At first, the killing in France of three paratroopers of North African and African origin, followed by three Jewish students and a rabbi outside a Jewish school, was a puzzling development. Some assumed it was the work of a white supremacist who, like the Norwegian Andre Brejvik, killed in order to stem immigration and multiculturalism.
As it turned out, the suspect was a 24-year-old Muslim man, identified as French citizen Mohamed Mera, who allegedly killed in the name of al-Qaeda. After an aggressive police siege that lasted 32 hours – and which included grenades being thrown into the apartment he was hiding in – Merah jumped out of the window, weapon in hand, and carried on firing. He was found dead on the ground.
On the face of it, that country which is supposedly the epitome of a republic seems a model of equality and secularism. In the name of equality and secularism, the French have banned Muslim headscarves and all other religious symbols in government-run schools. In the name of the same secularism, France has legislated against the wearing of burqas in public – both moves seen as anti-Islam but also anti-women (even as they pretend to ‘defend’ Muslim women from Muslim regimes and Muslim men).
In the ongoing presidential campaign, socialist candidate Francois Hollande has called to withdraw the term ‘race’ from the constitution, while his opponent and incumbent French president Nicolas Sarkozy ridiculed this proposition. However, since 2004 both right and left have united in fighting what they term Islamic fundamentalism, opposing both the hyper-visible (the burqa) and invisible signifiers of Islam, such as Muslim halal slaughtering – but also, of course, Jewish kosher slaughtering. Both Muslims and Jews are thus forever foreigners to the French.
Warning against vindictiveness, and attempting to seem as strong on those seen as ‘foreigners’ to France, President Sarkozy said: “I have brought the Jewish and Muslim communities together to show that terrorism will not manage to break our nation’s feeling of community. We must stand together. We must not cede to discrimination or vengeance.”
Writing in Le Monde, Valerie Amiraux and Alana Lentin argue that the call to withdraw the term ‘race’ is not new. Indeed, it goes back to the 1950 Unesco committee convened after World War II and the Holocaust which, at the instigation of French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, called for replacing ‘race’ with ‘ethnicity’ and ‘culture’ and ‘racism’ with ‘cultural relativism’. Unesco’s aim was to make sure that racism never raised its ‘ugly head’ again. But the end result was the refusal to recognise racism. The superiority of certain groups persists in the name of race, ethnicity, religion and culture, and erasing the term ‘race’ merely disavows the fact that racism continues.
Hollande, according to Amiraux and Lentin, does not engage in anti-racism. Indeed, erasing the term race – or anti-racism – is about erasing just a term, a discourse, but does not constitute a clear anti-racist politics. Erasing ‘race’ in the French context confronts neither France’s colonial legacy, nor its racist past and present. Indeed, it evokes that white amnesia characterising all European states for whom the ‘foreigner’, especially the Muslim ‘other’, is seen as a body out of place, subject to state discrimination, deportable, expendable.
Indeed, it was lucky that Mohammed Mera was not a white French supremacist, because it will enable the French to continue arguing that the danger to French secularism and equality does not come from within.
Dr Ronit Lentin is head of the MPhil in Race, Ethnicity, Conflict at the Department of Sociology at Trinity College Dublin. Her column appears fortnightly in Metro Éireann.
