6.17.20 - Finally, A Good Export

Kathy Smundak sent me this article today about why France (among many other countries) has so eagerly taken up the George Floyd  / Black Lives Matter protests for themselves. Essentially, it's that they see in BLM a model for grappling with their racial realities that is denied by France's commitment to revolutionary (and pre-colonial) notions of equality and fraternity.

I did not know that in France, keeping racial, ethnic, or religious statistics is illegal. But it fits in with their ethos of basically forcing the whole society to conform to one kind of ethnic representation based on traditional, white Frenchness. It's a bad approach to race relations. It squashes ethnicity and identity out of the equation and prevents their conversations about racial inequality from ever being rooted in data. It's willful ignorance of their racial reality. Surely, after colonialism, this model of "universalism" or "universal republicanism" is due for an upheaval.

So the fact that America is supplying it is encouraging. The article says that the French political establishment is very guarded against American ideas of identity. Maybe you shouldn't have colonized half of Africa then?

A hundred years ago, the Nazi party in Germany looked to American racism and Jim Crow laws for inspiration on how to create a racially segregated and oppressive society. Now, with France grappling really poorly with their colonial legacy, their people are seeing in the American tradition of protest and political tension a more honest, productive model of talking about social inequalities. We're on a long road to fixing our past sins, but I like that our model is inspiring to others doing the same.

It also reinforces the best thing about the US: that we are a nationality built technically apart from the notion of ethnicity, a cultural identity based on multi-culturalism. Anyone can bring their full selves to being fully American, and not have to censor their lived realities in service of some awkward, 21st century transposition of a dream of ethnic homogeneity, like the French do.