.
There is something empirial in Frnace that puts it very closse to russia, clinging to their impire, not bothered by giving pices of Ukraine to russia just to make a deal. Thats what empires do, not bothered very much about other countries bounderis and rights.
I wouldn't say it's similar in any way. I don't think France has an "imperial" mindset anymore. However, it has a hard time accepting the fact that it's not a diplomatic big player, respected by all. Our governments wanna feel listened to and respected diplomatically, so they get kinda desperate in preserving the act. Our government is just desperate about convincing itself it can be the one who enable a deal between Russia and Ukraine. But in doing so, it's willing to make ridiculous compromises just to not piss _too much_ Russia. Or else, the illusion of "being respected" shatters immediately
In Indonesia, instead of pretending that race didn't exist we're just embracing it and have a national motto of "Bhinneka Tunggal Ika" or "Different But One/Unity in Diversity". Our founding fathers work very hard to make sure that we can co-exist together between the thousands of ethnic groups, cultures, and languages. You might want to read "Imagined Communities" by Benedict Anderson, he wrote this book because he got inspired by how Indonesia despite of their differences can unite and become one community/country.
Indonesia is colonizing West Papua like they did with East Timor. It's all a lie lol. Modern day Malay colonization of Indigenous Papuans that should've ended up independent like Papua New Guinea.
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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." 👏👏👏
So Pierre Bourdieu was wrong all the way when he said that the environment had a major role in the future of individuals? Being born in a country with infrastructures, a functional education system, access to culture has nothing to do with the way the people living in France succeed? By the way, isn't he living in the US now?
And you should know that many people born in France, who can speak french, aren't french. The people born in Alger in 1950 stopped being french in 1962 apparently. And you should try ask Corsicans whether they are french. 😁
Soil isn't magic. Neither is a piece of paper. That person will never be French no matter what.
@@constantinethecataphract5949 is what a racist would say.
@@constantinethecataphract5949 Omar is french. Being french isn't about the color of your skin.
@@johnwotek3816 says who?
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
SAY IT LOUDER FOR THE PEOPLE IN THE BACK
Wild, totally forgot thats still a thing.
Does somebody know what would happen if Haiti just stops paying that? Would France heavily insist on that money?
Like: "Hey Haiti, sorry to bother you, but it seems you havent payed your monthly fees that we forced on you when you wanted to gain freedom from our oppressive colonial rule. So uhm, better pay up or we colonize you again."
@@pinotpinotpinot Haiti finished paying reparations to France in the 1930s. Though at that time it was under US military occupation so they had other problems to think about by that point
I am happy to tell you all the Haitian debt from the freeing of the slaves has been payed (Yay !)... but more seriously the country and the people are two different things, Poland wasn't a colonial power but I'd say it's pretty bad to be black down there. You can't put it all on colonialism, it's more of a power dynamic and nationalism thing to me.
@@poseidon6666 that’s a good point, colorism and racism even exists in predominantly black spaces because it is often internalized from society
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"...
Where there is diversity, there are racial issues. Want to know where there’s not racial issues? Japan. Give ethnic homogeneity a try!
I’m Canadian (Pakistani Canadian) and Canada is mostly not racist yes a handful of white people might be but as long as you pull your own weight people generally don’t care
@@at7915 India is also a very diverse country it does not any racial issue
@@at7915japan is literally racist to a genocidal point
Latin America *cough* *cough*
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.
I think the Ulster Plantation is comparable to other colonization's, it just didn't effect as much for as long. In terms of war crimes, the English don't usually discriminate.
I've always wondered if Spain, France or Italy helped back Irish Catholic rebels at any point in their history of fighting against english protestantism? It seems like they'd have to have gotten help to hold back the English.
@@jjoohhhnn The Ulster plantation's effects are still ongoing and very real.
@@jjoohhhnn There were a bunch of (abortive) attempts by France and Spain to aid Irish independence, such as the Spanish Armada and French support of the 1798 rebellion. You may need to read a history book.
@@jjoohhhnn Also, Protestantism wasn't a "problem" in Ireland until the aftermath of the 1798 rebellion. A massive chunk of Irish rebels have always been protestants of various traditions. One of the approaches taken by the British government after 1798 was to stoke and weaponise sectarianism to keep prevent future rebellions, leading to the rise of organisations like the Orange Order in the 19th century.
It was never about religion.
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
I'm from Paraguay and we definitely have the same issues, and it's so weird because literally 70% of Paraguay has indigenous roots, but still most of us are pretty racist against indigenous people except when it's about our football team playing - then everyone is Guaraní.
Indigenous people here also lost their land during the far-right dictatorship and with that means of survival, which means they need to go to the city. Where life is even harder as opportunities (which are not many) are reserved to people that "is from the city" in a way, which is even smaller. The worst is that they have no voices, and no one seems to care, most protests are just another "inconvenience" in the way to work.
The one country I know is doing well on this in LATAM is Chile, they even had an academic from Mapuche origins leading the re-write of their constitution in 2021.
The one thing I'd like to add though is that intersectionality exists across races and also across classes. And discrimination is heavily attached to class in LATAM, if you're not indigenous, but poor, you still have it really difficult, and people still looks down on you and it shrinks your opportunities (as far as just having a "countryside" accent, which exposes your lower-class origins). Now, most indigenous are poor and anyways - you can imagine how hard they have it.
The first time I went to Mexico city I was not expecting that. I'm black and for some reason, I thought I would be able to blend in, like in Cuba or Brazil, but nope lol
I got a lots a looks, kids wanted take pictures of me, even in the circle of my very rich white friends.
They all nice, but I felt like an attraction, and whether in the streets or in the house, it was very obvious who what background the maids and the poorest people were from.
I try to go every 4 or years since a a decade, so we'll see how things change...
That’s nearly every country in the Americas
It’s the entire continent from Canada all the way to Argentina
@@gonzalochristobal well shit in Chile the indigenous fought back violently so that plays a role
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
They call you black by respect because today european people are accused of racism for litteraly nothing, because some black people love being offended and playing victim a lot so people need to be careful when addressing to them not to sound racist. Because they know that a lot of non-white ppl love to play victim and get offended for nothing.
je comprends le point de vue qui doit rejoindre celui dit en vidéo (que j’ai pas encore finie) mais finalement si ton ami ne t’a pas décrit comme noir c’est peut-être parce qu’il n’y a pas pensé, parce qu’il s’en fout juste ? et il a dû pensé que ton date allait aussi ne pas prêter attention à ta couleur de peau ?
A White German -- appropriate, a Black Frenchman -- not appropriate? Did I misread sarcasm?
To be fair people starting to use the word black instead of noir because it was pushed forward as cool and progressive by antiracist associations.
The “black blanc beur” is an example of that.
There's no such a thing
“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.
That quote is very fitting.
@@antlerbraum2881 It reminds me also of the goal of newspeak in 1984, give people fewer and fewer words to express and conceptualize their thoughts, and at some point it will make thought-crime impossible.
@Karl Snarks my thoughts exactly!
There’s an excellent NYT article titled 'How Italians Became 'White'' which really summarizes the process of outgrouping to ingrouping with labor exploitation as the throughline.
Race isn't real, but racism absolutely is.
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
The algerians that have been killed were litteraly supporting terrorists groups that were killings innocents french citizien in algeria only because they were ethnic french.
I wonder how racist some African or Asian countries are.
Tunisia literally had openly anti-black mass movement a few months ago.
French white people were murdered in Algeria before the independence. How long are you going to beat a dead horse to prove something.
@@divinegon4671 no need to go this far. Have you visited Balkans?
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.
By saying people of color, you're still describing yourself as "default" and black and brown as the others.
You commented 1 day ago How?
@@kashishprasad yeah that is so weird
@@kashishprasad time travel
I think that "not seeing race" should mean that we don't see them as entirely different, but we recognize their differences in culture, and we can acknowledge their skin color without it being a taboo to some extent. Racism shouldn't exist. We should be able to see all of the differences but ignore them in favor of our similarities, or even better, embrace the differences and similarities by simply acknowledging that even in our own demographics, people are not the same. I'm just as different from most of my own culture as I am from any other, so what is the point of looking at skin color as the primary difference, when someone can be good or bad no matter the color of their skin, and often times the "most dangerous races" in the minds of whites, are far less dangerous than the white people who oppress them.
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.
I can second that experience from the 'other' side, no one was educated or talked to us about race and we were really racist as kids even though we would all claim we were not. Ignorance made it so easy to hurt people in a way I never would now that I have been able to learn.
And it puts people speaking out against discrimination in a doubly awkward spot because discussing race at all is already taboo.
Bro your bengali? Right?
Casteist jokes?
What was the joke?
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.
They're not better they just get fewer headlines because there are fewer and no country is as important as the USA to the modern world, so everyone hyper-fixates on the USA.
When in doubt, blame the English lol
@@TheCapnCanuck Who are ironically german.
Quebec is the worst province in Canada to be an immigrant - unsurprising given this video. The English are better with a live and let live attitude.
@@jjoohhhnn China is more important.
It was illegal in France until the 1990’s to give Breton children Breton names.
yeah my dad and his sister have stories about how they weren't allowed to speak breton at school, a langage that they used to talk with their parents at home
@@loucampo-riou
My family is Irish and what France did to you guys sounded very similar what England did to us when I read about it.
France is a strange country.
@@MCKevin289Ridiiculous : That not Brez langages that was prohibed but all dialectes in France...before 1900 some ...90% people in French republic did not speak French but dialectes ...that is républican Scholl very strict in those Times that made all puppils speak French ...
France is based on racism, my family is from Alsace and if some know their history it belonged to Germany so we had German names, it took us years to be considered as "assimilated".
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.
I'm from a country where almost everybody is mixed, and I feel uncomfortable refer to anyone as black or white, we say things like "she is wearing a red tshirt and is a little darker than me" But black and white feels racist like I'm reducing that person to that. We don't say things "like white people stuff" I remember when I heard of the concept the first time I was in shock because I thought they were literally white like paper 😅 I was a child around 10.
I'm always unconfortable using or hearing someone else doing it.
A couple years ago it felt taboo to call someone black (Schwartz) in Germany. I remember a classmate being (half) jokingly called a Nazi because he described someone as black. Many preferred to use dark-skinned as a descriptor, me included. I only started using it because black people told me they identify most with that term
I mean no one is actually black, and no one is white- they are pink, cream, dark brown, brown, tan etc as a kid I never understood the word for this reason as no one is actually literally white or black
@@tcrijwanachoudhury Come on, you know it's not a literal descriptor.
Yea, I'm not using the word race to describe human beings. This idea of using the word race to describe humans is basically just americanism.
In Germany the word race is a taboo, because putting people into different "races" (Rassen) has a pretty bad history here.
Evidently actually attacking ethnic groups is still acceptable in Germany, just don't talk about it 😂😂😂
@@jillybe1873 Just because some people do it doesn't mean it's acceptable. It's both illegal and unacceptable.
I guess I really have a nice image about life in Germany. I’m born and raised here as half german/ half tunisian with an arabic surname and I never faced racism really. Could be bc I live in southwest Germany and in a diverse city with many people of different ethnicities tho
Yes
@@jillybe1873 Nobody who isn't a r*tarded Nazi considers it acceptable to attack people based on their ethnicity. Stop talking shit.
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.
It angered me so much how Poland was praised (on the social media site I frequented) for taking in the Ukrainian refugees, but everybody conveniently forgot how they let Middle Eastern refugees starve and freeze to death in the woods just a few weeks earlier.
And when I said as much, I was drowned out in a wave of hateful and dehumanizing rhetoric against Middle Eastern refugees.
@@johannageisel5390 I didn't feel much if sympathy for the Polish government, considering what it had done when a similar situation presented but with Middle Eastern migrants.
As an Italian I'm profoundly disturbed by similar attitudes too common among my countryfolks.
@@marcello7781 It's the Catholicism. :P
JK, we have our share of racists in Germany too.
To be fair, though, there are always people who actually do help, may that be in Poland or Italy or any other part of Europe
I have great respect for the activists who try to combat the crimes against humanity that happen at the outer EU borders every day. Just earlier today I read an article about refugees being abducted on Lesbos by the Greek coast guard, forced onto inflatable rafts and then being pushed into Turkish waters. Some activist was able to record it so there is finally proof.
@@johannageisel5390 I completely agree with you and that's why I wrote "government". I feel a deep respect for all those activists that offered shelters to the victims of war and other civilians in need.
@@johannageisel5390 I also think here the issue was much more political and complex. It wasa much harder for Poland to accept them as it would give in the Blackmailing of the Belarusian dictatorship just shipping refugees from the middle east to them to the woods to cross the Polish border. But yes Indeed very perturbating
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.
children are stupid thats why they have to right to vote or the right to consent
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.
I never understood patriotism. I don't feel attached to any country, it feels weird to me when people around me say that they are.
@@simon_777 same. It’s only a product of luck, hence I don’t understand why I should be proud about my country (especially when it constantly discriminates me btw)
Go back to Asia then
you can just say you're from a homophobic country. there's no such thing as "queerphobic". Do you hate gays so much and are you so narcissistic that you want to pretend homophobia doesnt exist?
She’ll never be ethnically european, that’s why there will always be something to remind her that she isn’t entirely from France.
Because the history of that continent was mostly made without her ancestors. And everything in Europe will always remind her that.
That’s very different from the countries of the New World, where all those societies were made by immigration.
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!
Not only is that the same as here in the US, the French are even having elections between fascists and conservatives like us
Usually hypocritical people in France will say “je suis universaliste” to say they don’t see color.
The funniest (and most dangerous) thing about this is that an organization called “le printemps républicain” was born and it’s just people earning money to say the filthiest things about antiracist activists and poc public figures (especially in politics / journalism) but it’s okay because they supposedly don’t see color.
No it’s just that the concept of race doesn’t apply to human beings, black and white people are the same races but have a different ethnicity.
The concept of black ppl being a different race as white ppl was popularized by Europeans to justify crimes against black and particularly the slave trade.
I’m sure many people don’t want to use the word « Race » cause they think being white in France doesn’t give them any advantage, in that case they’re wrong.
Clearly
@AL facts = left propaganda for rightards.
I think it's European, not just French. I'm Scandinavian and it's the same here. It's really USA that is different in this regard...
Scannavian, has done nothing against POC starting to speak of that will only lead to racial tension. Scandavian country are alreading turning into trash with this whole recent mass immigration thing.
scandinavia need to stop to be colorblind on streets rapes/sexual harassement, and crime, look in sweden it's mostly arabs and blacks who are the perpetrators, same in all europeans country. we need to stop with colorblindness
And then Europeans come and act as open minded people meanwhile they bash usa on anything 🤣
Im a white american and I was shocked to find how tabboo race was. Many french people told me saying le racisme was fine but ça se dit pas La race. And they would always explain that word is used for genus of animals, but I also hear a lot of insults like ta geuele and escèce de… use animal related words to dehumanize people. Is that true? I was mostly in Normandy in 2010s but I was always suspicious of that correction. What no one ever talks about is the dehumanized Romani people across Europe. I’d love a video on their rights!
Americans like to bring up discrimination against Romani people as proof that Europe is just as racist but it's apples to oranges, and when Americans bring it up they actually don't give two fucks about Romani people; they use it as a "gotcha" point, which is kind of ironic how you're arguing about racism but using the plight of a group of people and dehumanising them for a mere checkmate to argue with people online rather than actually show concern. You guys also are pretty incapable of showing how to navigate the situation of Romani discrimination as well which shows a lack of interest in the discussion and more so just wanting to crap on Europeans.
The plight of Romani people is more so under the umbrella of xenophobia rather than racism; people aren't discriminating against them because "they aren't white" but because of cultural differences, much like you see in Europe between other European ethnic groups, as notably seen in the Balkans. Doesn't justify anything, but explains a lot.
Europe suffers primarily from xenophobia and racism is really an afterthought. The US has copius amounts of both and pillars of its culture are founded on nazi-tier ideology. People like to forget it often but Hitler himself mentioned that the United States was one of his primary influences for how to discriminate against Jews, which says a lot about American society then and now since the majority of the thoughts about race are still upheld.
Yes it is literally used as a swear word. Like "nique ta race" which literally means "fuck your race." It has a very pejorative meaning here.
Espèce there doesn't mean the scientific meaning of species, it's the word that preexists the scientific use. Just like there was a word "race" before racism, and like species, it meant just "type" of anything.
The concept of black and white people being of a different race just isn’t real, it was literally invented by Europeans to justify crimes against black ppl and It’s not supported by any scientific evidence.
The right word to use is ethnicity, it’s way better cause it doesn’t put people with different social status and amount of privileges in the same category just cause they look the same color.
the things is complicated :
Races don't exist as a real biolocial reality, they are merely a social construct.
Therefore, people saying that races don't exist and that using races is racist are right, from the point of vew that : "races don't exist as a biological reality"
But races exist as a social construct.
Basically, races exist as long as racism (and the stigma and historical consequences that go with it) exist. But for understanding that you need some basis on sociology
Which make both french and american biew on racism incorrect.
Americans because they too often treat race as if it was a biological reality (i have head for example some americans saying "latino is not a race because is black and white latinos" which is stupid because latino IS clearly a race in US society, as race is a social construct, and not a physical fact).
But french are incorrect when they say races don't exist in general, because they only don't exist from a natural standpoint (they are a product of society), but this mean they still exist from a sociological standpoint, like nationality exist as social construct.
But as most people, no matter the country, have a limited understanding of complex social issues, the discussion is hard, therefore educating them about those subjects is important.
Some french peole deny that racism exist in France, some admit racism exist in France, most don't know what "systemic racism" mean tho, as it's also a sociological term, and agan, most people have no knoledge of sociology (no matter the country, even in countries where sociology is a prominent university field like France and the USA ironically enough)
My grandparents are harkis , i'm fully Kabyle (not mixed with white). What the french mean by "integration" they mean racial integration, you can be a 3rd gen nonwhite "migrant" with 0 ties to your country/culture of origin and you will be othered because of your race.
i've been spit at after the bataclan terrorist attack despite not being muslim, i've been accused of stealing plenty of times after buying things. Racist comments like "you speak french so well when did you arrived here ?" or "i thought you were here because of racial quotas but you actually study" are really common. People who believe that race doesn't exist in France don't know any POC or if they do, POCs don't trust them enough to share their experience with them.
Thank you Alice
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.
Of any NATO member other than US perhaps. The US, as should be no surprise to anyone, has the largest number of forces deployed to the African continent [officially & who knows how many are there without being acknowledged.] I think we officially have something around 6,500 forces in Africa atm vs. the 5,000 or so France has.
@@aaronhoy3410 the US still only has one base in all of Africa, in Djibouti
@@jeffersonclippership2588
Right one official, formal US base. However as of 2019 it also had 28 other locations for a total of 29. They are separated into either "enduring locations" or "less permanent 'contingency locations.' "
Enduring locations were in:
Djibouti - Chebelley & Camp Lemonnier.
Uganda - Entebbe
Kenya - Mombassa & Manda Bay
Gabon - Liberville
Ascension Island - St. Helena
Ghana - Accra
Burkina Faso - Ouagadougou
Senegal - Dakar
Niger - Agadez & Niamey
Chad - N'Djamena
Less permanent "contingency locations" were in:
Tunisia - Bizerte
Niger - Arlit, Dirkou, Diffa, & Ouallam
Mali - Bamako
Cameroon - Garoua & Maroua
Libya - Misrata & Tripoli
Somalia - Baledogle, Bosasso, Galcayo, Kismayo, & Mogadishu.
Kenya - Wajir
Those 29 are down from the 34 "locations" they had in 2015. From 2013 through 2017 US Special Operations forces saw combat in 13 different African countries. This stuff just isn't widely known & the government/military are unwilling to answer questions about it. I know about it because a reporter named Nick Turse has been covering the US military's presence in Africa for over a decade now. He has never gotten an answer from Africom about its locations in Africa & has been trying to FOIA request the information since 2012. He's managed to get his hands on some classified documents on the subject a few times which is where the above information about the locations in 2019 come from.
The military thing is not the real issue, since without that governments/regions would fall to islamist insurgents like Afghanistan. And yes, some of that instability obviously stems from consequences of colonialism. The real issue is the economic and fiscal power France still holds over western Africa, which makes some of those countries not really economically independent. The french central bank still dictates their currencies. France needs to give that up if it wants to see these countries stand on their own feet. The military missions are more an unfortunately necessary thing and well meant. Compared to Wagner, for example. While France clings onto its last bit of remaining colonial influence, Russia is behaving like the West did in the 1800s.
Africa has had enough of that.
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.
Hey, german here.
We have something similar going on: People with a "migration background" here get seperated into well integrated ones and not so well integrated ones. Which is kind of a sham.
Like it suggests that people theoretical can be german, whoever they may be, or wherever their ancestors came from, but in the end a huge part of german society and german institutions will always define them as foreign.
It puts a huge burden on those humans, to try to adjust as best as to what they believe the german society expects them to be. But they can never really reach that, while they are still being told to strive for exactly that. Either they succeed and become kind of a model foreigner, or the fail and are labeled as unintegrated. Either way, they stay as foreign.
I came to realize that this society as it is currently structured is not able to really offer a way for "integration". It is inherently closed and yes, it is inherently racist. And when you point to specific failings of this system of "integration", like Alice said, people will make it out like pointing that out is the real problem. They really dislike it when you critique their myth.
In the end I really started to dislike the whole notion of integration. I mean what does it even mean? Integrate into what exactly? Humans are humans and should be valued as such. There is no sense in forcing people to adhere to some mystified notion of homogenous "german culture" that frankly doesn't even exist as such. Even more so when a large portion of people in this country will never really see humans with a migration background as real germans anyway.
Yeah. It starts with the entire system that people have to go through when they arrive here. Nothing is structured in a way that can quickly integrate them into German society. Quite the opposite: They are being kept separate and the state tries very hard to find a reason to get rid of them again. It's disgusting. :(
German culture doesn't exist?
You can't be serious..
@@wesleymatthews6356 If you could read, you would realize that they wrote "some mystified notion of homogenous "german culture"".
And they are correct: There _is_ no homogenous german culture. A punk in Köln is completely different from a farmer in Bavaria or a former industrial worker in Saxony who lost their job after the reunification and never got anything worthwhile since then.
another German here, and I was about to comment about the similarities as well! As well as the "you have to integrate!" narrative it's also the denial of colonial history that really annoys me. The only thing I learned about our colonial history in school was "yeah we only had really few colonies anyways and the British Empire was much worse" when Germany literally committed a genocide in what is now Namibia. Absolute disgrace, thankfully I think this is slowly changing (my much younger brother at least learned a lot more about colonial history in school so that's a ray of hope)
@@wesleymatthews6356 the point is not so much that German culture doesn't exist, but that there is not one homogeneous culture that all German people (or even a solid majority) can or want to actually claim/identify with. There is this idea popular among some (conservative) German politicians of a "Deutsche Leitkultur" (like a leading or most important culture) that usually consists of Goethe, Bach, Mozart, Dürer... I'd wager that less than 50% of our population have actually read more than one or two poems by Goethe and assume that an even smaller percentage genuinely like his writings. Same goes for Bach's and Mozart's music or Dürer's art or any other example. What counts as important culture was for a long time decided by a small elite (usually white, male, straight, Christian or non-religious, able-bodied, and upper (middle) class. I don't think it was ever representative of what culture the majority of the population was living in. And that is the second big criticism - German culture is also not homogeneous in terms of all the different regions we have. E. g. so many people from other countries associate Lederhosen and Dirndle with "Germany", when they are actually Bavarian and you hardly find them in other areas of the country. The cuisine is also really varied depending on where you go, as are dialects/accents. To me it really makes no sense to try and come up with "the German culture", it's only ever a construction, usually erected by people in power, often with the explicit aim of excluding minority/marginalised groups from "being cultured".
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
The first thing you should know about this country is the following: France adminstration records everything. They've been doing this for centuries. To be clear they have a very efficient (domestic) intelligence service. Better than the US or Israel for ex. So, regarding the ethnicity/diversity data they know everything they need to know. But officially it does not exist. It's as simple as that.
France has always been a mono-culture and mono-ethnic and its not 2 millions italians workers who have fully integrated and eventually returned to their home country who will change this reality.
That said, the mass immigration encouraged by our globalist elites, who are looking for docile new slaves and to destroy all national and cultural identity in order to make people ever more malleable, are gradually destroying French identity and culture, for the greater good of their capitalist interests.
Germany does better then the sithole state USA and it doesn't have racial statistics because we know that implementing racist policies like the US is a bad thing
The thing about the data. Thing you have to understand is that WW2 highly impacted the country.
It happened only 80 years ago !! The country was separated in half, there was a lot of d/th and destruction, the country was in literal shamble. Should I also mention the fact that the race categorisation/concept was made up by a german n/zi ?
Also recording ethnicity in France don't make even sense. France is not like America. Administratively Black don't mean anything just like white don't mean anything in France.
If we had to go by ethnicity they would have to record all of the african ethnicities groups. You don't group a senegalese and an egyptian together, it's just not the same. Especially when immigration in France is from pretty much all over the world. Big community of vietnamese, chinese, bosnia, congolese, senegalese, etc. Let's not even bring french islanders ! It's just going to be a mess because you can't group together people who don't even share the same origins culture and religious beliefs just by their skin colours to begin with (especially knowing that countries in North africa like Morroco also have black populations or French islanders for many which are melting pot).
Data collected is country/origin wise not "race archetype" wise.
Here what data is collected by the government for every french citizen :
- Where you are born
- Where your parents are born
- Where your grand parents for each parent are born
- And if you have it, your more updated family book
And I precise government. These info are only also shared with the health. Things like school or watherver only ask for where (country + city) YOU are born and that it (because it's written in the ID card).
It's more logical and more administratively helpulf, makes more sense than what the heck america is doing. Especially when the race cases don't even fit for many people (especially for people from asian and african continents). How do you place a black man that is morrocan ? Especially when many american states put magrehbi as being white.
And unlike american who are 1% irish, it's not rare for white french person to be more than just french. It's not rare for many to be half spanish or half an other surrounding country.
Also, in France, you don't help a certain group based of their ethnicities. You help a group based of their social statues. Anyone of low social statues can get help, liteally anyone, because that is how the free social security work. + The free food ticket that ayone with very small income can get. Health is literally free or cut 50% (if you make less than 500€ per month). And if you are beneficiary of that health category also get cheap ride from the train (you get around 60%-80% off, paying 9€ instead of 25€ for a ride).
Young adults literally can get free holidays budget payed by the government. And homes that never had any computer can get their first one paid by the government. Let's not even forget, the government granting EVERY students from 15 to 18, 300€ budget each year to buy and do cultural stuff (concerts, cinema, books, events, arts, etc).
I know all of that because I'm literally a black (congolese/angolese) girl from a mother who immigrated here 22 years ago. When we were kids she didn't have enough income, she and other people like her were following courses to help them find jobs, in french or informatic, etc. We lived in specialized appartement and houses for immigrants family (that we shared with a bosniac and morrocan family at that time) called "Armée du salut", us kids and lived for a moment in a foster home for a short while so my mom could have free time doing administrative papers/french/math evaluations (granted she already spoke belgium french and was a merchant in angola) for 4 year until she got a better visa an a permit to live in the territory.
And even by then she still got help times to times for food for free something call "resto au coeur" and "secours populaires" same for health until 2010 when she started having a better job and until 2018 when she got her nationality card and we are now middle class french citizen.
(for minors they automatically have french nationality when they reach 18 and grew up in the french school system at a early age or if they are born in the country, one of my classmate who is from tunisie origins was in the same situation as me + it's not rare sometimes in elementary school to have a new student coming from another country, that almost the norm)
Sorry for the novel
France is one of the few countries I’ve visited where you pretty much don’t see white people talk to black people outside of work settings, same for arabic descendants. It’s the wokest place in the world in every other sense and it’s still more racist than anywhere in the Americas.
As an Algerian person we’re taught a lot about French actions in Algeria how they used to massacre us and the horrors that we had to go through for our independence war. A lot of what we learn of the history of our country is French dominated because the majority of our modern history was under colonial rule obviously so we are very much inclined to dislike the French. France continues to take advantage of our country to this day and I personally hope we can coexist and have a strong partnership if France acknowledges its wrongdoings.
An African Union is the only way out, and the colonial powers will keep trying to get you to fight each other. They do the same thing in US ghettos, they get the community support networks to sell drugs and shoot each other over turf. This was basically admitted to by Nixon's drug Tzar in the early 1990's, and again confirmed by a journalist who found the CIA designed crack cocaine and shipped it to the US to sabotage african american communities. China will probably aid in this, but they'll want to incorporate it into a piece of their BRICS banking system, as opposed to truly uplifting africa.
Well france has already escuse himself for colonialism action in algeria. But algeria is not all clean and did the same during it's first independance time and forget easily (it's one of the reason why french and algerian can't get it).
From what i can see, french government have done everything to improve their relation with algeria, but algerian don't even try from their side. Algeria use this hate for keep it's government in place.
And when you see how algerian immigrate people are in other country most of the time, you can understand why other don't want to improve their parthnership with algeria.
@@florex5480 '' Well france has already escuse himself for colonialism action in algeria ''
I guess it says a lot.
Personnaly, I don't really see what's different when we still get Le Pen, Zemmour and all the other colonial products imported in the french political scene.
@@huriale1617 France didn't "excused itelf" this would be indeed ridiculous, self centered and stupid.
What France did was the only thing they would do : recognize their crimes, admit that they did wrong and bad things.
They din't say "we are excusing ourselves form the crimes we commited, so we are no longer to blame."
They said "we did this and we did that, it was bad and we acknowledge it."
The only one that could do (or don't do, it's on them to decide) the forgiveness part would be Algeria.
But Algeria can also refuse to forgive, it's their right afterall and were the ones wronged, France is not entitled to be forgiven by the victim, but they recognised their fault, which is wat should be expected from their part.
Regarding LePen and Zemmour, hopefully they never get elected.
The far right scores are growing, at least for the moment they never gained power, but the trend is worrying, especially as it's not just an isolated thing, but a global trend in most of the world of seeing rising far right demagogues (From Trump to Bolsonaro, the Ukip party in UK, far right catholics PiS in Poland, Orban in Hungary, the Fascists in Italy, new right coalition un Sweden, far right in Israël, Modi in India, Erdogan in Turkey, etc...
So honestly i am worried to see the far right taking power into France at it would make everything worse.
Especially now that Zemmour managed to popularize actual white supremacist talking points (like the "grand remplacement" conspiracy theory) in the media or wanted to rehabilitate Nazi collaborationist Petain as a national hero (despite the fact that he was a traitor)...
@@wikipiiimp9420 his mentality reminds me of an episode of metalocalypse:
Basically character has trauma because of an incident that happened with his brother when he was young
This character goes through a whole therapy and rehab session to get over his trauma and forgive his brother
Then he goes to his brother and forgives him, then his brother WHO CAUSED HIM TRAUMA refused his forgiveness.
For anyone into movies, Caché (Hidden) is a very well done film centered around how the effects of the Algerian War are repressed and denied by almost everyone except those who were directly targeted/oppressed. Still present for all, still relevant for all, just “hidden” by those who can’t face that they may be benefiting from something so terrible. 10/10 would recommend!
So, as a brazilian white male, and a leftist, I watched your video and I can say we are years ahead of france in this matter. We've been through this phase, like 10 or so years ago, where calling people "black" held an offensive tone to it, tied to the slavery times where black people were treated as objects. But after a few years of cultural turbulence (not only political btw) black movements in brazil started to proudly call themselves and ask others to call them "black" because why wouldn't people call them black?!
Of course, it's not as simple due to the fact that the term was given a new meaning, of the history of their people as slaves who, through literally countless brutalities, were capable of reforging themselves with their now "african" culture, and are now bringing more and more elements from a lot of ethnicities and history of africa. They kept a lot and now "have a home in two continents", as I've been told by a black activist.
From my pov, it's different than the current use of the n word, because calling someone "black" is not a taboo (except among the political right, i'd guess) but is something which is seen as a form of recognition of their culture and heritage. It's not forbidden for white people to call them "black", but it's is respectful. They know very well they owe nothing to anyone, that their ancestors are as responsible as white people for the building of this country, so they are a-ok for us calling them by their skin color. Some actually love, like literally, love it.
thats so interesting!! thank u for the insight its rly cool to see brazilian history as someone who doesnt know much (and even then its mostly abt slavery and thats rly reductive)
i feel like younger and i guess more left leaning french ppl have an easier time with saying "noir" to describe a black person compared to older ppl who have been used to calling different ethnic groups by "nicknames" that are in some other countries slurs (and now in france we r starting to reconsider how they have been used as slurs as well as being the default name we used for these groups)
What I struggle with in this topic is how cyclical it is. It makes me sound like a conservative sometimes but when you learn that "black" used to be a term that was considered rude, so it became negro, which was not considered rude. And then you learn that black was reclaimed and preferred. But then at least in the US African American became the preferred term. It starts to feel really futile to argue over which term - excluding obvious slurs - is proper and correct and not racist. I mean LGBTQ people are struggling over the reclamation of the term queer. It was used as a slur for so long by so many that older people don't like it's reclamation into official discourses. It's one thing to reclaim a slur, another thing to make it your identity and include it in the name of organisations etc.
Language matters so much, but at the same time is so slippery it begins to feel futile to fight over it when it can literally divide marginalised groups against themselves over what's the correct way that "we" should refer to ourselves.
@@IshtarNike I see what you mean. But here in BR negro (it is spelled the same as English) was always used as a "technical" term, but it now comes close to the current meaning of "black". Not as strong, not as culturally weighted, but either way is not just a way to "define" someone.
Black people call themselves black in French and in France, too. Actually, it's white people who are uncomfortable about calling us "noirs" they rather use the english word for it. Also, she's mainly talking about the black people who are French because of immigration and not those from overseas France who mostly are because of slavery. Both are really different, and both receive different treatments. Even though we're still similar, we also have different histories and then customs and behaviors. She's talking about colonisation, not both, unfortunately.
France is a complex country, and her video, while still informative, lacks clarity since she's only a spectator of all of what she's talking about, and she missed a lot about how and why France is still a racist country even though it doesn't realise it.
It's true, though we don't see race, but it's not in the sense that skin colour doesn't exist and it's not used as a tool to discreditate or to automatically be racist. I'm a leftist, too, and I too think that americans are wrong about how they deal with it. Race is a controversial word in france not because we don't want to bring it up but because it's widely accepted and taught in France that race does not exist in the sense that the only human race alive is homo sapiens and that the only difference existing between us are our ethnicity and phenotype, melanin levels and personality. That's why the far right will not be talking about race either while being racist but more so about ethnicity in France. It is indeed an american belief that's impleting itself in France that they do exist when they really don't. Basically, we as a country believe that race equals human and that we then have different skin colours and facial features, etc...
Whereas in america, its race used the old way, but instead of saying white humans and black, brown animals, it's black humans, brown humans, and white humans.
That's also why when a french african guy or woman does something bad, we'll have french of senegalese origins, whatever or french of algerian origins, whatever did something bad.
Ps: I'm black and from the French West Indies.
As someone who doesn't know a lot about race relations in Brazil, thank you for sharing that! Do you think that in Brazil, there might even be a change when it comes to the use of the word Japa? I've heard it's common to call asians this but wasn't sure if it's derogatory?
I'm a linguist and France is the one single worst example when it comes to the suppression of regional languages - most of them are well gone by now. It just showcases the French mentality of 'we're all French therefore we can only have one single identity' which is super toxic and inherently against multiculturalism - that's why nationalism keeps being a major force in politics. It takes such a long time to get out of this mindset and bravo to all the souls that spoke up.
its actually much more of left wing concept than right wing. I think this issue is mucccch more complex than a mrere will to supress differences. First of all, France contrary to most EUropean country has always been centrlized and also actually independent. A lot of regional disparities have also disappeared with the fast development in the 19th century of inter regional migrations and the very quick spread of norms. Of course in some areas speaking in local language was eventually forbidden for a time. But the very concept of the french republic was never about race that means it was about the language and culture and not the blood. This waa still a very novel concept than goes much further than an ethno-nation. THe trade off lays there , since its not about race or lineage then you need to display your belonging to the nation by speaking the main language. THis idea is rooted very deeply.
BUt the issue of culture and identity and why the far right is rising goes much more deeper. What differentiates West european countries from the US and UK, is the double fear to lose your culture from both migration and intense anglicization of arts/Litterature/Education, this puts countries as France Italy and co to have fringes of their population much more anxious than their American counterparts, and thats an issue not often discussed.
Similar in Quebec... no surprises
@@tayloryoung9803 yes, look at l'academie and we find a form of linguistic purism as kind of 'resistance' but also this standardisation is at the expense of diversity. French is among the first languages if not THE first to be standardised. To make my personal position crystal clear I hate nation states to the bones, so I'd rather countries like France to be more decentralised and there's eventually no need to display you belong somewhere. I didn't mention left/right wing because there can be both.
Italy was way more fractured so it still has immensely better linguistic diversity, and there's not quite as severe a push to prove that you're Italian according to my experience.
@@quain5063 Well there is always and benefit/advantages to it. Again the advantage would be that belonging to the nation is easier as it goes through set values and less about ethnicity., heritage of the revolution. Of course regional differences still exist. Another element that has made france more willing to centralize is the fact that compared to italy/Germany or Spain regional disparities would be much bigger if there hasd not been a push to a common norm. Basque country or French Flanders, Brittany and eslace or Savoya display much bigger potential disparities than would extremes such as galicia and Andalucia display in spain or Pedimonte and sicily in Italy. France bordering most of other "big" europeans. would have its border regions subjected to stronger independism probably, making the centralization rational very valid. Still, many regional accents disapeard without any state intervention druing the 1950-1980, as television and movement increased normalization, moreover the quicker move away from religion in france compared to southern neigbors and even west germany has made certain local traditions obselte quicker than some other places.
What French suppressed through harsh violence in its colonies, it suppressed it through harsh education in its own territory. The "french national identity" has always been wielded with pride by nationalists, but it is a fairly recent concept, not older than the Révolution (at most). The whole ideal of "unity through common identity" has been the sources of both terribles actions and today's toxic denial.
We are in denial about the failure of this ideal in the integration of foreign population, and we are in denial about how this ideal has crushed and erased almost all of the linguistic and cultural wealth of the French regions (which makes most of its territory).
And strictly linguistically speaking, I think we may be the only ones (atleast in Europe) who don't call our various French or Occitan dialects as "dialects" but as "patois", which is supposed to mean the same thing, but is actually a kind of condescending/degrading term ("oh it's not a dialect, it's just a 'patois' "). Thus, lot of french people grow with this whole idea of patois, which is less than a dialect, just a "peasant-thing" of bad french, which gives them a denial that modern French is just a dialect among others.
I can't say anything about racial tensions in France but let me point out an observation I made when I visited Paris a few years ago. Am American and am originally from the Caribbean. I live in NYC and when i visited Paris i was surprised by the parralles between the two cities in terms of how the demographics were spread around in the city. Anyone that lives in NYC knows that while the city is diverse, you could take a very confident guess as to where someone lives based on the color of their skin. You will have a chance of being even more corrupt if you know that person's ethnicity for sure. From there, you can go and make more guess about their social economic status. I was very surprised to see something similar in Paris and while i won't make any guess because I don't have much context, the fact that people of color appear to live in the more dilipated parts of the city made me feel right at home.
Alot of these people shouldn't even be there to begin with.
Here in Spain it's also common (at least for me and people my age) to avoid using race as a descriptor when talking about someone else, not entirely a French issue. I don't think it's incompatible with addressing racism and colonialism however. I just don't like to make the non-white people I know feel as if they are being singled out.
I am a non-white French man. I have many White friends as I happen to belong in the liberal upper middle class (where Arabs and Blacks are still rare).
Believe me, it is not my friends recognizing the differences in our experiences that would make me feel singled out. I already feel singled out by these differences. It is actually the other way around: what is jarring is having my worries about discrimination and racism being shut down by well meaning friends who ignore the obvious fact that we don't exprience racism in the same way.
You're not singling anyone out by acknowledging their race. Unfortunately we live in a world where white is seen as the default race so by denying other people their race you are in fact erasing them from the social landscape.
@Tarak Bouacida I am a white french man, from the upper middle class as well, and I'd be interested in hearing more about your perspective on the matter.
I personally feel like our social circle is one where most people are not "actively racist", but due to growing in a sort of comfort bubble where - as you said - there isn't that much diversity yet, there is a lot of "implicit racism" in that we tend to ignore or discard the existence of racism just because we don't see it in our circle.
@@tarakbouacida746 as a south asian in the uk, I also feel the same way about being shut down when I bring up genuine issues but I also do agree with the commenter, I dont like being singled out and seen as only "nonwhite" by the kinds of people that think every aspect of my existence is altered by the fact my skin is different colour from theirs. Like there is a way of showing curiosity without making someone uncomfortable
@@haidouk872 Just leaving a comment bc the answer would interests me :)
I lived in Brest for 2 years and worked in the university there. Although the city was full of Arabs and black people, I barely ever saw a student who was not white. Black people and arabs lived in different neighbourhoods. My left wing French friends there told me to stay away from certain arab areas of the city. I was absolutly shocked by the inequality in France amongst the different races. Maybe it's just the city I was living in, perhaps it's not like that throughout France.
Yeah the US is also pretty segregated too by neighborhood. One thing is that for post secondary in America - you do get more of a mix of races and cultures and people are more open to making friends regardless of background. Europeans are much more standoffish and cliquish when confronted with diversity of people.
That is a complete lie. French universities are full of black and Arab population. Not only as students but also as faculty. I know this well, I live here since 15 years ago. I read your comment and I could not let it by. If you teach or study in France there is a high chance that at least a quarter of the students come from African or middle Eastern descent
French and international migration is very new to the city of Brest and to the surrounding region. It is not representative of the rest of France.
Racism though is very real in France and also very taboo. It is going to be hurtful to address it. At least the big majority of french people know that races are a social construct and have no scientific value (because of ww2) so I think it's a good start.
The rampant racist ideology in France definitely comes from colonialism and capitalism.
@@TeddyAura Hello Teddy, 1/4 of Black people in university is way more than the actual amount 😊 I've been living in France my whole life, and the more you go up in the studies, and the more prestigious studies you do, the less Black people there is. In none of my school years since the end of high school there was more than 5 poc in my year of studies.
@@julietomiche6219 I don't say only black, please read my comment. If you put blacks and people from the Magreb and the middle East it is at least 25%. How many students/ professors are from Algeria or Morocco? . With regards of Brest, I have never been there but I had been in Caen and Rennes which are cities not that far away and what I have seen is the same. 75% of "white French" and 25% of mixed origin. Please don't promote misinformation by exaggerating the current situation in France
En tant que Québécois, je confirme que c'est la même chose ici. J'ai récemment arrêté d'utiliser le terme "Québécois pûre laine".
It is not just France, but also other european countries like The Netherlands, Italy and Spain. Great video as always!
What does "european" mean?
It’s like that everywhere. Welcome to earth
Open borders for Israel 🇮🇱
@@x-a- nO! YoU cAN't SaY thAt! ThAtS aNTiseMItic!
You tackled that conversation really amazingly !
You nailed this. I appreciated how you mentioned the West Indies. In school, we never had courses about the Antilles and it was truly a shame because it's part of the French history too. I think it says a lot about our current political climate. Avoiding certain topics in the curriculum and only associating slavery to the American territory was the starting point. France was NOT innocent in the Atlantic slave trade. We as a society should acknowledge that and the media should address this more. Another interesting point is the fact that the Cannes festival denied the movie "Chevalier" any promotion, when it's about the Chevalier de Saint-George, a mixed half French half Afro-Guadeloupean fencer and musician. The movie not having French releases was a big shame.
Funny how every European needs to take blame for slavery
But when you bring up Jewish slavers that were heavily overrepresented it becomes bad😂
@@deeznutz8320 weird that you think that white or Jews are different for us when you are a descendant of slaves, y’all are the same for me
Great video, would love to hear your thoughts, or just the French perspective, on the movie La Battaglia di Algeri (1966).
This "colorblind" perspective is very common here in Brasil too, it's how folks try to get away with their racism.
There is implicit assumption in the video which is we can only talk about racisme if we talk about race. I personally don't like the word race, it is a made up concept with no basis whatsoever and we are still using it in 2023 which is absurd to me. Racisme and Xenophobia in France is very different that in America. I know, I lived in France for a while, and can count many times I've witnessed or been on the receiving end of racist, xenophobic comments, and discrimination.
The reality is, by americanising the discourse in France we are not helping combat racism in France because France is not the US, has a different history, a different population of immigration, a different cultural and societal structure.
A simple example is, discrimination by name. I can assure you it is extremely prevalent in France, if you are black, but you have a good nice french name you will get less discriminated than if you're "white skin", whatever than means, but have an "exotic" name.
You will systematically get more job opportunities, get accepted into better schools, get bank credit, rend apartments if you have a nice french name. It is really problematic, and sometimes it feels like everyone in France is in some kind of denial and doesn't want to say it and to actually deal with it because they are the land of "Les droits de l'Homme".
That being said, americanising the subject will not help solve France's problems. Talking about people's "race", a made up concept, that we should all stop using, because it doesn't mean anything, will not help.
Being black, doesn't really give any indication of your ethny. You could be Berber living in North Africa, be Middle eastern living in Yemen, south African or Brazilian. I understand why it is important in the US, because discriminating laws based of skin color have been implemented until fairly recent history, but that's probably not the focus European countries should be looking at if they want to combat racisme and discrimination.
Race is real enough to impact people's lives and identity. Different countries have different dominant racial groups that form the main identity of their nation. Would Nigeria still be Nigeria if it wasn't black dominant and anyone could live there and be called Nigerian
Race is a social construct that impacts people’s lives
@@TerraiderRace is an outdated, offensive, colonial racist concept, and phasing out and making this word taboo is a good thing, just as phasing out words like Negro is a good thing.
@@kingkong-gn6oiMost Nigerians in every day life don't use categories like "black", it's something literally made up by Europeans and that didn't exist before colonization.
@@TerraiderRace is an outdated and racist word, it's good people don't use it anymore
je suis d'accord avec la grande majorité de la video toutefois j'ai tout de même un énorme problème avec le terme de "race", les catégories qu'on désignent comme races comme "blanc", "noir", "asiatique" etc mène à plus de stéréotypes qu'autre chose. Comme tu le pointe dans la vidéo tout les "blancs" ne sont pas les même que ce soit ethniquement culturellement etc et il en va de même pour les noirs, mettre tout le monde dans le même panier avec "race" dessus amène a une généralisation qui amène a des stéréotypes racistes. De plus, il n'y a qu'a voir le système américain de race pour se trouver rapidement face à un problème, on retrouve les catégories noir, blanc et hispanique mais on ne prend pas en compte qu'une personne d'Amérique latine peut être noire ou blanche et n'est pas forcement juste " bronzée". Ainsi je pense qu'il est plus pertinent de parler d'ethnies plutôt que de race puisque cela permet plus de précision et cela permet d'englober les nuances culturelles
In Mexico, we don’t discuss race but we discuss more how skin color tone is associated to discrimination, colorism.
which is complete nonsense anyway because we have a fuck ton of rich or famous celebrities that are black or much more dark skinned.
so much for that supposed "racism".
@@LevisH21wrong mexico's elite is mostly white even though they are a small percentage of the population. There is also racism against natives there.
There's nothing wrong with noticing differences, the issue starts when you weaponise it. I don't mind being called black cause I'm black just don't use my skin colour to push your agenda and this is to both white and black people
I’ll preface this by saying that I’m French and currently living here.
I think many people don't know why or understand why France doesn't really talk about "race". Since 1872, France has enacted a law that prohibits the collection of data based on the race, ethnicity, or beliefs of a person. This sentiment was strongly reinforced following WW2 when people around France had a firm conviction of "never again". With the majority of the French people at the time having supported the Vichy government, (That is not to say that there weren’t people in the resistance or that there weren’t people who didn’t disapprove of it) who had played a significant role in the deportation of Jews, Roma (Gypsies), and non-hetero people around France, that law made in 1872 played a pretty big role in safeguarding the aforementioned minorities.
This is because, censuses of that sort weren’t uncommon around Europe, in fact, this type of discrimination was present throughout all of European history. However, the ones that had begun to use those surveys in order to discriminate on a massive scale had begun with the Nazis in Germany. (I’m sure everyone here knows how the Jews were forced to wear the “Star of David” on their clothes at all times when they left their houses in Germany) Through them, they were able to find the majority of Jews residing in their country and send them to death camps.
With that in mind, it is now easy to see why France refuses to conduct surveys based on someone’s race, ethnicity, or religion. Additionally, as mentioned in the video, people in France don’t really like to use the word “race” either, because that implies that not all of us are human and instead, are genetically distinct enough from one another to the point of being a new “race”, which we are not.
There is this prevailing idea in France that we should prioritize collective rights over individual rights. This can be seen through its secularism and non-discussion of things regarding the color of one’s skin or background, as before any of that, we are French. While I do agree that discrimination in France exists and should be talked about, we must always remember why this law was put into place in the first place; to prevent the discrimination of minorities.
'Black' isn't a dirty word, describing people as they are doesn't connote slight, having prejudice on the basis of them being 'black' or Arab and what not would be the slight, the dirty act
I once had occasion to be in a situation that allowed me to spend time with different people from different countries, and I remember that a friend from Australia said the same thing, that they don’t say “black” in Australia. With who Americans would describe as a black person, they refer to that person’s country of origin. She used the example of saying that they would say that someone is Cameroonian if they were from Cameroon, and so on.
And how do they describe Aboriginal people?
As a Belgian Afrocentrism sickens me because we divided the people of Congo and Rwanda in tribes that were closer or further removed from the white men to conquer them. And the story was that some where more white and came from Egypt. And we have our part of responsibility for the Tutsi genocide. I won't say more about afro-centrism but it is not the paradigm shift it's supposed to be.
LOL As if tribes didn't exist before. Left wing people are delusional.
Don't flagellate yourself so hard or the whip will break.
I have a complicated relationship with race being used as a defining factor . As a brown person coming from India, I am too tired of brown “intersectional “ feminists taking over us in the west and also assuming a moral superiority as they are brown themselves. Most of the time it has opposite intended effects but i can understand why we need to talk about race because it does impact experiences
Brown is such a stupid categorization. Arabs and Dravidians and Khoisan have different experiences and problems.
@@appa609add to the mix us here in latin america and the term "brown" becomes even more stupid
I would not consider those to be real "intersectional" feminists. Intersectional is just a cool thing to say, because it makes it sound like you've read books by women of color, but a lot of so called progressive/leftists in the west don't do any work to deconstruct their internalized western chauvinism and they have a complete inability to understand that people can experience the world and their feminism in a way that's completely different than their perspective of what feminism is supposed to be.
@@Bojoschannel but nobody actually uses brown for a specific group. White and black are the only colors used for specific groups. Other people who are commonly brown are referred to as just “Asians, Native American, Arab, Latino”
@@kinTaro-ju5xuexcuse me Asians are "yellow"
I feel like a lot of Europeans tend to look down on America’s race issues without ever really understanding the difference. America actually TALKS about our issues. Constantly. We are always striving to move forward in that respect and because other countries are constantly hearing our discussions they assume that it’s an extreme issue here. Honestly I’d say it’s not that bad as an African immigrant, that is, compared to my cousins who live in Austria and Germany. Its not hush hush and it’s something people can and will talk about. The problem is you can’t just IGNORE race, it will always be there even if its a created term; not talking about it will not make racism disappear it will just halt and stagnate important discussions leading people to hold things in without considering other perspectives.
Tu peux faire la vidéo en Français ?? Ça serait super bien pour encourager le débat
nos vies ne sont pas des choses à "débattre" 😉
I’m a student of French at uni and I love your videos as it helps me gain an insight ❤
Saying that race doesn't exist isn't the same thing as saying that racism doesn't exist. These are 2 very different things. Race is a social construction, it's like gender, it doesn't exist but was created as a way to maintain the current dynamics. Racism, on the other hand is discrimination based off that social construction. I applaud you friend who refuses to teach racialism to his children because until like the 19th century, it wasn't a thing. It's something created to prevent European workers from organising with African slaves.
It is not a coincidence that places where people are very ready to call each other by their races are also the most racist societies in the world; in the US, the police shoots "black" people indiscriminately and get away with it - in the US, you have Black Lives Matter, a PR initiative that went very wrong (or very right if you are antiracist) and brought about one of the biggest insurections in the history of the US, bringing mighty USA down to its knees only to die in a fart because they organised along racial lines instead of according to their social class.
On the other hand, here, in Africa, nobody calls themselves "black". "Black" insinuates that we are a monolith but that's not true, we are thousands of cultures speaking thousands of languages. Heck, even the formerly enslaved communities in French colonies, like Reunion Island don't even call themselves "black" - they call each other Kafre, Zorey, Malbar, etc, each with very specific meaning as to their ancestry, culture and language.
"Black" and "White" are western inventions, kindly keep them in the west, please. And maybe learn from leftists in your own country instead of bringing the racialism of the US to spaces that are trying really hard to destroy it.
Thank you, This racial ideology fuels more discrimination and racism than anything else. It's so reductive and makes no sense.
It's very upsetting to see it get more and more popular.
So what is the moral problem with having a conception of nationhood that is based on ancestry? Seems to me like a very common thing throughout history to have more loyalty to ones family than to strangers.
you exclude people who are also French but whose parents were perhaps not. You create an idea where some people are "more" French than others, meaning they have more rights to be there, more legitimate etc. and of course, this inherently is based on racism in the end. Because the easiest way to spot who is less French than someone else is based on their look, religion, languages they speak, names etc.
@@reksfoleur859is it only racist for Europe but not the rest of the world? Lmao
@@reksfoleur859si a White Person can clain they are chinese??
All descriptions are reductive, though. Making "race" or words related to it a bad word is not a good thing and suggests you are trying to avoid race issues and racism rather than being truly tolerant.
Tolerance isn't good either, honestly what are you trying to "tolerate" about another person's skin color and culture without being racist, the same logic applies to any other form of bigotry
I hate that word. Why do you have to tolerate people why not just accept them?
What do you think of the fact that "Negro" became a bad word in English?
Why is it bad that France is phasing out an outdated and offensive concept used to oppress entire populations and justify racism? Or is it that Americans decide what word is problematic and what isn't worldwide?
I think the problem is that we tend to mix up racism with dislike with foreigners. Racism is an ideology based on appearance while dislike of foreigners (which exist in every country in the world) is a sense of them not being us. As long as we have countries, there will always be a them and an us. They don’t share our history and our experience, just as we don’t share theirs. There are over lapses, especially if a country has some kind of connection to another country, and your skin color makes it easier to see if you aren’t from this country or not, making it easier for someone to single you out, but in most cases I have to wonder if the hostility comes down to race or just a dislike for “them”.
I as a Swede would face hostility in France if I moved there because I’m not French. Someone from Japan would face the same “not French” attitude but people tend to sum that up to racism despite it being no different from my encounter. Sure, I would most likely be French passing if I learned the language perfectly, while the looks of the Japanese would ensure that Frenchmen could single them out as not french but the starting point here wouldn’t be racism.
That said, saying there are no racism in my country is definitely an overexaggerating. Racism exists in all countries, among all people, but I do believe it is far less the culprit of hostility then people seem to assume. Hostility towards foreigners has existed since the rise of civilization, (long before racism was invented) we can see that in, for example, ancient Egypt toward the jews (and later in African countries where they were called werehyenas) and in Ancient China toward the “barbaric tribes” (such as the mongols).
My fear is that, though we should fight against racism where it shows its head, but if we mix up the two then one will go unaddressed. Fighting racism when that isn’t the culprit will not ease our hostility toward foreigners, or our tendency to think they are less for this country because they weren’t born in it.
Too many words, didn't read. Doesn't refugees constantly rape your women and Swedish have no future and are being sanctioned.
I heard you are also a minority in your own country lol
Disliking "foreigners" is racist also
Facts
Thank you for your video! As a Brazilian, whose country used to be thought as 'a racial democracy', I commend your for your video. Discussing white privilege, racism, slavery, eugnenics, xenophobia, present-day fascism, feminism, homophobia, the rise of the far-right around the world, conservatism, zealous orthodox christianity as well as islam, colonialism and imperirialism is a much needed practice among those who would like to see a freer, a more egalitarian and a more just world! If we let these ideas silence us, we risk losing the rights we have today. I believe we need to study all of these issues through the lens of intersectionality of race, gender, class, politics, histories, economics and religions. Love from Brazil.
I am black American and just got back from a two week trip to Paris and the racism I experienced was honestly very unsettling. I would say it border on more microagressions but it was still a very different experience
I was there for a study abroad program where we visited different businesses and the answers I got to question were icky. I had asked at a bank visit if the prestige behind European ivy leagues(as the presenter put it) lived up or if it was just the name they were after when picking candidates and then got an answer about the lack of racial diversity. We had gone to Unesca for a visit and they talked about how the place is supposed to represent all the countries in the world but I asked why they had a statue praising Christopher Columbus and was given an answer about how I basically needed to shut up because they don’t have racial issues there and they teach about s*avery
Also there were so many racist art depictions just in the streets. We went down this market place street and on the wall was a mosaic of a slave feeding their slave master. And a lot of other statues or books on display that presented Black people in very dehumanizing ways.
I was also a little taken aback by how common the word oriental was to refer to Asian people. It was even in the Louvre and on restaurant menus.
Also a group of 4 men were catcalling my group and they chased after us making monkey noises. I was the only black woman in my group and I am still pretending I misheard this because I can’t believe someone would do that
Whew, that's rough. France sucks just as much as the rest of us and they like to act like they're better.
Oriental isn't an offensive word in French. It isn't even used only for Eastern people or cultures but the East in general. It literally means Eastern just like Occidental is Western. For example Western culture is Culture occidentale. Just because you find something offensive means the entire word needs to change it? Do you know how many words are potentially problematic in other languages? I want Americans to stop using the word race, it's racist. Also stop using the word Jew, it's a slur in Russian. French isn't English, France isn't America, get over it.
I find it crazy that this kind of discussion is literally that exact same thing we're having here in Canada, mostly focused on the indigenous community
Is it true your grandfather had 9yr old black girls as slaves in his basement for “entertainment” use.
As someone who has "brown" family and muslim family all over france, their is deffenitely a threat towards them as well
I’m canadian this is definately a thing here also, I notice myself trying not to refer to people by skin colour and its not something I ever intentionally decided to do
Many Black and brown people are ok with being called black and brown. Just practice in the mirror and you will get used to it
I love that you made this video, and how you made it.
I can recommend to all Europeans to try and find the social movements for racial equality in your own country because they're there! American understandings of race and racism can be helpful and are important.
But understandings of race and racism are different here, and people who have to face racism here know a lot about it. I learned so much from May Ayim for German Black history, for example.
Editing to say that I subbed and am looking forward to watching all of your videos and as a German, we do ignore a lot of our colonial history and only recently recognized the genocide we committed against the Herero and Nama, and we still have a lot of pro-colonial sentiments in museums and an unwillingness to give back literal human remains in a lot of places. I'm still waiting for more of a thorough reckoning with our colonial past and an understanding of race as it pertains to Germany, but I'm hopeful more people want to learn.
I watched an intetesting youtube video by Rebal D an Egyptian himself on the Nextflix Cleopatra documentary, it was very very insightful as he highlighted the diversity of race in africa alone and that the theory of Cleopatra being Black is actually offensive to many Egyptians as it suggests Egyptian citizens now are descendants of colonialists. I really recommended further research into that theory as all evidence suggests Cleopatra was a Macedonian woman. I'm not denying that history is notoriously recorded in a eurocentric way but for this specfic example I think its quite complex
Incredible. You do know that the Arabs invaded this part of Africa from the 7th century? Right?
@@AilleursHigherno, he only knows Netflix education.
I don’t agree with you, as a person of color, born and grown in France.
An idea: since we started caring so much about preserving indigenous cultures, which is great, how about we start addressing how the indigenous populations of Europe are literally disappearing ( if we look at Govt statistics ) ?
I mean it’s great that we talk about the decolonization of India or Algeria, and I’m all for it, but why are we overlooking Europe? Europe is for europeans, just like India is for indians and so on.
Why does wellbeing for Africa and South East Asia have to mean that something bad has to happen to Europe?
Imagine if indian Govt. statistics would show that in 20-30 years ethnic indians are gonna be a minority in their own country! Or if indians were only 36% of the population of THEIR OWN CAPITAL!!!! I suppose that would be a problem you would address.
I’m sorry but the double standards are crazy. I really like your essay videos, but there is obviously a little bias in them.
i think the one thing that holds all of us back from having productive and useful discussions is the reoccurring sentiment that we (non francais de souche) are trying to erase french people’s identity by always bringing up all the stuff that france owes us from a legal and moral standpoint, which only reinforces resentment.
also i feel like one of the reasons why race talk is considered taboo is so that those who are privileged can say that the only reason why most people that are part of a minority struggle to live is because they aren’t doing enough to be better and live better, if race doesn’t exist then they get to pretend that racism is a myth and that minorities are just ungrateful people praying on the downfall of the good french.
i as someone who’s from a country that was unjustly turned into a colony, don’t understand why we don’t have the right to talk freely about this very traumatizing past and don’t even get to voice our struggles due to discrimination without being labeled as lazy or a threat to the republic.
i never felt like i belonged here despite living in france for the past 8 years, and i never expected to feel welcomed or at home, what i did expect though was simply living without my life being made harder due to the constant racism and islamophobia, and apparently that was too much to ask.
i did survive a majorly white people’s high school and have experienced first hand the insensitivity some people show in regards of actual crimes against humanity all because they have the privilege not to experience any remains of them of being constantly reminded of what happened in the past. and to be frank i have no idea how i survived. hearing white people calling black people the « n word » with no consequences, and even people doing the nazi salute or voting « h*tler » to a class president vote…yeah i really don’t know how i kept going
the last straw for me was when someone made a joke about the algerian people who were murdered and thrown in the seine saying « couldn’t they just swim back? » and since this one was a very personal one it made me feel really really bad for days. no one did anything about it, the kid never got suspended not even those who did the nazi salute or pulled the vote « prank ». it felt like hell truly, but the worst part i feel is how most of the students there did things that if it were me or my black friends who did them would’ve guaranteed a background check of our parents, the involvement of police or trying to link theses events to our religious beliefs.
also did i mention that a student got shot? the only non white person at a school protest? yeah that too.
I lived in France between 2001-2006, I've always loved French culture and language, so I was very well integrated as I am a white eastern European that spoke without an accent. That meant that if I didn't explicitly state that I am not French people wouldn't know. I used this to observe the different reactions I would get from different people. There has been quite a few times when guys from older generations completely changed the way they spoke to me when knowing I wasn't French - they would start saying things like "Tu bien parler". It was so funny for me but again, as a white guy there wasn't any risk or heavy prejudice. I couldn't imagine how it would feel for people of color or any apparent physical difference.
"Tu bien parler" j'aurais répondu "ça a pas l'air d'être ton cas poto" 🤨
I don't think most former colonial empires have really dealt with their own racism. In Spain we've just had the leader of one of the biggest parties claim that we are not a racist country right after a football player complaint about the insults he keeps getting for being black
I must say, I very strongly disagree with most of what you say. I am a French young man of "mixed race" and with left political opinions, but also a student of rhetoric, linguistics, and semiotics. Race in France does not exist. Ethnicity does.
Since the Enlightenment, our philosophers have been fighting against this word, which suggests that we can't really "breed", that we are more different than what we really are. And yes, I hate that the American ideology of race is coming to France because we simply do not have the same history. While slavery for black people was still a thing, the mayor of Paris was a black guy. We even had a black deputy in the late 1700s, just after the revolution. How can we compare countries where black people have been free and of equal rights for over 200 years with one where laws were different regarding the skin color 60 years ago? Our parents were alive while Jim Crow's laws were still there. This is absurd and I will not hear that.
Yes, racism is alive and kicking in Western Europe, I've been a victim of it. But it is way different than the racism I have seen living in the US, and by all means, do not compare us to Americans who had Jim Crow in the 60s, where the KKK is still legal today. And I will never stop fighting about the word "race" in French.
I see skin color, but I give it as much importance as hair color, I just don't care, so does my French family who dates to the 1700s and all of the people around me.
Merci!
And reading the comments, I can see that most french people disagree with Alice
@@michaellafraude1621 France is the least racist Western country
@@riyadougla539I don't know if it's the least racist, but if it was the worst in the world, the world would have been better. Uk is also pretty good
@@riyadougla539"race" is a racist concept and a slur in France. Why is France phasing out an outdated and offensive concept seen as problematic instead of a fight against racism? Ah yes, because only the American perspective matters. I want to see one day Brazilians come to the USA and say they NEED to use the word NEGRO and if they don't THEY'RE in fact the racists because they're denying the history of black people! See how ridiculous that sounds?
Yet another brilliant video. I don't have much to say other than that these patterns are unfortunately quite common across countries with a history of colonisation. I live in Aotearoa / New Zealand and so many of the things mentioned in the video are mirrored here. I mostly wanted to comment to boost engagement and hopefully recommendations for others to see it, but the struggle really is a complex and widespread one for communities all over the world, so I'm glad people are talking about it.
You really hit the nail in the head when commenting about having to prove that you are French enough. As an asian raised in Spain, proving that I'm Spaniard enough is my defense mechanism and it is always activated(except when I'm with trusted people).
For many people, the impression that they have of me, will be the impression they will have for all asian people.
Great video!
Soy de España y conozco a mucha gente que ha sido muh discriminada aunque es menos comun en las ciudades grandes
Maybe just maybe. No matter how much mental gymnastics you do, no matter what the magic piece of paper says, you'll never be a Spaniard. Your blood, your genes show that you belong to a population group that evolved in a completely different part of the world from the Spanish ( castillians, aragonese etc) and that can never change no matter what. So embrace your true actual concrete biological identity and kindly get out of a nation state build as a home for it's indigenous people like Spain and go to some country of immigrants like Canada or sth.
You calling yourself Spaniard is like a white guy calling himself chinese it is weird and doesn't make sense
1:31 It’s not exactly the same thing but in India, we’d say the same thing about Caste and now there are public discussions on a caste census to help identify systemic inequalities.
I'm a white American and my parents aimed to raise me and my brother as being "colorblind," which I think was more harmful than helpful. While children of color around me probably experienced racism to a certain degree, I believed that racial discrimination ended after the 1960s. When my brother described a TV character as black, my parents told him that he shouldn't describe a person by their skin color. As a kid I assumed that talking about race was inappropriate. Teaching kids to be colorblind doesn't help them but instead teaches them to avoid sensitive subjects that they may need to face in order to understand other people.
0:06 The party you went to feels like something straight out of ‘Bridget Jones’s Diary’.
Talking about racism in France, some time ago I finished reading perhaps one of the worst books by a French author I've ever read, "The Camp of The Saints" by Jean Raspail. Apart from some truly disturbing and dehumanizing characterizations, what stroke me out was the constant reminder of the author that West, Christianity and Whiteness are one singular concept.
At first I thought it was nothing but outdated ideas held by a tiny minority, but after seeing the many cases of double standards of many people that claim to have nothing against legal migration, I kind of suspect that Raspail's notions of what constitutes "the West" aren't too far fetched from the minds of said people.
Steve Bannon loves this book.
Really enjoyed this video. I’m an American but am a secret francophone 🤗 America has its problems too. A lot of people will think we’re post racial after Obama. We’re not. But the dream lives.
I often think because France had a different path and Liberty, egalitarianism and fraternity can be used as a cover so people don’t have to look at their racial past.
Bravo for the youth and forward thinkers of France who are trying to change things!!
I’m an American (ironically with both French and Algerian Berber ancestry). And when I went to France as a teenager, I was appalled by all the racism, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia I saw there.
France being an avoidant ex boyfriend that gas lights you about the pain it caused sounds very accurate to me lol
I think when we're talking talking about racism, it's important to realize that one if the reasons slavery in the US at some point turned to almost entirely African based people is exactly because you could visually identify them.
There had been a lot of white (indentured) slaves as well, who could just run away, whether you branded them or not. The people and especially the slave owners in the US just didn't have the capacity or the institutions in place to find escaped slaves on this very vast new continent. They had also tried the original peoples, who just ran off as well or died.
But black people were great for the purpose of slavery. Those who survived this terrible sea/ocean journey were genetically very strong and mentally hardy and you could very easily identify them due to their skin colour. Problem solved! Anyone who was black was a slave. And groups of men could earn money by going out and find the black people who had escaped.
And when the US got to the point where it wanted to and could organize a police force, in a lot of places they started with this network of groups. Which is why there is still such terrible racism in the police force specifically in the US. It doesn't help that they get very little training, average of 21 weeks, don't want to waste those tax payer dollars!
So please realize that there are a lot of people for whom seeing people as black, not as one aspect/characteristic of their appearance, means they are seeing them in a way to identify them and brand them slave/wrong/other. When they were young, someone/people around them pointed out black people to them and described them in a negative way. So they were taught that as soon as they saw a black person, what to think about them - and this was very negative and therefore racist. So when people refuse to identify people as black, they are honestly in their minds breaking the link between their taught racism and the people they see. Based on where they are coming from, what they were taught, this is an amazing feat that they consciously worked on. They now also see racism as bad, so they literally internalized that racism is bad so seeing colour is bad.
To now call them racist feels very hurtful to them, both because of their efforts to change themselves which aren't being seen nor recognized, and about the internal discomfort they feel around the fact that they are also seeing still that there was a valid reason for racism - which they get fed a lot of on places like Fox. It's a complicated mess that is being exploited for financial gain.
But do realize that it is thanks to their efforts to not see race and not describe people as black that this link is less strong now for us. Which is why we can now say: but that is a characteristic and it's not bad, so why are we not using it as a word to describe these people. This characteristic ought to be as neutral as other characteristics. And that's definitely the next progression. Just do realize that the people who can't follow us there, can't because they were taught to link racism directly to the visual cue of the skin colour.
My teacher in Toulouse Business School used to call the only black guy in our class "le noir" 😭 As an Irish person I nearly fell off my seat
For me i never fell racism because of the french attitude but in the anglophones countrie yes.
Same here
Just this month an elderly moroccan-french citizen was arrested because someone falsely claimed she was shoplifting, the police tackled her to the ground and the poor lady was screaming that she was innocent, the only one who stepped in was an Algerian man who deescalated the situation. Tells you everything you need to know about france and Europe's fantasy of "equality"
One bad thing happening somewhere in Europe and automatically all Europe is like that ? It's like saying "In New York I saw a Karen, that tells you a lot about North America"
Given french history, none of this is surprising……..
I watch all your videos. A big merci for this one!
Je me permets de commenter en français parce que flemme de sortir mon plus beau anglais ^^'
Je trouve ça quand même dommage que dans une vidéo qui parle de race, il n'y aucune allusion au fait que scientifiquement le concept de race est aussi controversé et sans fondement pour les humain. Je pense que prendre conscience que oui, socialement et culturellement, il existe des groupes de population (des "races") qui ont des vécus communs, des traumas générationnels etc lié à cette catégorisation humaine (aka racisme etc); c'est aussi important que prendre conscience que la catégorisation en "race" est arbitraire, historique et n'a enfait pas de fondements biologiques. Tant qu'on accepte pas ce fait, on aura tjs des gens pour prétendre qu'une "race" est meilleure qu'une autre et faire des hiérarchies (cfr histoire du racisme scientifique et par ex, les commentaires sous la vidéo nota bene concernant la série netflix cléopatre ou certains propos tenus par l'extrême droite ).
Pour le passage sur la guerre d'Algérie, il y a un enjeux aussi pour les historiens actuellement, c'est que les documents officiels sont encore classifiés, mais plus pour très longtemps si je ne m'abuse. Ca va etre très intéressant quand on aura accès aux archives de voir ce qui va en sortir (pas des trucs jolis j'imagine).
Pour le reste, très intéressante vidéo. J'ai remarqué aussi cette tendance au color blind aussi récemment en France et ça m'a mise très mal à l'aise. Cette volonté de ne pas voir les "couleurs" me semblent lié à une volonté de ne pas vouloir s'occuper des effets et dégats bien réels du racisme.
Mais merci!!! Je suis surpris qu’il ait fallu que je descende aussi bas dans les commentaires pour trouver quelqu’un qui parle de ca (le fait que le terme ‘race ne signifie rien biologiquement)
LOL, éviter de voir les couleurs, c’est surtout pour éviter de voir que les violeurs, agresseurs, etc... sont plus noirs et arabes que blanc.
Merci
Your last upload felt like yesterday but then again, every day feels the same to me.
L'hypocrisie raciale qui règne en France depuis des décennies est en train d'être mise à mal par les gens de ma génération. That's why they maaaddd. Je pense toujours que le racisme en France est beaucoup plus profond que ce qu'on essaie de nous faire croire.
Est-ce qu'il y a du racisme envers les blancs en France ?
@@kal_bewe1837 le genre de question qui nous dit ce qu'on a besoin de savoir sur la personne qui l'a pose 🙄
@@lorelange Comment ca ?
I am black and i have never have a problem in France of all my life.
@@kal_bewe1837 oui clairement je l'ai vue souvent
Hello ! I am french and I loved your video. It is totally hypothetical but maybe the fact that french people don't want to use the term "race" is that it also mean animal breed and so it is maybe one of the reasons why it is seen as negative.
The French ADORED Josephine Baker!!!
I disagree with you. "Race" doesn't exist in France, especially "skin color based" like in the US. Ethnicities and nationalities do. Race isn't a scientific or objective concept, it's cultural.
Just because racism exists doesn't mean that we should attribute a race to people or that it represents an objective reality.
In france we said that race doesnt exist because we where thaught that there is only one human race.
but different ethnicities, origins, cultures, and religions exist and France discriminates against that
I really appreciate listening to your French perspective. We need more of these perspectives, coming from other European nations. Speaking as a German, we have kind of the same issues. Our terrible European war history usually overshadows anything that has to do with colonization. Many people don't even know about the Herero and Namaqua genocide and our colonial past - me included, I know way too little about it.
It's not exclusively French, we have this type of person here in the US too
As a white French woman, I feel like I would also try to avoid using skin colour to describe people when I was younger, I studied in the UK and had friends from all over the world and it's really just a colour, I don't really think about it nowadays honestly.
France's way of handling the issue of race never made sense to me, like you mentioned, the whole 'no getting data on ethnicity' just feels like they want to sweep it all under a rug. It's just like if I stuff all the mess in my room under my bed, it's not going to make the mess disappear, it will still be here and even get worse with time, even if it's out of sight. I feel similarly about France's take on secularism, I feel like France is always out there mentioning that they're a secular country and have been for over a century when they don't allow you to wear any sign of religion in schools and some other places, it feels counterintuitive to me? So much for Liberté if you can't wear what you want to wear
As for colonialism, I have strong feelings about it. The vast majority of my mum's side of the family was born and grew up in Algeria when it was a colony, my grandparents and aunt who was a newborn left right at the end of the war and had to start anew on the mainland. I know there's some resentment against the French state for the lack of help they got when they arrived back in France with nothing. My grandma ended up very racist. I remember as a teen we had arguments about race and immigration, but I started avoiding politics like the plague around her because I knew there was no point, none of us were going to change their mind, it was a dialogue de sourd. I remember once asking her "what about if someone American moves to France" and she told me it wasn't the same (how is it not the same?). I moved abroad to study when I was 18 and stayed there afterwards, I am a migrant too although I didn't move to get away from war or in hopes of a better life, I still got some benefits from that country as a student, as well as from France. But now, like the vast majority of people who migrated to France, I pay my taxes and do my bit in society, I just don't see how skin colour or religion are important?
I actually hadn't heard about what Omar Sy said (I've been living abroad for years) but honestly, I feel like it doesn't just apply to France but the entire Western world. Only what is happening near us or has direct consequences for us is going to be talked about, a lot of conflicts around the world are just ignored because it's happening far away
D'accord avec toi mais c'est pas contre productif juste différent et défectueux. C'est un truc que je remarque beaucoup mais en vous éloignant de la France vous en oublié la France ( dans le sens où vous en oublier que les règles d'aujourdh'ui sont informé par l'histoire de celle ci) . Je comprends ce que tu veux dire par contre productif pcq l'on aurait pu etre laïc comme les autres le sont seulement aucun pays anglophone ojd à un rapport à la laicité comme le notre. Au US et en grande bretagne la laicite à été introduite pour protégés les minorités religieuses en france elle a été imposé pour retirer son pouvoir à l'eglise mais plus largement à la religion. Au US le président jure sur dieu lors de sa cérémonie d'inauguration et en grande Bretagne le roi il est fait roi par l'église encore.
La laïcité française est même dites comme n'ayant pas de traduction car c'est quelque chose de propre à la France.
En France tu peux être musulman, juif, chrétien, bouddhiste, taoïste, hélleniste ce que tu veux à partir du moment où tu mets pas les règles de ta religion au dessus de celles érigé par la démocratie c'est pour ça qu'un chrétien ne peux pas porter de croix à l'école, que les musulmans pose problème avec le voile, les juifs avec la kippa etc... Le problème c'est pas la religion en soi mais le degrès de visibilité des signes en lien avec les religions. La protection des musulmans , juifs etc... c'est secondaire et involontaire dans le contexte français de la laicité.
Bref, la laicité c'est de gauche faut pas l'oublier, la loi n'est pas mauvaise ce sont les droitards qui utilise le manque de clarté du concept à leurs avantage. Sur ce point là on a besoin de clarté et donc de modification. Pcq la loi ne servait et ne sert à protéger personne d'autre que la république française et son pouvoir. C'est similaire mais pas la même chose.
The difference between moving Algeria to France and you moving to America is the history of french colonisation in Algeria. As an Algeria, you would expect to country that colonized and fucked over your country, and has ongoing relationships with Algeria, to recognize that. You would expect France to take particular care of immigrants of former colonies because they are already French in a way, and your country helped make France wealthy and powerful at the colonies own expensive
parce que si on commencais a faire des statistiques ethniques crois quoi que certains deviendrait raciste vu a quel points ils peuvent etre accablants
When I was living in Paris I met a group of Parisians and everyone in the group was a different race, but grew up in Paris. They told me in France they do not address someone as we do in America such as "Asian-American". They say we say we are all French. Even if their descendants originate from the Middle East of Africa. They say we are ALL French. I love that.
So do I ❤ 🇫🇷
Sounds good, has nothing to do with reality.
The French establishment has shut down discussion of these issues through their control over the media, government and schools. Europeans like to criticize Americans regarding their obsession with race but Europeans like to pretend everything is perfect and dismiss issues when people raise them. Not sure the younger generation is all that different.
I agree, and I also think the younger generation is not that different, the far right movement is growing with young people especially with the young white people in France
As a french anarchist who is aware of what occurred to my people during the french Third Republic with the bloody Adolphe Thiers as a commander of the Versaillais soldiers, I would argue French Republic has always been anything except Liberty, Equality or Fraternity... While at the opposite, libertarian socialists always have given their lives for these typical values in fighting the Bosses, their Estate troop, and thus the so-called "Republic" ( same in Russia, Ukraine, Spain, and pretty much everywhere ).
"Republic" is a "Potemkine" word used by politicians, the same way there were "Potemkine villages" ( fake painted villages on cut wood ) along the Tsar's russian rails to hide the real state of the dying-from-hunger russian country side... Except in France this "Republic" Potemkine word was intended to hide the increase of all unequalities and, more recently the rising of a pre-war last-century authoritarism, and when it comes to "fraternity", they don't neither bother any more to fake anything since a few monthes : All people seeking ayslium are now publicly treated either as future slaves or as possible terrorists... Here is the french "Republic".
P.S. Human "race" is not a thing in France because scientists use to speak about the "human specie", which is not scientifically subdivided into races because it does not pass the needed differences. Instead, we rather speak about "ethnic groups" when it comes to ancestors genom... That's the main explanation of why there is not such a thing as "human races" in France ! ...Then only comes into play social tendancies to speak or not about something taboo which is... Just not a scientific reality, while it is indeed a sociologic one implying racism.
I actually visited a museum about the colonialism and immigration. The museum was in Paris. Actually the only such museum Ive seen.
There is a museum on immigration, but it is purposefuly called "Musée de l'immigration", the title of the muséum doesnt mention colonialism :) and knowing France, they would NEVER add colonialism in the title of a public muséum. Once again, not putting words on our past.
@@julietomiche6219 Ive been there at it talks a lot about colonialism, this was 5 y ago. The name.. I didnt care that much. I actually forgot the name, so I had to google it to post it here correctly. Generally, I understand the author's point, just wanted to mention the museum as an educational checkpooint.
The problem with talking about race is that once race is part of the discourse you can't control what disparities people are going to notice and politicise. You might want to be talking about discrimination and police violence, but others will quickly notice disproportionate black crime and IQ gaps. So, you either choose not to talk about race at all, or you choose to politicise it and risk the discourse not going exactly your way.
There is something empirial in Frnace that puts it very closse to russia, clinging to their impire, not bothered by giving pices of Ukraine to russia just to make a deal. Thats what empires do, not bothered very much about other countries bounderis and rights.
I wouldn't say it's similar in any way. I don't think France has an "imperial" mindset anymore. However, it has a hard time accepting the fact that it's not a diplomatic big player, respected by all. Our governments wanna feel listened to and respected diplomatically, so they get kinda desperate in preserving the act. Our government is just desperate about convincing itself it can be the one who enable a deal between Russia and Ukraine. But in doing so, it's willing to make ridiculous compromises just to not piss _too much_ Russia. Or else, the illusion of "being respected" shatters immediately
In Indonesia, instead of pretending that race didn't exist we're just embracing it and have a national motto of "Bhinneka Tunggal Ika" or "Different But One/Unity in Diversity". Our founding fathers work very hard to make sure that we can co-exist together between the thousands of ethnic groups, cultures, and languages. You might want to read "Imagined Communities" by Benedict Anderson, he wrote this book because he got inspired by how Indonesia despite of their differences can unite and become one community/country.
Indonesia is colonizing West Papua like they did with East Timor. It's all a lie lol. Modern day Malay colonization of Indigenous Papuans that should've ended up independent like Papua New Guinea.
Merci Alice, sujet super important dont on parle trop peu