I’m just back from France, where my direct experience of riots and looting was non-existent, although I had walked past a Montpellier branch of Swarkowski the day before it ceased to be. My indirect experience was quite extensive though, since I watched the talking heads on French TV project their instant analysis onto the unfolding anarchy. Naturally, they discovered that all their existing prejudices were entirely confirmed by events. The act that caused the wave of protests and then wider disorder was the police killing of Nahel Merzouk, 17, one of a succession of such acts of police violence against minorites. Another Arab kid from a poor area. French police kill about three times as many people as the British ones do, though Americans can look away now.
One of the things that makes it difficult for me to write blogs these days is the my growing disgust at the professional opinion-writers who churn out thought about topics they barely understand, coupled with the knowledge that the democratization of that practice, about twenty years ago, merely meant there were more people doing the same. And so it is with opinion writers and micro-bloggers about France, a ritual performance of pre-formed clichés and positions, informed by some half-remembered French history and its literary and filmic representations (Les Misérables, La Haine), and, depending on the flavour you want, some some Huntingtonian clashing or some revolting against structural injustice. Francophone and Anglophone commentators alike, trapped in Herderian fantasies about the nation, see these events as a manifestation of essential Frenchness that tells us something about that Frenchness and where it is heading to next. Rarely, we’ll get a take that makes some comparison to BLM and George Floyd.
I even read some (British) commentator opining that what was happening on French estates was “unimaginable” to British people. Well, not to this one, who remembers the wave of riots in 1981 (wikipedia: “there was also rioting in …. High Wycombe”) and, more recently, the riots in 2011 that followed the police shooting of a young black man, Mark Duggan, and where protest against police violence and racism soon spilled over into country-wide burning and looting, all to be followed by a wave of repression and punitive sentencing, in which (enter stage left) Keir Starmer played a role in his capacity as DPP. You can almost smell the essential Frenchness of it all.
There is much to despair about in these French evenements. Police racism is real and unaddressed, and the situation people, mostly from minorities, on peripheral sink estates, is desperate. Decades of hand-wringing and theorizing, together with a few well-meaning attempts to do something have led nowhere. Both politicians and people need the police (in its varied French forms) to be the heroic front line of the Republican order against the civilizational enemy, and so invest it with power and prestige – particularly after 2015 when there was some genuine police heroism and fortitude during the Paris attacks – but then are shocked when “rogue elements” employ those powers in arbitrary and racist violence. But, no doubt, the possibility of cracking a few black and Arab heads was precisely what motivated many of them to join up in the first place.
On the other side of things, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France Insoumise are quite desperate to lay the mantle of Gavroche on teenage rioters excited by the prospect of a violent ruck with the keufs, intoxicated by setting the local Lidl on fire and also keen on that new pair of trainers. (Fun fact: the Les Halles branch of Nike is only yards from the fictional barricade where Hugo had Gavroche die.) There may be something in the riots as inarticulate protest against injustice theory, but the kids themselves were notably ungrateful to people like the LFI deputy Carlos Martens Bilongo whose attempts to ventriloquise their resistance were rewarded with a blow on the head. Meanwhile, over at the Foxisant TV-station C-News, kids looting Apple stores are the vanguard of the Islamist Great Replacement, assisted by the ultragauche. C-News even quote Renaud Camus.
Things seem to be calming down now, notably after a deplorable attack on the home of a French mayor that left his wife with a broken leg after she tried to lead her small children to safety. As a result, the political class have closed ranks in defence of “Republican order” since “democracy itself” is now under threat. I think one of the most tragic aspects of the last few days has been the way in which various protagonists have been completely sincere and utterly inauthentic at the same time. The partisans of “Republican order” and “democracy” perform the rituals of a system whose content has been evacuated, yet they don’t realise this as they drape tricolours across their chests. With political parties gone or reduced to the playthings of a few narcissistic leaders, mass absention in elections, the policy dominance of a super-educated few, and the droits de l’homme at the bottom of the Mediterranean, what we have is a kind of zombie Republicanism. Yet the zombies believe, including that all French people, regardless of religion or race, are true equals in the indivisible republic. At the same time, those cheering on revolt and perhaps some of those actually revolting, sincerly believing in the true Republicanism of their own stand against racism and injustice, even as the kids pay implicit homage to the consumer brands in the Centres Commerciaux. But I don’t want to both-sides this: the actual fighting will die down but there will be war in the Hobbesian sense of a time when the will to contend by violence is sufficiently known, until there is justice for boys like Nahel and until minorities are really given the equality and respect they are falsely promised in France, but also in the UK and the US. Sadly, the immediate prospect is more racism and more punishment as the reaction to injustice is taken as the problem that needs solving.
{ 112 comments }
yabonn 07.04.23 at 8:37 am
Also:
the Darmanin law, giving the police the “I felt threatened” pass to shoot at moving vehicles. Enacted in 2017 – police shooting went up 40% that year.
the police unions (Alliance, Unsa) discourse is – ah – “decomplexé”, that is, near openly fascist now. It gives a view on what works with the police rank.
Speranta 07.04.23 at 9:58 am
“”Compatriots as morally foreigners””
Thanks for the analysis of these sad news.
Another recent detail (that might interest philosophical analysis) is that people have organized two crowdfunding campaigns: one for the mother of the young killed by the police officer and another, for the wife of the police officer “who did the job and now pay the highest price” as stated in the campaign description. The campaign for the police officer collected 1,3M whereas that for the teenager’s mom only 300k (and that after the news about the success of the first campaign went public).
From a political perspective, that means that far right supporters are much more numerous and determined than (left-wing) supporters of the teenager.
But from a philosophical perspective, it also suggests that people can have quite opposite moral intuitions even when faced with a filmed killing. It seems difficult to argue with people who see, not different, but opposing things in a killing which was filmed.
To elaborate on Chris’ metaphor of “zombies”, people became “morally foreigners” each other. Walzer (1982) thought that compatriots share similar understandings of justice. But polarization in France (and UK, USA etc) shows that compatriots have quite opposite understandings of justice: they become (or always have been) morally foreigners each other.
Unfortunately, given the crowdfunding results, I am again moral foreigner within a rich and organized majority
engels 07.04.23 at 11:20 am
The campaign for the police officer collected 1,3M whereas that for the teenager’s mom only 300k (and that after the news about the success of the first campaign went public). From a political perspective, that means that far right supporters are much more numerous and determined than (left-wing) supporters of the teenager.
On the face of it, it just means they have more money.
steven t johnson 07.04.23 at 12:45 pm
“From a political perspective, that means that far right supporters are much more numerous and determined than (left-wing) supporters of the teenager.”
The meaning is, the supporters of the policeman have more money. It may also mean that contributions to a legal defense fund seem more urgent than contributions to funeral expenses but that gets a little shakier.
A quibble? Moral panic about violence against designated authority may reflect conformists’ emotional investment in the status quo as justice, but is it really a political program? So far as I can tell, people who consider themselves leftist can also feel a visceral distaste for the threat to moral order posed by looting.
Minkfossa 07.04.23 at 5:39 pm
The numbers that donated to the policeman’s crowdfunder was in the region of 46k. compared to 20k for the family of the boy who was killed. The crowdfunded for the police is being taken down, but the rhetorical point has been made – there is substantial support for the police.
Seekonk 07.04.23 at 9:52 pm
I believe that the outbursts after the killings of George Floyd and Nahel Merzouk are the product of our having combined a system of extreme economic inequality with a white supremacy racial hierarchy.
We need to renounce the culture of competition, and embrace solidarity, cooperation, and sharing.
Chetan Murthy 07.04.23 at 10:48 pm
Two thoughts:
First: I lived in France 1991-94. Back then, I had some observations about French society and immigration, and was young enough (and sufficiently internally racist, having grown up in lily-white small-town Texas) that I no longer trust my intuitions of that time. Nevertheless:
the first place I lived was in the Denfert-Rochereau area of Paris, and on my block, there were literally five different tiny “marchande arabe” (arab groceries). Each was run by a single person, and each was pretty rundown. I remember buying figs from one, and finding upon getting home, that there were moths in the packet. It occurred to me that if these five tiny shops combined, then they could share the work, have larger turnover, larger inventory, and do better. But perhaps if they did that then they’d run afoul of French labor laws, and have to hire French workers, and …. well, my observation was also that French grocery store workers could barely operate their cash registers, couldn’t touch-type on the numerical keypads, etc. Maybe if these merchants combined, they’d lose the only competitive advantage they had, which was that they were willing to work harder than French workers. It sure looked like the US was a better place to be an immigrant, than France: that immigrants who came to the US with nothing, were able to climb the ladder into America’s middle class far more easily than in France.
Maybe. Like I said, I was a different person there, and I could have been misinterpreting.
Second observation: I remember being told about how even in Martinique, French schoolchildren (descendants of slaves brought to the Caribbean by French slavers) were taught about “nos ance^tres Gaulois” (our Gallic ancestors). And how France was race-blind. I’ve read that in France, they don’t even accumulate statistics about race. And so recently (reading the testimonies of young French people of Arab descent, describing the daily racism they face) I wondered: perhaps, if you do not measure a thing, you will never know if the thing exists, how bad it is, etc. Perhaps this is part of why nobody measures the impact of racism and race on people’s lives in France.
I’m only asking questions [and I swear I’m not sealioning: I actually don’t know]. I haven’t lived in France for 29 years, and so I don’t have any answers. But I do wonder if the facially race-neutral system in France is a Gallic version of “I don’t see race” [h/t Stephen Colbert].
Chetan Murthy 07.05.23 at 1:22 am
Something else I thought about, as I read the news about these riots, and the murder of Nahel M. that sparked them, was Do The Right Thing. In that movie (as Spike Lee has been clear to say) Mookie starts a riot, so that the murder of Radio Raheem by the police will not be forgotten. I wonder to what extent this is part of the dynamic in France.
KT2 07.05.23 at 1:42 am
engels @3 says “On the face of it, it just means they have more money.”
I’m surprised at you saying Engels “on the face if it”.
Behind the face, and I assume to be tendered in court. … “A voice can be heard on the video saying: “You are going to get a bullet in the head.”.(^1.)
And I am surprised Chris B, as you said “are the vanguard of the Islamist Great Replacement, assisted by the ultragauche. C-News even quote Renaud Camus” that you didn’t reveal the polarizing originator of the fund, Jean Messiha who “Messiha has asserted his belief in Renaud Camus’s Great Replacement conspiracy theory”. Wikipedia below.
The creator of the crowd fund for the lying (^1) murderous officer is Jean Messiha. Banned by Twitter… “In August 2021, Twitter has permanently suspended his account @ jeanmessiha for multiple violations of hateful conduct policy.[12]”. Wikipedia below.
^1. Lying: “In a video of the shooting, he can be seen with a colleague stopping a yellow Mercedes which Nahel was driving without a licence in the western Paris suburb of Nanterre on Tuesday morning.
“The officer has his weapon drawn and shoots Nahel at point-blank range as he drives off.
“Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne said it “was obviously not in line with the rules of engagement for police”.
“Florian M also faces charges of making false statements, having initially claimed that he opened fire when Nahel drove at him.
“Another teenager in the car told media after the incident that the officers had hit Nahel with the butts of their guns before opening fire.
“A voice can be heard on the video saying: “You are going to get a bullet in the head.”
“A third passenger present in the vehicle, also a teen, testified on Monday local time, according to national outlet BFMTV.
“The teen’s lawyer told media her client was “particularly distressed”.
“He gave precise and detailed testimony which details the actions of the two police officers and which corroborates the images of the video,” she said.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-07-04/millions-pledged-for-french-police-officer-who-shot-teenager/102557298
*
Some French politicians also see a double standard: “without saying anything when it had closed the yellow vest pot in two days who hit a policeman”.
David Guiraud wrote on Twitter:
“The assumed message is kill Arabs, and you will become millionaires, and the government watches this horror pass without saying anything when it had closed the yellow vest pot in two days who hit a policeman. Repugnant.”
https://www.euronews.com/2023/07/03/crowdfunder-for-french-police-officer-charged-with-shooting-teenager-nahel-m-draws-anger
*
Jean Messiha
“In March 2021, Jean Messiha made the headlines [citation needed] in affirming the existence of a “black privilege” during the 46th César Awards.[11] [better source needed] In August 2021, Twitter has permanently suspended his account @ jeanmessiha for multiple violations of hateful conduct policy.[12]
…
“In May 2016, he became the spokesman of the “Horaces”, a group of high-ranking civil servants and business executives, supporting Marine Le Pen, who meet once a month and discuss the political platform of the National Rally.[4][3][5]While the group announces more than 155 members, Messiha is the only one whose name has been publicly known so far.[5]According to Dominique Albertini of Libération, Messiha’s role within the National Rally is to represent “the drawing power of [the party] towards high-ranking civil servants”.[4]
“Messiha has asserted his belief in Renaud Camus’s Great Replacement conspiracy theory, whereby Christian populations are being “replaced” through non-European immigration, specifically from Muslim and African countries.[3] On social media, he has expressed that Islam is at odds with France’s republican system.[3] He is also a critic of the European Union.[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Messiha
*
This NYT piece was written in 2019. Since 2019 we’ve had a pandemic, AI explosion, interest rates swings, Russia invading Ukraine etc etc. We live in interesting times. And more oercieved and real unequality. So with Jean Messiha leading the cabal “of the “Horaces”, a group of high-ranking civil servants and business executives, supporting Marine Le Pen … “Messiha is the only one whose name has been publicly known so far”, polarization and police will be boosted. And breakouts riots will simmer beneath the surface.
So, a hidden cabal frinted by the fuy who oisted the ceowd fund for the police officer, who then gets used as a prop for and by “Sincerely inauthentic: zombie Republicanism and violence in France”. Fuel. Fire. And so more able to mobilise the zombie Republicans.
“Inequality Fuels Rage of ‘Yellow Vests’ in Equality-Obsessed France
By Peter S. Goodman
April 15, 2019
…
“This notion animates many of the Yellow Vest participants. More than a threat to livelihoods, Mr. Macron’s reforms constitute a breach of the French social order, an attack on the understanding that the state looks out for struggling people.
“Such thinking holds special currency among white people born in France, who dominate the ranks of the Yellow Vests. Many echo sentiments heard across Europe amid an influx of Muslim migrants, and in the United States, where President Trump has fomented fear of immigrants. They claim that outsiders are capturing benefits that should be going to French-born working people.
“Coralie Annovazzi, 20, still lives with her parents as she works temporary waitressing jobs. She gets no cash assistance from the government, because people under 25 are not eligible.
…
nytimes dot com
/2019/04/15/business/yellow-vests-movement-inequality.html
*
Chris B said “Americans can look away now”. And so can Australians:
From a 2018 report on the 1987 Royal Commission into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody -31 years later;
“… Over half of the Indigenous people who died in custody since 2008 had not been found guilty, as 56% were on remand, died while fleeing police or during arrest, or were in protective custody. Most were suspected of non-indictable offences, which typically carry sentences of less than five years.[49]”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aboriginal_deaths_in_custody
Chris Bertram 07.05.23 at 6:20 am
@KT2: I allowed your comment, but please make your comments a lot shorter in the future (and that goes for everyone).
TM 07.05.23 at 7:24 am
Per today’s morning news, Macron’s big new idea to quell the riots is to … shut down the internet. Well that didn’t take long.
I have very little insight about French society but I know the election results. Leaving aside the special dynamics of the Presidential election: in the 2022 parliamentary election, the left received 32% of the vote overall, and this despite the fact that majorities of the population claim, when asked, to oppose most of Macron’s policies, for example his pension reform. These facts suggest that contrary to popular misconceptions, the French just are not very progressive. Macron surely has a lot to answer for but nobody can claim that Macron somehow fell from the sky and subverted Frenchness or whatever. People voted for him, they voted for his party, or they voted for even parties that promise even worse policies. Only a minority voted for something like a progressive alternative. I recognize that Mélenchon has his own problems but voters in 2022 did have an alternative to Macron, neoliberalism and racism to vote for, and the vast majority (the overwhelming majority if we include the non-voters) chose not to.
MisterMr 07.05.23 at 8:40 am
@Chetan Murty 7
“I wondered: perhaps, if you do not measure a thing, you will never know if the thing exists, how bad it is, etc. Perhaps this is part of why nobody measures the impact of racism and race on people’s lives in France.”
Measuring “racism” and measurnig “race” are quite different things. I for one am of the idea that attributing citiziens to different “races” solidifies and increases racism.
engels 07.05.23 at 8:47 am
Only a minority voted for something like a progressive alternative
I seem to remember anyone to the left of Emmanuel Macro being told they had to vote for him to keep out Le Pen.
Chris Bertram 07.05.23 at 8:57 am
@engels, true, but there’s always the first round to look at. In fact, in its entire history since 1789, France has very few years of left-wing government, even on quite a generous view of what counts as “left-wing”.
Tm 07.05.23 at 10:28 am
Engels, that’s why I stressed the Parliamentary elections. People could have voted Macron to keep Le Pen out and still have elected a progressive parliament to keep Macron in check. Those election results are not flukes, we have to assume that they reflect real preferences.
Daragh 07.05.23 at 11:47 am
Engels @13
That was largely because instead of putting up a real candidate the French left decided to make a narcissistic grifter with awful politics their standard bearer, and as TM @15 points out Renaissance still came first in the parliamentary elections putting the lie to the idea that NUPES’ policies and leaders are akshually sooper popular. A quick look at the UK elections in 2019 indicate this isn’t a uniquely French phenomenon either.
engels 07.05.23 at 12:30 pm
we have to assume that [elections] reflect real preferences
Like humanity’s real preference for Coke over Pepsi. Anyway I agree France isn’t on the verge of a communist revolution although I’ve been rather more inspired by Mélenchon than Chris has. In the spirit of the post I should probably keep quiet since my only contact with any of this was nearly visiting Metz last week after passing an autoroute sign for Robert Schuman’s house and momentarily assuming it referred to Robert Schumann the composer, not Robert Schuman the Eurocrat (what a lucky escape!)
Ebenezer Scrooge 07.05.23 at 1:14 pm
All I know about French politics comes from desultory reading of Art Goldhammer’s blog. But I’d be a little careful in interpreting the French election results. Mélenchon strikes me as the French equivalent of a Jeremy Corbyn (and I know nothing about British politics, either.) They both campaigned as if they only wanted the votes of true believers, and did not want to filthy themselves with soft support. This tends to skew voting to the right.
LFC 07.05.23 at 2:04 pm
Chetan Murthy @7
I remember being told about how even in Martinique, French schoolchildren (descendants of slaves brought to the Caribbean by French slavers) were taught about “nos ancêtres Gaulois” (our Gallic ancestors).
I would not be surprised if that were indeed the case, i.e., if whoever told you that was correct. France has a long tradition of emphasizing, at least at the level of official rhetoric and ideology, that Frenchness is something that attaches above all to the French language and French culture (as spread by colonial expansion or other means); hence schoolchildren being taught in Martinique in the French language would be considered French, period, which means that they have, in a cultural or quasi-spiritual sense, Gallic ancestors, even though, in a factual sense, they don’t. That would be my gloss on the anecdote fwiw. So official “race blindness” would perhaps be one result of the emphasis on French culture and its assimilative power.
I don’t know the facts on how “multiculturalism” (or bilingualism) is dealt with in French schools (or whether that has changed over time), but my guess is that it is not much emphasized. I’d be interested to find out whether the school curriculum for kids of North African or Arab descent has been tailored in some way to take account of or acknowledge their particular heritage in addition to their Frenchness. In other words, whether there has been an effort to make the idea of a universalizing French culture somehow compatible with different cultural heritages.
oldster 07.05.23 at 2:20 pm
“On the other side of things, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and La France Insoumise are quite desperate to lay the mantle of Gavroche on teenage rioters excited by the prospect of a violent ruck with the keufs, intoxicated by setting the local Lidl on fire and also keen on that new pair of trainers.”
I’m an American ignoramus here, so probably missing and misunderstanding a lot.
But this sentence stood out to me because it sounds like the kind of pejorative characterization of urban rioters that, in the US, the generally advanced by the right-wing, and frequently the racist right wing, as a way of countering the claim that the riots are a justifiable response to unjust killings or unjust systems more generally.
Chris, I think of you as decidedly not right-wing, and anything but racist, so it is surprising to my American sensibilities to hear you offer an assessment that, in the US context, would be coded as both. Is it your judgment that some significant amount of the rioting really is unscrupulous and opportunistic in this way, motivated not by outrage at the police shooting but by the desire to steal shoes? (And note “significant amount” — no one will deny that even the most noble cause attracts some bad actors around the edges.)
If so, then I’m happy to accept that things are simply different in the French riots than they have been in the US riots.
John 07.05.23 at 2:40 pm
…”disgust with professional opinion writers…” Amen. And thank you for an informative post.
steven t johnson 07.05.23 at 3:40 pm
Minkfossa@5 gives us relative numbers for the early stages of contributors to the cop and the mother. To me, the salient thing is that crude percentages suggest the cop-lovers have over four times as much disposable income than the mother lovers. The inadvertent implication that the anti-racists’ sincerity is measured by how much money they contribute to a funeral fund is unfortunate in my view. But then, I also tend to suspect people are more motivated to contribute to a defense fund, as a political act, while funeral expenses are still widely considered to be a personal expense.
engels@13 Perhaps I misunderstood the thread but an offhand reference to the monster Macron when discussing that election campaign struck me as confirming the real problem for CT and CT commentariat was, is and will forever be, anyone claiming to be left, not centrist or technocratic or bipartisan or committed to not taking the road to serfdom. I see no reason to think such strongly held values have changed.
The beliefs that voting for parliamentary parties reliably deliver on their professed programs; that parliaments are routinely effective in restraining presidents; that national policy is the dominating issue in local elections (aren’t French parliamentary elections local?); that the poor etc. naturally mobilize for elections of their friends to offices that lack significant power to address immediate issues; that local media and other power structures are in no way more monopolized than national media….well, these and other such implicit propositions would be highly dubious were it not for the purpose. Namely, to blame the evil masses, or at least those portions of it selected by the blamer as blameworthy. Blaming vile humanity is a right-wing trope, thus popular in some circles and better yet, immune to argument.
Chris Bertram 07.05.23 at 4:22 pm
@oldster, well, what can I say? I have to write things as I see them. There has been much more consumerist looting and recreational arson this time round than in 2005 and it is as well to recognize it, even if that spoils the simple narrative of revolt. Yes, there has been justifiable anger at the killing of Nahel and at police racism and violence, but I don’t think it helps the cause of justice to pretend that the other things haven’t happened. But as I said, I don’t want to “both sides” this: the victims of state violence and marginalization are right to protest and the responsibility for these days and nights of anger lies principally with the perpetrators of the injustice against them.
oldster 07.05.23 at 5:52 pm
“well, what can I say? I have to write things as I see them.”
That sounds right, Chris.
” Yes, there has been justifiable anger…, but I don’t think it helps the cause of justice to pretend that the other things haven’t happened.”
That too sounds right, but would be controversial in many liberal circles in the U.S..
Chetan Murthy 07.05.23 at 7:02 pm
LFC: I guess I wasn’t sufficiently clear. I’ll try again.
There are two different things going on, perhaps. (1) “French culture and its assimilative power.” Here, the idea is that if everybody thinks of themselves as French, has the same cultural referents, etc, etc, then hey presto! there’ll be no racism, no discrimination, and everybody will kumbaya. (2) racism. No white person ever engaged the target of their racism in a long and detailed discussion of their cultural referents and intellectual lodestars, before proceeding to, y’know, plant a burning cross on their front lawn. Or refuse to hire them. That’s not how it works.
So what I mean is, if France refuses to even acknowledge the possibility of racism, then they’re not going to find any, are they?
MisterMr: “I for one am of the idea that attributing citiziens to different “races” solidifies and increases racism.”
You and Chief Justice John Roberts agree. Congratulations.
Ikonoclast 07.05.23 at 8:57 pm
A TV talking head said French politicians were blaming the internet and social media for the riots or at least the extent of them. That’s got to be the reason. After all, the Peasant’s Revolt ( England 1381) and the German Peasant’s War, 1524 to 1525, were both caused by the internet and social media too. QED. Case closed. I mean, this sort of thing can’t possibly have anything to with inequality can it? Definitely not. The poor should be as content in their hovels as the King, er um “President,” is in his palace.
LFC 07.05.23 at 10:16 pm
Chetan Murthy @25
You misunderstood my comment.
You write: “if France refuses to even acknowledge the possibility of racism, then they’re not going to find any, are they?” Indeed not. But if you re-read my comment, you will see that I nowhere took issue with this. Rather, I was trying to hazard a tentative partial explanation of why it might be the case that French officialdom does not acknowledge or at any rate downplays the possibility of racism.
A book published in the early 1990s argued that the dominant (though not the only) tradition in France has stressed an assimilationist and inclusive understanding of nationhood/nationalism and citizenship. (Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany) Frenchness in this tradition is defined “in social and political [and, one might add, ‘cultural’ in a non-exclusivist sense] rather than ethnic terms, as a matter of social becoming rather than intrinsic being.” If that argument is right, then it’s not only the French Right that presumably has an interest in downplaying or denying the possibility of racism, but the more mainstream parts of the French political spectrum as well. To acknowledge the possibility of racism would be implicitly to acknowledge that the assimilationist tradition or project isn’t working (because if it were working the definition of Frenchness “in social and political rather than ethnic terms” would have taken hold to such an extent that racism would be relegated to a tiny fringe of the society).
So in short I wasn’t disagreeing, I was rather trying to take what you said as jumping-off point for some tentative suggestions of my own.
engels 07.05.23 at 10:32 pm
MisterMr: “I for one am of the idea that attributing citiziens to different “races” solidifies and increases racism.”
You and Chief Justice John Roberts agree. Congratulations.
Would like to see a list of people who agree with the opposing position, that sorting citizens into “races” is a good and necessary endeavour?
MisterMr 07.05.23 at 10:59 pm
I have a bright future as a Supreme! I’m sending my C.V.
J-D 07.05.23 at 11:44 pm
Yup.
But then what are we going to do after lunch?
J-D 07.06.23 at 2:20 am
I have no idea whether it’s a significant amount in this particular case, but assuming for the sake of argument that it’s not, there are a few points which I think are worth making.
If discussing the rioting, there’s no good general reason even to initiate reference to an insignificant number of bad actors.
If discussing the rioting and somebody else initiates reference to bad actors, it is appropriate to respond ‘they don’t represent a significant part of what’s going on’.
If discussing the rioting and somebody else initiates reference to bad actors, it is not appropriate to respond by heroising the bad actors (of whom, as you acknowledge, it is extremely probable there are at least some**).
It was my understanding that the third of these three points was the one that Chris Bertram was making, and that it was relevant to do so because some (significant) people are heroising bad actors.
** But maybe some people don’t acknowledge this? You write that nobody will deny that even the most noble cause attracts some bad actors around the edges, but have you considered the possibility that some people will do exactly that?
J-D 07.06.23 at 3:44 am
If nobody attributed people to different races, then there’d be no such thing as racism: indeed, there’d be no such thing as races. If there were no such social construct as races, that would make the world a better place. But we don’t live in such a world, and to pretend that we do doesn’t help. We live in a world where there is racism, and, by definition, racists attribute people to different races. To redress or remedy racism, it is necessary to recognise that people are targets of racism, which has to mean recognising that racists attribute them to racial categories, which has to mean recognising the existence of racial categories, which has to mean attributing people to them. If you don’t recognise that people are (for example) black, how can you recognise racism against black people?
J-D 07.06.23 at 4:04 am
I’m not clear on the meaning of this.
In the 2022 French presidential election, Jean-Luc Mélenchon got more votes than the aggregate of those received by Yannick Jadot, Fabien Roussel, Anne Hidalgo, Philippe Poutou, and Nathalie Arthaud (more than twice the number, in fact). I understand how somebody might say that by voting in this way the French left made Jean-Luc Mélenchon their standard-bearer. That’s not, however, an explanation (or partial explanation) of what caused the election outcome, because it’s a fact only known after the result. On the other hand, I can understand how somebody might say that the reason he got more than double the aggregate vote for other left candidates was because the French left made him their standard-bearer, but in that case I don’t know what are the actions by the French left that are supposed to constitute making him their standard-bearer.
If somebody said La France Insoumise made a bad choice of standard-bearer and that both it and the French left as a whole would have done better if it had made a better choice of standard-bearer, I would also understand that, but La France Insoumise and ‘the French left’ are not synonymous.
Chetan Murthy 07.06.23 at 9:06 am
engels @ 28: “Would like to see a list of people who agree with the opposing position, that sorting citizens into “races” is a good and necessary endeavour?”
Hannah Arendt wrote that when they put a label on you, it does no good to protest that you’re not described by that label: best to understand that they’re going to treat you that way, and you’d better understand what that implies, whether there’s a cattle-car (or an extrajudicial execution) in store for you.
It isn’t a good thing to sort people into “races”. But it is what the people who run societies do, and so if you’re one of the people who are thus sorted, it is …. important for one’s longevity to understand it and not deny it. Concretely, I grew up as an “American”, and I sneered at people who were “hyphenated-Americans”; I was “American, full stop”. Needless to say, on November 9, 2016, I was disabused of this notion.
When they tell you what you are, there’s no use in denying it.
Chetan Murthy 07.06.23 at 9:13 am
LFC @ 27: I’m sorry, it is I who didn’t understand your comment. My apologies.
Yes, France does indeed have this belief that being a member of the nation comes via civic and political membership, and not due to ethnicity. It turns out that the USA has that same belief, yes? I mean, “the melting pot” is an article of faith, almost our civic religion. And yet, it seems, it’s all bullshit: there is literally nothing I can do to “melt into the pot” — I will always be a sand-ni-CLANG, a camel-jockey, a goddamn Iraqi, a wetback, and many other things, to the good, salt-of-the-earth folks of the area of Texas where I grew up. And as difficult as it is for me to “melt into that pot”, clearly it is even more difficult for Black Americans. And, perhaps, French of Arab descent. That’s really the question at hand here: whether the French civic religion is really open to admitting French of Arab descent, or perhaps, the door is barred.
I hope it’s clear that I want that civic religion, that faith, to be real, and to be accessible to all Americans, to all French people. But you can’t live in the world of your wishes; you have to live in the real world.
Chetan Murthy 07.06.23 at 9:17 am
LFC @ 27: “To acknowledge the possibility of racism would be implicitly to acknowledge that the assimilationist tradition or project isn’t working”
Oh, this is also very good! Yes, this is also something that in America we’re grappling with.
engels 07.06.23 at 11:11 am
Hrm. I’m not saying no one should ever talk about “races” and I agree there needs to be a political response to racism. I thought the discussion was about whether the state should classify people on that basis. Without foreclosing that issue I was just observing that pointing to unpleasant people on the other side of the debate doesn’t really work in your favour here (I assume we don’t really need to go full Godwin…)
MisterMr 07.06.23 at 11:58 am
@J-D 32
“We live in a world where there is racism, and, by definition, racists attribute people to different races. To redress or remedy racism, it is necessary to recognise that people are targets of racism, which has to mean recognising that racists attribute them to racial categories, which has to mean recognising the existence of racial categories, which has to mean attributing people to them. If you don’t recognise that people are (for example) black, how can you recognise racism against black people?”
I understand this point, but I think you are conflating a lot of different things. For example, if someone writes antisemitic stuff on a wall, I can recognize this as racism even without entering the quesation of who is or isn’t a Jew, or whether “jewness” is a race or a religion. If people behave badly against migrants or citiziens whose parents were migrants, I can see this as xenophoby, birdering on racism, without telling the kids whose parents are recent immigrants “you are different because your parents were immigrants”.
Thinking about it, I suspect part of my dislike of the idea of marking people because of their “race” is due to the fact that here in Italy this kind of racism is mainly an anti-immigrant thing, and I suspect the same thing happens in France, so marking people for not being French from enough generations looks as a bad move to me.
engels 07.06.23 at 12:56 pm
“We live in a world where there is racism, and, by definition, racists attribute people to different races. To redress or remedy racism, it is necessary to recognise that people are targets of racism, which has to mean recognising that racists attribute them to racial categories, which has to mean recognising the existence of racial categories, which has to mean attributing people to them. If you don’t recognise that people are (for example) black, how can you recognise racism against black people?”
I’ve never understood this particular argument. It seems like saying “the only way to prevent witch hunts to acknowledge the existence of witches”.
Fake Dave 07.06.23 at 1:24 pm
Re: Oldster, critiques of rioting in America have never been confined to the right. The pacifist end of the Civil Rights Movement was fairly insistent that violence was a tool of oppression, not liberation. As understandable and human as it was to want to lash out against the intolerable and inhuman conditions of Jim Crow or the ghetto, it was ultimately counterproductive. White supremacist rioting and police violence would be minimized or explained away as necessary, but if oppressed communities tried to fight back on those terms it would be amplified or exaggerated in a way that reinforced and justified the ugly stereotypes and double standards that allowed racial terror to pass as law and order in the first place.
There were obviously detractors within the community insisting a more militant turn was necessary at the time and since then much ink has been spilled by the (often white, always ideological) “diversity of tactics” crowd that the riots and threat of violence scared the government into working with the reasonable end of the movement, but even that revisionist fable seems to concede the necessity of people who emphatically rejected violence and destruction of property as legitimate social protests for the movement to get anywhere.
Many of the fiercest critiques of rioting have come from within the Black community. They’re the ones who have to live with the consequences of idiots trashing their neighborhoods, hurting innocent people, and alienating whole communities (people in LA still remember how Korean shopkeepers were targeted during the Rodney King riots) and often harbor fewer illusions that the people who want to smash windows and steal shit must care deeply about social justice.
BLM wasn’t a unified group, but by and large its organizers worked hard to keep the agitators and street fighters out of their movement and have generally been at pains to say that looting and violence are unacceptable. That hasn’t stopped some people from doing it anyway (especially when confronted by the police or right wing provocateurs), but in general the movement people have been quicker to condemn and less willing to justify “cathartic” street violence than a lot of white liberals watching from the sidelines who know enough to reject rightwing narratives but are still insisting on trying to make sense of something rather senseless.
oldster 07.06.23 at 6:55 pm
@Fake Dave
Thanks, that’s all useful history and context.
Chetan Murthy 07.06.23 at 7:27 pm
engels @ 39: “It seems like saying “the only way to prevent witch hunts to acknowledge the existence of witches”.”
Heh, why do you think witch hunts happen? It’s not because somebody got turned into a newt: it’s because there are women who refuse to be cowed, or (so I read, in Africa) widowed women whose resources and wealth their younger family members covet. It’s not about “witches”, but about misogyny and elder abuse.
Let me put it differently: you don’t react to a wave of anti-semitic accusations of blood libel, by sending out police to investigate disappearances of children on the theory that they got turned into matzo wafers. You react by investigating the anti-semitism. And you can’t do that, if you don’t actually know who is Jewish and who is not.
I would have thought that this was obvious at this late date.
Chetan Murthy 07.06.23 at 7:34 pm
MisterMr @ 38: Two things:
have you given any thought to the way that your position is pretty much identical too that of SCOTUS Chief Justice Roberts in his “the way to not discriminate by race, is to stop discriminating by race” ? Any thought?
It’s not about cross-burning. Perhaps it might be useful to look into Lee Atwater’s “deathbed confession”, where he notes that you don’t say “ni-clang, ni-clang”, you instead talk about local school control, lower taxes, balanced budgets …. and that has the same effect.
There have been widely-replicated studies that show that people with identical resumes, with either white-sounding or Black-sounding names, receive vastly different responses from prospective employers. [IIRC] There have been (again, widely-replicated) studies that show that police stop Black people far more than white people for weapons/drug searches, even though white people are found to be much more likely to actually carry weapons or drugs. There’s almost a subgenre of documentaries where Black policemen (who profile Black people for searches) are stopped and searched outside their jurisdiction, and are shocked, shocked, shocked that there is racial profiling going on.
These things are all evidence that there’s a lot of racism going on in this ostensibly facially racially neutral society.
You don’t stop those things, by ignoring that they’re happening. And if you don’t capture statistics based on race, if you literally eliminate the data-features of race, then you’re ignoring what’s happening.
Chetan Murthy 07.06.23 at 8:15 pm
Fake Dave @ 40: Thank you for this. During the 2020 Police Riots (aka the George Floyd protests), it occurred to me that it’s pretty hypocritical to excoriate protestors who are literally protesting against police brutality and extrajudicial executions, for violence occurring during protests. After all, they’re literally protesting the forces of “order” which are responsible for preventing that violence, b/c those forces of order don’t do their jobs and instead just bust heads. How are these protestors supposed to ensure the peacefulness of their demonstrations, after all, when the usual forces that do so are the ones they’re protesting against.
And those usual forces …. well, we saw them on display, “masks off” on live video all over the USA during that summer: just a brutal and violent gang. Forget about shooting young black men: they thought nothing of brutally attacking young white women and old white men. The mask came off, and what was underneath it was a festering mass of Fascism.
engels 07.06.23 at 9:30 pm
I think it’s complex issue but I think it’s at least arguable at this point that some of the famous progressive American approaches don’t work very well. UK universities made a lot of progress in recent years with a somewhat different one:
https://www.ucas.com/connect/blogs/what-contextual-admissions
Just to note in passing that Fake Dave’s idea that only “white liberals” have tended to defend rioting and other forms of militancy is completely batty:
https://www.southampton.ac.uk/politics/news/2020/06/11-riots-and-political-theory.page
Fake Dave 07.06.23 at 9:53 pm
Re: MrMister,
Count me as someone who despises the US’s racialized census categories. They’re arbitrary, inconsistent, pseudoscientific (why are “Hispanic” and “non-Hispanic” the only acknowledged ethnicities?), and elide real divisions in society in a way that perpetuates the myth of a monolithic (non-Hispanic) “white” majority while pushing real diversity to the margins. It’s worth noting that, despite all the vagaries of history and popular prejudice to the contrary, the Middle Easterners/North Africans who bear the brunt of racialized violence in France and are too often treated like potential traitors or terrorists in this country would still generally fall into the same undifferentiated “white” category as Anglos, Italians, Jews, etc. (Unless their ancestors happened to speak Spanish).
Algerians might plausibly claim to be “African American” but that label is explicitly still the Black/Negro category. West Asians might put themselves into the “Other Asian” category, but that would mark them as the same “race” as East Asians when the communities are quite separate. In practice, they’re erased whatever they pick. It’s hard to say what MENA people are actually putting down (because they’re not counted as such), but the general wisdom is that they should consider themselves white despite all treatment to the contrary. Despite all the progress (and backsliding) American society has made toward acknowledging real diversity, the US government is still stuck in the era of “natural” races and the social scientists have had to face the impossible choice of further reifying categories that aren’t fit to purpose (and can do real harm) or ignoring the best data available in favor of alternative models that might not be any better.
However, none of that makes the French model acceptable. Race is bullshit in many ways, but it’s bullshit people believe in. People get fired for that bullshit, get harassed for that bullshit, sometimes even get murdered over it. Recognizing it as bullshit means acknowledging that people deserve to be protected from the bullshit. Saying “oh we don’t do that sort of thing here” means ignoring the bullshit and protecting the bullshitters and is entirely inconsistent with the sort of steps one would take if they actually wanted to stop the bullshit.
This isn’t even just about race anyway. The US has laws protecting freedom of religion. Sometimes those laws are actually overbroard or favor nasty fundamentalists, but they also generally preclude the sort of chauvinistic “secularism” that seeks to erase (“foreign”) religion from public life. We also have acknowledgements and protections of minority language rights that would be unacceptable in much of Europe (despite the EU’s best efforts) least of all France, a country that regards even most of its native languages as backwards “patois” of no real significance. The US has a loud and hateful “speak English!” crowd but despite their best efforts they’ve never succeeded in forcing an official language on the country and very few people in this country would be interested in empowering an elite clique of retrograde language snobs like the academe francais.
When we consider the way old metropolitan “Frenchness” has been constructed and enforced as monolithic across all social and cultural spheres, even ones that have little to do with race or ethnicity we start to recognize the “Americans are the real racists” stuff as the weak deflection (projection?) that it is. As with all other forms of whataboutism, the appropriate response is “so what?”
MisterMr 07.06.23 at 11:05 pm
@Chetan Murty
Two answers: first, about method, I don’t chose my opinions in order to be leftish, I just say I’m leftish because I tend to agree more with leftists, but if I happen to agree on something with a rightie so be it; I really don’t understand how “your opinion is the same of a rightie” is an argument.
Second, on the substantive issue, it is quite obvious that it is possible to measure racism without legally stating that X is, for example, “black”. Something is having “black” as a legal status, which is what is forbidden as far as I can understand, and something is having studies and for example having people self identify as blacks.
I think you are giving a maximalist reading of the concept of “not attributing a race to people”, which is not what I think it means.
MisterMr 07.06.23 at 11:13 pm
Here are two articles about a study on racism commissioned by a French ministry, and one commissioned by a pro-black association.
Both paint a sad picture about racism in France, hiwever evidently they show that it is possible to study racism in France without legally recognizing race as a status.
https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/2021-saw-surge-of-racist-crimes-in-france-report/2532525#
https://www.lemonde.fr/en/france/article/2023/02/15/91-of-black-people-in-metropolitan-france-say-they-are-victims-of-racist-discrimination_6015940_7.html
J-D 07.06.23 at 11:40 pm
Intriguingly, I think that is what you are doing when you refer to
If you asked me ‘How do you feel about people identifying people by their race?’ my response would be ‘It depends on the context and the purpose, including who’s doing it to whom’. I think it would be plainly wrong to say ‘I am against it in all cases whatsoever’ (although I guess it would be fair to say ‘I am not against it in all cases whatsoever but as a general phenomenon I don’t like it’).
Consider, for example, this instance offered by Chetan Murthy:
I think it’s important to know that the way police officers carry out searches for weapons and drugs is racially discriminatory, but how would you conduct a study to confirm whether this was so without identifying individuals by race? It can’t be done. The researchers must have been identifying individuals by race, because that was an essential requirement for their (valuable) purpose of discovering information about racially discriminatory policing. Context matters.
Consider, for that matter, your own example:
You are only able to do this if you mark people as belonging (or not belonging) to the categories of ‘immigrants’ and ‘children of immigrants’. Tagging people as belonging to the categories of ‘immigrants’ and ‘children of immigrants’, just like tagging people as belonging to racial categories, is something which is done for different purposes in different contexts, and it does not make sense to apply the same evaluation regardless of whether the purpose is ‘perpetrating bigoted discrimination’ or ‘investigating the phenomenon of bigoted discrimination’.
Bart Barry 07.07.23 at 3:02 am
This Charlotte Kilpatrick article in The New Republic examines French public identity at odds with the social realities of race in France.
The article points out that no data is collected related to race in France. The policy of “We’re all French here,” manages to overlook a lot.
Chris Bertram 07.07.23 at 7:03 am
John Burn-Murdoch has the data on how things are worse for immigrants in France:
https://www.ft.com/content/25eda9f0-8bd3-41e1-948c-89cc7c0ec66e
J-D 07.07.23 at 7:39 am
It’s not clear what you mean by ‘a legal status’. What’s the difference, in your understanding, between stating that somebody is black and legally stating that somebody is black? Putting it another way, what specifically is it that is happening in the US which you think is not a good thing?
engels 07.07.23 at 8:24 am
Also, just to note that the French approach to statistics etc is pretty common in Western Europe iirc, although you’d never know that from reading American think pieces.
MisterMr 07.07.23 at 9:37 am
“what specifically is it that is happening in the US which you think is not a good thing?”
When did I say something abot the USA?
I was just reacting to the fact that France has a sort of anti-discrimation “colorblind” law and people take it as if was pro discrimination.
I do think in general that the left, starting from the USA left but also in other places, is going in a wrong direction with insistence on a sort of reverse discrimination, and I think this happens because the left has largely abandoned the concept of general economic equalization, but I’m not referring to some specifical laws in the USA (also because I don’t know the laws of the USA).
PS: perhaps I misunderstood your question, so if you are specifically asking “what do you think the government should not collect”, my answer is: “I’m totally OK with the government being forbidden to have a list with the name of its citiziens on one side and a racial attribution like black, white, arab, slav etc. on the other”, that is what I think the french law forbids.
I have no idea if the USA has such a record or if it is or isn’t legal in the USA.
oldster 07.07.23 at 11:01 am
here are some views that seem plausible to me:
1) govts should not categorize their citizens by their race;
2) researchers need to be able to study how policies and systems interact with perceptions of race.
Both of these views have been expressed up-thread, and both have some merit. And it seems that we could satisfy both, by simply mandating that researchers may use categories of race (bzw. racial perception), and govts may not.
But that solution runs into problems with the following two points:
3) non-govt researchers frequently need to rely on statistics collected by govt agencies (whether the topic is poverty, nutrition, income, or anything else);
4) researchers are sometimes govt employees, and important research is done by govtal agencies.
In the US, probably 80% of social science research (whether in economics, public health, or what have you) depends directly or indirectly on statistics collected by the govt. It is not feasible for most researchers to fund massive data collection projects.
The combination of 3&4 means that if you like 2, then you will push back on 1, and if you like 1, then you will push back on 2. The US policy is to accept some exceptions to 1 in order to facilitate 2; the French policy is to insist on 1 and accept the loss of 2.
Maybe we could finesse the problem by finding non-govtal bodies that are large enough to collect data on a nation-wide or world-wide scale? Sure! Let me introduce you to Google and Facebook. Sometimes they make their data available to researchers. But not freely, and always with their own agendas. And if you don’t like the idea of your govt categorizing you by your race, you should really hate the idea of Google and Facebook deciding what race you are.
In fact, I am fairly sure that the big tech behemoths do assign races to people when they create dossiers for targeted advertising. After all, stereotypes help them to sell products. Fake Dave up above mentions some of the inadequacies and perversities of the US Census Bureau categories. It would be interesting to find out whether FB and Google internally use those categories or others.
engels 07.07.23 at 5:28 pm
if you don’t like the idea of your govt categorizing you by your race, you should really hate the idea of Google and Facebook deciding what race you are
Think you might be onto something…
https://www.independent.co.uk/tech/eu-law-will-targeted-ads-race-religion-sexuality-b1999620.html
what specifically is it that is happening in the US which you think is not a good thing?
How long have you got?
Chris Bertram 07.07.23 at 7:15 pm
I can’t help thinking that “government categorizing people by race” is needlessly (but perhaps deliberately) vague. It is perfectly compatible with people being equally citizens, regardless of race, that the government conducts (or permits) research to ensure that citizens who are socially recognized as being of various racial or ethnic backgrounds are not, on account of those backgrounds, socially disadvantaged.
MisterMr 07.07.23 at 7:57 pm
Part of the problem is that the “colorblind” laws are supposed to avoid stuff like what happened during fascisn/nazism, that is explicit negative discrimination against some group, whereas the “american” (?) point of view is that the government should do “reverse discrimination” to equalize stuff between groups.
Basically the “american” (?) view is that the government would never directly use a database of, say, muslims to directly target them, whereas the european (?) view is that governments could very much do this, since it happened many times in european history (not only fascism but also, say, “marranos”, or religious wars between catholics and protestants).
engels 07.07.23 at 11:05 pm
There’s a reflexive relationship between the categories of official statistics and social understanding I suppose. I don’t think that precludes research about ethnic disadvantage or racism and according to MisterMr it doesn’t; I think this thread needs someone to frogsplain…
engels 07.07.23 at 11:06 pm
Idk if this is connected:
“With a few glorious and glaring exceptions, the shadow of Jim Crow was cast in its new glittering form expressed in the language of superficial diversity: all my courses were subsumed under Afro-American religious studies, including those on existentialism, American democracy and the conduct of life.”
Cornel West accuses Harvard University of ‘spiritual bankruptcy’
J-D 07.08.23 at 12:12 am
What makes you think there is any such law in France? What if you’re wrong and there isn’t?
Chetan Murthy 07.08.23 at 2:13 am
MisterMr @58: “Part of the problem is that the “colorblind” laws are supposed to avoid stuff like what happened during fascisn/nazism”
Do you really think that it required a database of Black people for Southerners (and too many Northerners) to discriminate against Black people? Do really think that it requires a database of French of Arab descent, for French people to discriminate against them? Do you really think that French “flics” (po-po) do a database lookup (haha, maybe with a facial scan?) to decide whether the kid they’re about to pistol-whip is a French Arab?
I mean, c’mon dude.
Chetan Murthy 07.08.23 at 6:59 am
MisterMr @ 58: Upon further reflection, I thought I’d tell you about my first thoughts when I learned back in the early 1990s that Serbians were murdering Bosnians over “sectarian differences.” My first reaction was “how can they tell? They’re all white, how can they tell which are Serbian and which are Bosnian”. Why do I relate this? Because I also remember reading about how many of the Jews of Weimar Germany were very much urbanized and assimilated. Again, the question arises: “how could the Nazis tell?” And so, sure, they had to use databases to tell which people to murder, which to dispossess, and which to gift with the spoils of that dispossession.
But when it comes to Black people in America, Arabs in France, East Asians during Covid (in America), you don’t need a database to tell, y’know?
MisterMr 07.08.23 at 7:09 am
“What makes you think there is any such law in France? What if you’re wrong and there isn’t?”
From the article linked @50:
“The law against statistics on race dates to the 1970s and has origins in the Holocaust. Defenders of the law claim the Nazis were able to round up Jews because the French government kept records on faith and ethnicity.”
The same article implies that the French government forbids any research on ethnicity, but above I linked to two researches on ethnicity in France, one commissioned by the government. From this I deduce that this french law simply forbids the government to keep a record of who is, or isn’t, arab, jew etc.
John Q 07.08.23 at 11:56 am
Coming in late to make my usual observation that political violence is almost always counterproductive, even in the minority of cases where it enjoys initial success.
That’s not immediately helpful as advice to an unemployed young person who takes a chance to kick back against oppression. It’s directed at the comfortably off people who engage in violent rhetoric or theoretical justifications for violence, while mostly leaving others to deal with the consequences (on the other side of politics, Trump is one of many examples).
engels 07.08.23 at 4:46 pm
you don’t need a database to tell, y’know?
Elizabeth Warren did.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45866168
political violence is almost always counterproductive, even in the minority of cases where it enjoys initial success
You should probably show your working, especially given the importance of that minority (if such it is): the French Revolution, Stonewall, decolonisation, …
I think it’s important to know that the way police officers carry out searches for weapons and drugs is racially discriminatory, but how would you conduct a study to confirm whether this was so without identifying individuals by race?
By identifying the relevant states of mind of the perpetrators, regardless of whether they correspond to anything in reality. If a kid with long hair is beaten up for being “gay” we can investigate that as homophobic violence without inquiring into his sexual preferences; likewise if police seem to be targeting people with dark skin (who might be Southern Europeans) or guys named “Josh”.
steven t johnson 07.08.23 at 6:06 pm
The police are agents of the state and their violence is political violence. Jailing people is political violence, too. Don’t know about France, but very powerful people in the US thinks political violence is counter-productive or they’d want less of it.
Chetan Murthy 07.08.23 at 11:38 pm
engels @ 66: OK, you got a laugh out of me on that one!
“By identifying the relevant states of mind of the perpetrators”: uh, this is the problem, isn’t it? You can’t identify that at all, at all, at all. All you can do is observe the external characteristics of the targets of their violence. Or (another example) when some subset of job applicants are rejected much more than others, despite being equally qualified, we can observe whether that subset has certain external characteristics (like, y’know, certain kinds of names).
Every po-po perp says he was afraid for his life. Every one. Doesn’t matter if they’re murdering a man holding a BB gun (in a completely non-threatening way) in a store, or a cellphone in his own backyard, those coppers are a-feared for their delicate lives.
engels 07.09.23 at 9:52 am
Ok Chetan let’s call it a draw. There are a lot of difficult issues I don’t know the answer to and I’d really like someone to understands the French approach to comment. I do think most of your points have been good ones (in case that didn’t come across from my snark).
J-D 07.09.23 at 10:07 am
So, do you think there are other countries where the government does keep records like that?
bekabot 07.09.23 at 11:53 am
Late to the party.
About the disconnect between genuine outrage over an unjustified police killing and the willingness to grab a new pair of shoes without paying — I don’t think the two things are actually disconnected. I think there’s a throughline between them which is vividly alive to a good many people and that if the demarcation of the line were to be verbally placed, the description would go something like this: “You guys have access to one kind of property, while we have the use of another. We have our lives, and you have your stuff. You’ve more than proved that you have no respect for our lives. Well then, take a good look at how much respect we have for your stuff. And bear in mind that while you can always get more stuff, each one of us individually will never have more than one life, and that when that’s is gone, it’s gone for good.”
I’m not saying that this formulation is right or that it’s praiseworthy, or that the shoe-stealers are doing the right thing; what I’m saying is that as conceptions go, this one is probably not very rare, and that if one were anxious to eliminate it completely one would have to dispense with huge swathes of human beings, some of whom are as Anglo as can be. Of course it’s always possible to condemn those who think this way, whatever their background; but I question whether it’s wise, if only because there are so many of them. (Stand tall against the mob by all means — but only when you need to.)
engels 07.09.23 at 12:10 pm
Judicious comparison by Kenan Malik:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/09/france-laissez-faire-race-us-proactive-race-class-relations
Matt 07.09.23 at 12:12 pm
J-D asked: So, do you think there are other countries where the government does keep records like that [i.e., about ethnicity and/or religion]?
Yes! The Australian government collects information about religion in its census data. See here: https://www.abs.gov.au/articles/religious-affiliation-australia
The US Government doesn’t ask about religion in the census (though government sponsored demographic surveys may collect this) but does collect information about race and ethnicity in the census. See the form here: https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/acs/methodology/questionnaires/2022/quest22.pdf
I’d be surprsised if lots of other governments don’t do this, too.
Chetan Murthy 07.09.23 at 5:08 pm
engels @ 72: I found that article distinctly unsatisfying. It’s like he forgot that there were nationwide protests in the US after the extrajudicial execution of George Floyd, during which the police (nationwide) simply made it known that they would continue their Fascist reign of terror against Black people, and if anybody got in their way, they’d, y’know, beat them to a pulp. On live television. Even pretty white girls and staid white retirees. Even they would get the stick, if the po-po weren’t allowed to rage out on Black people at the slightest provocation (or none at all).
And then there’s the fact that affirmative action has barely an effect at all, that American high schools are as segregated as they ever were, and on and on. I mean, it’s not so much about “compare and contrast” as “both of these attempts are shitty AF”.
Sigh.
J-D 07.09.23 at 9:46 pm
But No!
The Australian government does indeed use the census to ask people about their religion (although answering this question, unlike all others in the census, is officially optional, and many respondents exercise their legal option not to answer). As an Australian myself I am well aware of this. But what I had in mined (and you may have overlooked) is the distinction MisterMr made:
The Australian government does not use the census to keep a record of who is, or isn’t, Catholic, Anglican, Orthodox, Muslim, Hindu, and so on. Once the census returns have been used to compile statistical information (not identifying individuals), the individual returns are destroyed.
engels 07.09.23 at 10:33 pm
“both of these attempts are shitty AF”
I thought that was the thrust of the column?
engels 07.09.23 at 11:45 pm
Back on topic (rather belatedly I’ll admit) I think “zombie republicanism” is a promising concept that could be applied more positively perhaps to the ending of I, Daniel Blake.
Chetan Murthy 07.10.23 at 4:12 am
engels @ 76: Well, his characterization is (to quote): “France has been laissez-faire on race, the US proactive. Clearly, neither of them has it right”. But he’s wrong, the US has not been proactive, unless by proactive one means “schools are as segregated as they ever were”, “the po-po can still pretty much murder any Black person they want”, and on and on. He explicitly structures his article around a comparison and contrast:
This framing pretends that US policy actually does target specific inequalities. Which it does not, not by any stretch of any imagination.
engels 07.10.23 at 9:50 am
The editor would have written the headline but “proactive” isn’t intended in a positive sense I think. He’s pointing to the difference we have been debating: US aims to identify racial out-groups in order to support them whereas France aims to prevent them emerging (he says neither succeeded). I don’t see how anyone can deny affirmative action targets race…
Chetan Murthy 07.11.23 at 3:43 am
engels @ 79: “US aims to identify racial out-groups in order to support them”
My point is, they pretend to support. There’s no actual support going on. As in “we’ve tried nothing and we’re all out of ideas!”
Chetan Murthy 07.11.23 at 3:45 am
engels @ 79: “I don’t see how anyone can deny affirmative action targets race…”
You might look into the actual impact of affirmative action — it’s pretty minimal. Here, let me help: https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/07/the-affirmative-action-myth
In fact only about 5% of the nation’s higher ed institutions engage in race-conscious affirmative action:
Fewer than 200 selective universities are thought to practice race-conscious admissions, conferring degrees on about 10,000 to 15,000 students each year who might not otherwise have been accepted, according to a rough estimate by Sean Reardon, a sociologist at Stanford University. That represents about 2 percent of all Black, Hispanic or Native American students in four-year colleges.
engels 07.11.23 at 9:10 am
Chetan, you’re right that 5% is a staggeringly small number. Malik has commented here in the past iirc so perhaps he could continue this discussion; I don’t think he would disagree with anything you’re saying.
LFC 07.11.23 at 3:13 pm
I read the Malik column v. quickly. Bookmarked for later perusal.
Malik’s column uses as its “hooks” the recent disturbances in France and the US Sup Ct affirmative action decision. So the column has to be read in that light, i.e., in terms of its particular framing.
Re only 5 percent of U.S. higher ed insts having engaged in race-conscious admissions:
this has to be contextualized. First, the majority of US univs are either non-selective or not very selective, so the fact that they don’t do race-conscious admissions partly reflects that they let most applicants in to begin with.
Second, one reason, obvs., that race-conscious AA in admissions has been a flash point of controversy is that the schools that have practiced it are those that disproportionately serve as pipelines to American elites in various fields, or (as Adam Liptak put it on Fresh Air) as pipelines to “the leadership class.” Now of course it’s a leaky pipeline: not everyone who graduates from one of these places joins “the leadership class” or nec. aspires to. And the leadership class is not made up exclusively, by any means, of graduates of these places. Still, they do prob graduate a disproportionate number of them.
So, those 10,000 to 15,000 students Reardon identified will disproportionately end up in elite positions. Thus, while the impact of AA may be “pretty minimal,” it’s not so minimal when it comes to the racial composition of US elites. If it were minimal, it prob wdnt have become a target of right-wing ire.
Fwiw I think the univs in question shd have been putting the emphasis on “class conscious” rather than race-conscious admissions. But they’ve resisted that partly bc it’s more difficult and requires more organized effort. Malik gives the well-known stats about how relatively few Harvard students come from the bottom quintile of the income dist. and how skewed the socio-ec makeup of the class is. There’s no reason Harvard couldn’t change that if it made a concerted, long-term effort to do so. Of course it will still admit plenty of wealthy kids. But the main thing that’s keeping it from recruiting and admitting more economically disadvantaged kids is a lack of institutional will and commitment. If the Sup Ct decision nudges it and other schools in that direction, then Roberts’s decision will, somewhat paradoxically, turn out to have had a progressive result.
Chetan Murthy 07.12.23 at 2:27 am
engels @ 82: And affirmative action on addresses that small subset of Black youth who go to college. For the rest, there are:
(1) the fact that American schools are as segregated today as they ever were
(2) the police state of extrajudicial murder and violence continues unabated
…. and I don’t know enough about the current state of employment discrimination and discrimination in housing and mortgages, to comment about that, but I doubt it’s good.
This idea that somehow structural racism against Black Americans is over is …. some real poppycock.
And to bring it back to France, the problem is, in France the state isn’t even systematically measuring these things, and what you do not measure, you can ignore.
engels 07.12.23 at 11:07 am
This idea that somehow structural racism against Black Americans is over is …. some real poppycock.
Where did anyone advance that idea?
Chetan Murthy 07.13.23 at 6:48 am
engels @ 85: It is implicit in the idea that the US “target the specific inequalities faced by minority groups”. It does very little at all of this. Here’s an example that came across the transom literally in the last few hours: https://www.techdirt.com/2023/07/12/chicago-pd-sued-over-mass-traffic-stops-of-minorities-that-do-almost-nothing-to-stop-crime/
Turns out, this is just the latest turn-of-the-crank: CPD used to do “stop-and-frisk” of pedestrians, but when a lawsuit stopped that, they switched to traffic stops of drivers. And haha, disproportionately Black drivers.
Perhaps you’ve seen the recently-uncovered scandal in Connecticut, where police were fabricating traffic stops of white drivers, in order to make the statistics look like traffic stops weren’t racially motivated? https://www.governing.com/politics/connecticut-demands-accountability-for-falsified-police-tickets
The Democratic governor, Ned Lamont, said:
And the machinery of the police state under which Black Americans live, goes on.
TM 07.17.23 at 9:57 am
A lot of the discussion above about “categorizing people by race” is actually redundant, based on false assumptions. The US government does not for any legal purposes “categorize” people by race. The Census “race” category is self-selected and purely used for statistical purposes. People have the option to select no race or several races. Whatever they select (on the Census form) has no impact on how the government behaves towards them. Of course the collection of this data and the design of the specific categories is open to perfectly legitimate criticism, but the charge that by collecting these data the government “categorizes” the people is dubious.
There are situations where a person’s racial identification can have legal relevance, in particular for the purposes of anti-discrimination law and, up to recently, in the context of Affirmative Action. Btw, in response to engels 45 (“it’s at least arguable at this point that some of the famous progressive American approaches don’t work very well”), if you are referring to Affirmative Action, you should be aware that only a tiny percentage of US students were ever affected, positively or negatively, by Affirmative Action.
South Africa’s apartheid government did indeed racially categorize people, it was stated in their IDs. A tidbit that has stuck in my mind after visiting the apartheid museum is how the government tried to legally “define” race:
“A white person is one who in appearance is, or who is generally accepted as, a white person, but does not include a person who, although in appearance obviously a white person, is generally accepted as a coloured person.” See how scientific!
https://projects.kora.matrix.msu.edu/app/files/163/583/9/65-25A-17_upload.pdf
TM 07.17.23 at 10:32 am
Re the Malik article:
“Should it target the specific inequalities faced by minority groups or treat all citizens equally without any reference to individuals’ racial and cultural backgrounds?
The contrast between these two approaches has often been seen as that between Anglo-Saxon multiculturalism and French assimilationism, the one “based on the right of ethnic minorities, of communities”, the other “based on individual rights”, as Marceau Long, then the president of France’s Haut Conseil à L’Intégration, put it in 1991, adding that the Anglo-Saxon approach, unlike that of the French, was that of “another way of imprisoning people within ghettos”.”
This framing is really problematic. Where does the US legally recognize a “right of ethnic minorities, of communities”? Is he referring to Native Americans here (which is a rather different question)? Ironically, both the US and France have a staggeringly high degree of geographic segregation between racialized communities, despite their supposedly so radically different political approaches (which perhaps are not so different after all – perhaps similar structural reasons are at work, like … racism?).
In the US, after the Supreme Court struck down school segregation, there were attempts to actually address segregation and create genuinely mixed schools (i. e. the opposite of what Marceau Long claimed). These attempts mostly failed due to the resistance of whites and due to later (and lesser known compared to Brown) Supreme Court descisions that more or less upheld the “right” of white parents to resegregate:
“From the time Seattle became the first major city to integrate schools, opposition from white parents followed. The district tried a variety of strategies, then steadily backed away from every one of them, including requiring tens of thousands of students to bus to schools outside of their neighborhoods… In the years since the district stopped requiring students to bus outside of their neighborhoods, Seattle Public Schools have resegregated. City schools are more segregated now than they were 30 years ago, a Seattle Times analysis has shown.”
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/06/john-robertss-dream-of-school-re-segregation-is-fulfilled
engels 07.17.23 at 3:34 pm
‘The Anglo-Saxon approach… was that of “another way of imprisoning people within ghettos.’ This framing is really problematic.
What about Cornel West’s framing?
steven t johnson 07.17.23 at 5:31 pm
Have a headache, so things have exhausted my patience…
“Where does the US legally recognize a ‘right of ethnic minorities, of communities’?”
I know this was supposed to be an unanswerable rhetorical question, but every time a state legislature have drawn voting district boundaries so that there will be a Black-majority district, it is to ensure the right to representation. And every time a court entertains evidence as to the representation of minorities, it is legal recognition.
The tacit assumption that such rights (for some at least) not must be guaranteed but apparently can’t even be contested is tacit for argumentative reasons. The failure of purely political/administrative measures to end racism is obvious (even if some deny the obvious.) But it appears that some so far unspecified political/administrative measures are guaranteed to work.
“Ironically, both the US and France have a staggeringly high degree of geographic segregation between racialized communities, despite their supposedly so radically different political approaches (which perhaps are not so different after all – perhaps similar structural reasons are at work, like … racism?).” If somehow here the phrase “political approaches” doesn’t refer to policies and programs, much less real world economic structures like banks and real estate markets, then none of this means anything. The French and US political approaches really are different. They’ve both failed, I think as I’ve said, because purely political/administrative measures are insufficient to change the way of life (aka, the culture.)
Interjecting the word “racism” doesn’t make it a “structure.” Structure is the arrangement of parts, and parts can be counted or mapped or photographed. The word “racism” as the catch-all term for the outcome of the functioning (better, dysfunctioning) of real structures could be useful. But here “racism” is some magical miasma, specifically abstracted from real life, dismissing radically different political approaches as nonexistent is nonsense.
Again, the real problem is the insistence on purely political/administrative measures, which have failed in both the US and France. My conclusion is that advocating secret political/administrative measures is not a useful contribution to anything.
LFC 07.17.23 at 7:02 pm
TM:
Seattle and some other cities in the North have not done well in terms of school resegregation, but that’s not true everywhere, and specifically not true in certain cities in the South.
engels 07.17.23 at 7:12 pm
only a tiny percentage of US students were ever affected, positively or negatively, by Affirmative Action
Well yes that’s kinda the point (as Malik said too I think fwiw).
TM 07.18.23 at 7:40 am
stj 90, the courts have held that manipulating electoral districts with the aim of depriving African Americans of representation violates the 15th amendment respectively the Voting Rights Act, and the Roberts court has recently, to the surprise of many, affirmed that principle. It’s indeed an edge case that in the result might constitute some sort of “recognition of minority rights”, but that’s not how it’s legally constructed. There is no principle that there have to be a minimum number of African American representatives, for example, the principle is that the state must not act to deliberately dilute the voting power of African Americans, and it is based on the historical experience of African Americans having been deprived of their voting rights and other rights for generations.
I took issue with the claim that the US has a legal regime based on the “rights of ethinc minorities” rather than “based on individual rights”, which is “imprisoning people within ghettos”. I think that’s nonsense. It’s certainly not the Civil Rights laws and Affirmative Action and other feeble attempts at remedying the legacy of slavery, segregation, and racism that are “imprisoning people within ghettos”.
engels: “What about Cornel West’s framing?”
Do I have to know that guy? Oh I remember, a morally and intellectually bankrupt former leftist now expressing admiration for Ron Desantis’ fascist education policies, blaming Biden for Russia’s war of aggression, and trying to help Trump win the next election. Now why do you mention him? It’s a trick question I’m sure?
TM 07.18.23 at 11:01 am
US Republicans are making great strides in promoting a “race blind” society:
“Oklahoma’s far-right superintendent of public instruction thinks that schools should teach students about the Tulsa race massacre, so long as teachers don’t actually acknowledge that the white supremacist attack was about race.”
https://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2023/07/recent-oklahoma-secretary-of-education-says-the-tulsa-race-massacre-should-be-taught-in-race-neutral-terms
steven t johnson 07.18.23 at 1:45 pm
TM@93 supposedly thinks laws by legislatures are not “legal?” “There is no principle that there have to be a minimum number of African American representatives…” That is of course the actual principle behind creating Black-majority districts. As is, the objection reduces to, Blacks are not decreed by Supreme Court opinion (or maybe Constitutional amendment) to be guaranteed a minimum number of representatives. Very well, this guaranteed Black representation is not de jure on a national scale. But it is de facto.
As I have already said, I think such political/administrative measures for representation, even de jure, would overall be no more effective than the de facto ones already undertaken. Gimmicks like guaranteed minimum number of representatives work out mostly to the benefit of entrepreneurs ginning up a personal platoon of political operatives, selling services to their investors. (What currently are called “parties” are much more like brands selling franchises to the local businessmen.)
I think instead liquidating the legacy of slavery and segregation—by the way, I’m pretty sure TM reall thinks “racism” is an ongoing and ineradicable thing in other white people’s minds and I have no idea at all how anything but death is going to eradicate that—-without changing the way of life/the culture. But that means changing the economics. The current system can’t guarantee housing for the population at large, for instance. Leaving that intact inevitably means many people will be trapped in bad housing, or none. Administering poverty so that only the proportionate number of Black people are in hovels or on the streets is not even an admirable goal.
We have had it explained that the Thirteenth Amendment reinstituted slavery under color of law and that the New Jim Crow (that is, segregation) is already here.
On a side note, the only thing I remember from Cornel West on education was a complaint DeSantis shouldn’t be allowed to monopolize the argument for high standards in curriculum, which is objectionable because DeSantis garnishes his racist BS with phrases gesturing at a few good ideas. I don’t know whether misrepresenting West is permissible, even admirable, because West is a leftist or because he’s Black?
(There is a certain ambiguity in how left a religious believer can be, in principle, but there’s always inconsistency and hypocrisy. But West is almost certainly no more a rightist than Biden is a socialist.)
It is not possible to vote against someone, the votes are always for. TM’s order to some of us to vote for Biden despite his lifelong commitment to principles we abhor is noted, and despised for what it is.
engels 07.18.23 at 1:51 pm
Cornel West… a morally and intellectually bankrupt former leftist now expressing admiration for Ron Desantis’ fascist education policies, blaming Biden for Russia’s war of aggression, and trying to help Trump win the next election.
I’m starting to think you don’t like him…
engels 07.18.23 at 6:53 pm
I don’t know whether misrepresenting West is permissible, even admirable, because West is a leftist or because he’s Black?
Likely both; plus to Democratic true believers he’s an apostate and gets treated by them (discursively) like a soldier who quit the Wagner group.
https://jacobin.com/2016/11/everybody-hates-cornel-west/
steven t johnson 07.18.23 at 9:01 pm
By coincidence…”Ice Cube Says Black People Are In The Same Place As They Were In 1865″ https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/ice-cube-says-black-people-are-in-the-same-place-as-they-were-in-1865/ar-AA1e1GWD?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=57c3b18b245946cbaaba6a43f85248ac&ei=54
engels 07.18.23 at 10:02 pm
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/26/nyregion/school-segregation-new-york.html
https://nypost.com/2018/06/30/posh-schools-plan-to-segregate-students-by-race-draws-parents-ire/
J-D 07.19.23 at 12:44 am
The concept of ‘treating all citizens equally’ is inadequately specified. I doubt that anybody would advocate for the kind of equal treatment where every citizen is imprisoned in a penal institution for an equal period of time. Possibly some people would advocate for the kind of equal treatment where every citizen holds the position of head of government for an equal period of time, but I expect many people would oppose this. There may be some ways of specifying what kind of equal treatment is meant which are consistent with making no reference to cultural or racial backgrounds, but there are definitely other ways of specifying kinds of equal treatment which necessarily require referring to individuals’ cultural or racial backgrounds.
For example, one way of specifying equal treatment in one particular context would be to designate one language to be used in court proceedings and requiring everybody (equally) to use that language, with no special accommodation for people with limited or no capacity to use the designated language; a different way of specifying equal treatment would be to provide that each citizen has an equal legal right to use their own language in court proceedings, with interpreting services to be provided as required. The first kind of ‘equal treatment’ might be consistent with making no reference to cultural background, but the second kind necessarily requires taking note of cultural background.
Thus, reference to ‘equal treatment’ without further specification is obfuscatory and not clarificatory in effect.
To me it looks like an ‘argument from authority’.
TM 07.19.23 at 7:29 am
Regarding the question of “rights of ethinc minorities” (a question I haven’t brought up): if anybody here thinks that such rights exist legally in the US, it should be possible to point out exactly what these rights are and where they are codified. Anybody?
J-D: “To me it looks like an ‘argument from authority’.”
Except there is no argument presented, and I genuinely didn’t know whether engels considers West an authority or not (following his latest comments I guess he does).
engels: “misrepresenting West” : I didn’t bring him up and don’t care about him but my comment is factually 100% correct and you are putting out BS like:
“gets treated by them (discursively) like a soldier who quit the Wagner group”
So West was “discrursively” murdered with a sledgehammer. At least you don’t claim he was “canceled by the woke mob”.
J-D 07.19.23 at 9:01 am
I think the (implicit) argument was probably something like:
Premise: Cornel West is an authority
Conclusion: Therefore, if you disagree with Cornel West you are wrong.
TM 07.19.23 at 10:23 am
J-D: engels didn’t even state a position that I might or might not agree with. Anyway this is pointless.
engels 07.19.23 at 10:24 am
I think the (implicit) argument was probably something like:
Premise: Cornel West is an authority
Conclusion: Therefore, if you disagree with Cornel West you are wrong.
Just for the record, I asked TM what he thought of Cornel West’s views (which I’d linked to earlier in the thread) and the response I got was on the level of “Jeremy Corbyn is mates with Putin, Hamas and the IRA” (but thanks for the logic lesson!)
engels 07.19.23 at 12:27 pm
I genuinely didn’t know whether engels considers West an authority or not
As I’m believer in independent reason who doesn’t follow any religion (either West’s Christianity or TM’s liberalism) the answer to that is “no”.
steven t johnson 07.19.23 at 4:34 pm
TM@101 “… I didn’t bring (West) up and don’t care about him but my comment is factually 100% correct…” This sort of thing passes as fact at CT but in truth, it is not. That’s why DeSantis is not and will not embrace West for political cover. The WSJ op-ed page will, but taking the WSP op-ed page as serious analysis is closer to being a right-winger.
West’s liberal theology buys into so-called classical learning=higher standards. That’s not fascism. It’s just TM’s BS. There is a bitter irony in TM’s charge [self censored aka non-trolling]
engels 07.19.23 at 6:58 pm
I think I probably agree with West about the classical learning thing at this point but that’s a whole other discussion (at least it didn’t do Marx any harm).
Tm 07.19.23 at 8:28 pm
Engels: I only saw your question regarding „Cornel West‘s framing“ and I had (and still have) no idea what you were referring to. I now see that you had posted a link mentioning West 30 comments earlier. Even if I had been aware of the link: I don’t think it’s helpful to post a link and then unspecifically ask „what do you think about it“. If you are interested in serious debate, it’s more helpful to state the position you wish to debate. Anyway I’m not interested in reading any more about Cornel West than I already have, life is short.
stj, you earlier insisted that West was no rightist. I didn’t even say he was, I called him a former leftist and pointed out that he expressed admiration for DeSantis’ fascist education policies, which he did in a very high profile WP op-ed right at a time when DeSantis‘ fascism had become undeniable. Do you disagree that DeSantis is a fascist or at least one of the most rabid reactionaries in the US? Do you think any credible leftist would express admiration for the education policies of one of the most rabid reactionaries, a guy who is waging war against public education and academic freedom, passing book ban laws and banning discussions of sexism, racism and capitalism in schools and universities?
Engels: „Jeremy Corbyn is mates with Putin“ etc: it makes sense that if you think there’s nothing wrong with supporting a right wing authoritarian like Putin, there’s also nothing wrong with supporting a right wing authoritarian like DeSantis. Both are reliably antiliberal, and antiliberals will always find each other, whether they are masquerading as leftists or conservatives or nationalists or whatever they call it (they don’t nowadays call themselves fascists, which according to some logic geniuses means that they can’t be fascists).
engels 07.20.23 at 3:12 am
I had (and still have) no idea what you were referring to
Cornel West’s comments about Harvard and their evident similarity to Marceau Long’s comments about the US, which you found to be oh-so-problematic. Sorry if I wasn’t clear, but interpreting that as an appeal to authority (as you and J-D did at some tedious length) is beyond weird. As is claiming West and Corbyn are fascist sympathisers. Hope that’s “helpful,” if not don’t hesitate to speak to my manager…
TM 07.20.23 at 7:17 am
engels: It would have helped if you had provided that context before. At least I would have known what you were getting at. I would still have pointed out West’s publicly expressed admiration for DeSantis and his loathsome whitewashing of Putin’s war of aggression.
Is he actually a fascist or a fascist sympathizer? Clearly he doesn’t mind publicly expressing support for fascists. Clearly he’s not remotely a leftist and not an antifascist. If that doesn’t matter to you, it does matter to me.
engels 07.20.23 at 4:15 pm
Taking a break from this until there’s a version of TM-GPT that can handle anaphora; thanks, it’s been a blast.
nastywoman 07.20.23 at 8:04 pm
@
‘Taking a break from this until there’s a version of TM-GPT that can handle anaphora’
Hi – I’m a version of TM-GPT that can handle anaphora and I’m tell’ya:
I just spoke to the foreign minister of Ukraine – I think if you said to him you’re standing with the people of Ukraine in solidarity, and you’re saying that
they are just victims in some ‘proxy war’, he would say you’re out of your mind as didn’t you claim that Ukraine war was at least partially fueled by American aggression and Nato in Europe?
As the Ukrainians themselves are thankful for NATO, they are thankful for the US – and about – that the U.S. was risking World War III by using NATO to expand American influence, especially on Russia’s border.Let us not be deceived – Russia is an expanding instrument of Putins criminal invasion and occupation of Ukraine and you can’t compare it to the Irak War – and I do think it’s inappropriate to compare the Russian bombing of Grozny and what we witnessed there with the war in Iraq and even if you say: half a million Iraqis killed, my brother. Half a million – I certainly understand I also saw a lot of Americans getting killed and I saw the horrors of Saddam Hussein. I’m just saying, I don’t think it’s accurate to compare the pummeling of a city by Russian artillery with civilians inside, pummeling every single day with the intention of just destroying and flattening a city, with actions the US took. And the world didn’t come to the rescue of Grozny and Putin did exactly what he wanted to do. I mean,
“You saw what [Putin] did to Grozny in the ’90s. I mean he flattened that city.
Civilians were trapped in that and the Russian President Vladimir Putin is just too dangerous to be left unchecked – unchecked he will slaughter people.
Right?
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