The Postnational Monitor

 

Blacks in Europe Part I:

Panem et circenses, The State of the Black Frenchman

Like many black American intellectuals, I have had a long fascination with the République française, and I am not just speaking of the heavily perfumed, chain smoking, hyper-stylish beauties that adorn the streets of la Ville Lumière (Paris). Oh no, I greatly admire the French swagger, which is a distant cousin to that of America, but more refined, more aged, more classy. Only a well heeled Frenchman can bring the je ne sais quoi, of the Ancien Régime. No doubt, it is the result of the hybrid cultural vigor of the Celtic Gaul and the Roman.

Haute culture and liberty have long been espoused by the French as the hallmark of their republic. Specifically, how the French have historically included blacks has led to it being “common knowledge” in black America, that the French are less racist than their Anglo-Saxon cousins across the pond, in America. In my short 30 years, I have heard countless times, from the lips of black Amerncans, “in Europe they treat you like a human being”, in Europe, “there is no racism (against blacks anyway)”. When given a superficial overview of the French relationship with blacks in the United States, it is easy to see how one might come to this opinion.

Compared to the Anglo-Saxons, the French have indeed appeared more liberal in their attitude toward blacks. Like all the great Atlantic powers of their time, France dealt in the institution of slavery, however the flexibility of their attitude toward slaves in their empire is well known. Unlike the Germanic cultures (which include the UK) the French did not tend to see blacks as animals or interracial children to be inherently inferior mongrels. The Latin culture of the French, like the Spanish and the Portuguese, made them not only more likely to father children with slaves, but also to free them. This can be observed in the history of the French colonies, particularly Louisiana and Saint-Domingue (now Haiti). Some of the more well off French, sent their children to be educated in France, where they would often return and become mid-ranking civil service officers in the colonies. In some cases, the children stayed on in France and they and their descendants made names for themselves, such as Alexandre Dumas, who wrote the Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. He never hid the fact his grandmother was a black slave, because he did not have to, in fact his father, Thomas Alexandre Dumas, who was biracial was a famous general during the French revolution and considered a nobleman in the French aristocracy. Although the lives of many free blacks, Gens de Couleur and mixed race peoples were not as grand, they were often not as harsh as the lives of their contemporaries in the United States.

After the French Revolution the institution of slavery was in conflict with the new republic, so France became one of the first major European powers to ban slavery in its territories, which was done on in February of 1794. This was 39 years before the United Kingdom and 71 years before the United States (as a result of the 14th Amendment).

There have also long been blacks in the French parliament al well. This is mainly due to the overseas departments (states) of Guadeloupe, French Guyana, Martinique, Réunion, which are majority blacks and have long sent black representatives to Versailles. Even during colonial times, blacks from African colonies have sat in Parliament. One of them, Leopold Senghor, a black African, served in the French cabinet as the Secretary of State, in the 1950’s before going on to becoming the first president of an independent Senegal.

African Americans have had a long history of positive relations with the French. Benjamin Banneker’s work (the almanac) was lauded by the French Academy of Sciences in Paris during a time when slavery was still legal in both the United States and France. When the U.S. army was segregated and black soldiers were oppressed by white American commanders in 1917, during WWI, the French agreed to take them and added them to their regular army.

For centuries black Americans intellectuals, writers, and entertainers lived in France in self imposed exile due to the desire to escape racism in America. In the early to mid 20th century alone the list of blacks who moved to France permanently or for extended periods includes Josephine Baker, Ada “Bricktop” Smith, Adelaide Hall, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, Chester Himes, W.E.B. Dubois, and James Baldwin to name a few of the more well known.

Contrary to American popular knowledge, perfunctory erudition affirms that the French Republic is and has long been nearly as diverse a nation of immigrants as the United States. France is by far the most diverse country in Europe with as much as 40% of Frenchmen (according to Wikipedia) having foreign ancestry. France has dealt with this influx of immigrants in their own unique fashion, with the onus being the promotion of equality in the republic. France so holds the ideal, that all Frenchmen are equal in the republic that they do not keep governmental racial statistics. For a Frenchmen, the ideal of being French is also adherence to French culture and language. This form of hyper-integration has been enforced since the nationalism of the French Revolution. France, unlike America, Canada, and the UK did not absorb the ideology of multiculturalism as rippled out of Canada in the 1970’s and spread about the Anglosphere.

So what is the life of the black Frenchman like in the 21st century as it compares to the black American? It seems that France’s forward momentum in racial equality would have set it further afield than the United States, or has it?

The snippets blow are of two New York Times articles below give a overview of the state of life of the contemporary black Frenchmen:

November 16, 2005

France Is Trying, Discreetly, to Integrate Television a Bit
Audrey Pulvar’s “Bonsoir,” she begins before delivering the day’s news on France 3, a state-run channel…She is black, one of the first minority anchors to appear regularly here on prime-time television and part of a gradual effort to mold the country’s communications media into a more representative shape.

“On TV the faces are all white and Gallic, but in the street France is more multicolored,” said Édouard Pellet, a journalist of Algerian descent, who is charged with diversifying on-camera personalities for the state-run television networks. “We have fallen behind the reality of the country.”

President Jacques Chirac, speaking of the unrest, acknowledged the failing when he told the nation on Monday night that he would meet with the heads of the French media to see how they could “better reflect the French reality of today.”

Ms. Pulvar, 34, came to Paris in 2000 to look for work after appearing for six years on television in her native Martinique and was told point-blank that “the French public is not ready” for a nonwhite face to present the news. Even more junior on-camera jobs were off limits; “I already have a black and I don’t need another one,” one television executive told her.

“There are many minorities on the production side, but in front of the camera was reserved for Caucasians,” Ms. Pulvar said, sitting in a cafe before her broadcast.

France is slowly changing. In 2000 an actors’ campaign called Collective Equality pushed for diversity and got some attention, though it fizzled with little effect.

Ms. Pulvar said she noticed a shift in 2002 when the state television group, France Télévisions, finally gave her a chance at an on-camera job. The next year, large photographs of 13 women, 8 of them of Arab or African origin, were hung on the facade of the National Assembly to represent Marianne, France’s idealized embodiment of freedom.

But efforts to promote the visibility of minorities have lagged, in part because of the French ideal, enshrined in the Constitution, that all citizens are equal regardless of race or religion. The clause has long been interpreted as prohibiting affirmative action for ethnic minorities, even if such initiatives have been undertaken in less sensitive areas.

“We’ve adopted a law to help women, a law to help the disabled,” Mr. Pellet said. “The only sector of society that we haven’t dared touch is the ethnic-racial realm, which affects society most deeply.”

The gap between the France seen on television and that seen in the streets began to bother even television executives, who could see the rest of the world passing them by. The television network moved Ms. Pulvar to Marseille, where she anchored the news in one of the most right-wing regions of the country. Despite the management’s fears, the channel neither lost viewers nor drew letters of protest.

The state-run television group has since embarked on a discreet affirmative action program, called the positive action integration plan, tailored to avoid transgressing the country’s rules against hiring on the basis of religious or ethnic origin.

Because affirmative action on the basis of race or religion is effectively banned, the company keeps no records that could be used to accuse it of hiring people because of their origins. “We’ve never written it down anywhere that we hire on the basis of color,” Mr. Pellet said.

“No one will accept positive discrimination here,” he said. “The weight of centuries is against it.” He added that the company was using all the means permitted by the current law to diversify.

“We’re doing things quietly,” Mr. Pellet said. “If we make too much noise it will polarize people; it will become a legal question. Instead of talking, we act.”

The group has people in each of its five channels who focus on developing minority talent and broadening the channels’ entertainment and editorial content to include minority issues. It has also accelerated the training and recruitment of people of non-European backgrounds, financing, for example, a journalism scholarship at the influential Political Studies Institute of Paris. Of the six people in the program so far, four are members of ethnic minorities.

The television group is negotiating with its unions to allow members of minorities from outside the network to compete for job openings that normally would go only to people already holding contracts.

“We’re not accustomed to seeing someone on television who is different,” said Rachid Arhab, France’s most famous minority broadcast journalist, who is ambivalent about affirmative action. “In the end the public will question their objectivity, saying that ‘we can’t believe Mourad,’ for example, ‘because he’s speaking for the Arabs.’ ”

Even in advertising, minorities are relegated to stereotypes. One current campaign shows black soccer players brandishing bananas in fruit advertisements. Ms. Pulvar said she had seen a television commercial for a sport utility vehicle in Canada that featured a black family and then saw the same commercial in France, but redone with a white family.

“Progress in the media is important, but it’s not enough,” she said. “I’ll feel the situation has really changed when there are minority ministers in government.”

August 14, 2006

For French Blacks, a Face on TV News Is Only a Start
By KATRIN BENNHOLD
International Herald Tribune

Four months later Mr. Roselmack’s news value is unabated. He greets about 7.3 million viewers every evening as he fills in for Patrick Poivre d’Arvor, whom he replaces until the end of August and who has anchored the broadcast since 1976.

“This is certainly no sign that we have arrived at a normalized situation,” said Mr. Roselmack, 33, whose parents are from Martinique, in the French Caribbean. “That will be the case the day people no longer make such a fuss when a black, North African or Asian colleague is hired.”

In a country with more blacks on its national soccer team (13 of the 23 players) than in the 577-member National Assembly (10, none from the French mainland), Mr. Roselmack’s sudden celebrity has highlighted how rare it still is here to see minorities in prominent posts.

“It’s very good news, not just for black people, but for France in general,” said Patrick Lozès, president of the Representative Council of Black Associations, an umbrella organization for black advocacy groups. “It shows that black people can succeed somewhere other than sports and music.”

After the rioting in immigrant suburbs in November, much attention was focused on the plight of France’s largely North African Muslim communities. Less publicized has been a quiet but determined push by blacks to assert their place in society.

There are an estimated five million blacks in France, about one million from the Caribbean and four million from former French Africa.

Like the lighter-skinned North Africans, they often live in segregated suburbs where unemployment rates can reach 40 percent. But several factors set blacks apart from North Africans.

The history of slavery makes their relationship with their host country more complex. They appear to be more vulnerable to discrimination and poverty. (The 48 people who died in a series of fires in illegal housing last summer were all black.) And they are far less uniform as a community than the North Africans: the families of people arriving from France’s Caribbean islands have held French citizenship for hundreds of years, while those from sub-Saharan Africa often struggle to get immigration papers.

What unites them is the color of their skin. “We are the most visible of visible minorities,” Mr. Lozès said. “But as a social group we are invisible in France.”

The North Africans began their campaign for equality in the early 1980’s, but the black movement did not begin to develop until 1998. That year 40,000 black people marched in Paris for the first time to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the end of slavery, and France unexpectedly won the soccer World Cup with a team with many black players.

In 1999 a black writer, Calixthe Beyala, filed a formal complaint demanding quotas for blacks on television. Since then the screen has gradually become more diverse.

In 2001 the French channel TF1 hired Sébastien Folin, from Madagascar, to present the weather forecast. Audrey Pulvar, from Martinique, presents the news on the public broadcaster France 3, but her audience of four million is only half that of TF1’s evening news.

Meanwhile a large number of black Web sites and organizations have been established. In 2001 Christine Taubira, a member of Parliament from French Guyana, drafted a law that recognized slavery as a crime against humanity. In 2005 President Jacques Chirac declared May 10 an official day commemorating the end of slavery, and summoned top television executives to the Élysée Palace to demand more diversity on the screen.

Mr. Roselmack, who holds degrees in history and journalism, was born into a middle-class family and raised in Tours, in western France. He began his career at Radio Tropical, a small music station, and later moved on to Radio France Inter. His big break came in September, when he was hired by the pay-television company Canal Plus to anchor the news. He was hired by TF1 less than six months later.

Mr. Lozès said the main topic of discussion among blacks was affirmative action, still a taboo in France. He recounted how deeply ingrained France’s republican ideal of colorblind equality remained, even among black people.

“For the longest time I could not bring myself to use the world ‘black’ and would find these really long convoluted formulas talking about diversity,” he said. “But we need to start explicitly acknowledging the existence of ethnic minorities so we can get serious about fighting discrimination.”

Ad rem:

This essay may inspire many questions, but the central one connecting I wish to pose is:

How did the black Frenchman fall so far behind the African American in their place in society?”

I have my own ideas but I want to open this to discussion.