Turn “Jeff Davis” into Arthur Ashe. Do it now!

June 24, 2015 by Dan Moshenberg 8 Comments

If you live in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, New Mexico, California, or Washington, you might live near Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway. That’s right. From sea to shining sea, from the Rio Grande to the Canadian border, Jefferson Davis is “honored” and, presumably, you are honored to drive in his memory.

In 1913, the United Daughters of the Confederacy designed, planned and sponsored the Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway system, which was to extend from Washington, DC, to San Diego. Their plan was to overlay the Confederacy onto the map of the United States, an ocean-to-ocean highway that would compete with the Lincoln Highway. While the coordinated highway system no longer exists, in each of the states mentioned above, parts of it survive, and under the name Jefferson Davis Highway.

In 2002, when Washington State Representative Hans Dunshee proposed changing the name of Washington’s Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway, he ran into a whirlwind of opposition, because nothing says the Pacific Northwest like … the Confederacy and the war to preserve slavery. As Dunshee noted, “People are saying, ‘Oh, Jeff Davis was into roads for the Northwest.’ That’s their cover. But let’s be clear. This memorial was not put up by the AAA. It was put up to glorify the Confederacy.” The president of the United Daughters of the Confederacy weighed in, complaining that the change would “cause more hard feelings and certainly will not unify our country.”

When Dunshee first discovered the presence of the Confederacy in his home state, he said, “I was astonished that it was there. And then I was disgusted.” Disgust is a good response. Dunshee’s disgust only deepened, once he received calls telling him “to go back to Africa and take all of his kind with him.” Hans Dunshee’s “kind” would be German and Irish.

Nine years later, in 2011, in Arlington, Virginia, the Arlington County Board renamed a part called the Old Jefferson Davis Highway. It’s now the Long Bridge Drive. Why the name change? As then-County Board Chairman Chris Zimmerman explained, “I have a problem with ‘Jefferson Davis’ [in the road’s name]. There are aspects of our history I’m not particularly interested in celebrating.”

While the “Old Jefferson Davis Highway” was part of the original Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway, it wasn’t included in the Commonwealth’s 1922 designation of the Jefferson Davis Highway, and so Arlington County could change the name, once it convinced opponents that perhaps the real “importance of history” is not its repetition but rather its analysis and critique.

Meanwhile, the rest of Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway in Virginia falls under the Commonwealth administration, and so any change there must go through Richmond.

The lesson of history has to be that people can change their histories and themselves for the better; that we don’t happen upon progress, we make progress happen. From Washington, DC, to Charleston to Washington State, make freedom ring. Move from astonishment to disgust to astonishment. Tear down the flag; rewrite the name. In Virginia, turn “Jeff Davis” into Arthur Ashe, a proud son of Virginia of whom we are all proud. Do it now. It’s the least we can do.

(`Jeff Davis’ Photo Credit: author’s photo) (Arthur Ashe Photo Credit: Charles Tasnadi / Associated Press)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Alabama, Arthur Ashe, California, Chris Zimmerman, Dan Moshenberg, Georgia, Hans Dunshee, Haunts, Jefferson Davis, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Mexico, North Carolina, racism, South Carolina, Texas, Virginia, Washington

White fear of Black success

June 19, 2015 by Ivy Ken 1 Comment

White people kill Black people because they’re doing things right, not despite that. That’s the problem, you see. We can’t have that.

Black people who start hot meal programs for the people in their communities – we can’t have that. Black people who attend church every week – we can’t have that. Black people so carefree they spend time together at the pool – nope, that’s not gonna work.

When you have to be afraid to simply be in the world—to be with your friends, to buy candy, to look at toys, to worship, to walk—you’re living in terror. People who stare that terror in the face and live anyway, and thrive anyway, and help anyway, those are the people whites fear the most.

The terrorist massacre in Charleston occurred about 100 miles away from an area in South Carolina where, in 1862, Union Army General Ormsby Mitchel ordered that a town for freed Blacks be created. The town, which came to be called Mitchelville, was designed as an experiment to demonstrate to white people whether African Americans were capable of organizing and governing themselves after emancipation.

This was all explained to my family and me by a Gullah man named Emory Campbell when we visited the area three years ago. It will not surprise you to learn that the town thrived. The “experiment” worked, and the 1500 African Americans who lived there succeeded in establishing farming collectives, stores, a government, a school (along with laws about compulsory education), and a church.

And that was the problem. According to Campbell, the town was set on fire – not unlike other Southern towns along the coast, from Charleston to Florida, that had been ordered by Union Army General William Sherman to be settled by freed Blacks for farming. Mr. Campbell showed us the only material remains of Mitchelville, South Carolina: some bricks from the church the community built.

Success is a damnable thing for Blacks. Some forms of social organization (such as mass incarceration and residential segregation) are meant to stifle such success. But when people achieve success anyway, well, we’ve got to put a stop to that, don’t we?

(Photo Credit: WoodandPartners.com)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Black success, Charleston, Emory Campbell, Gullah, Ivy Ken, Mitchelville, racism, South Carolina, White fear

Racism has produced the Mediterranean `refugee crisis”

May 17, 2015 by Brigitte Marti 2 Comments

Today, thousands of people escaping violence are killed or die because of the color of their skin, their origins, and because there are too many of “them” to fit into the neoliberal order of exploitation and competition. At the same time, the disequilibrium of the climate originated in the global North and has had a devastating impact on the global South.

The European Union had no qualms when it defunded and thus forced the Mare Nostrum Italian program to be abandoned and then moved to the Frontex program, based on nationalist (here European) security and militarization. Mare Nostrum saved 150 000 people, while Frontex, not designed to save people, has already killed thousands with more deaths to come.

This move seemed innocuous from the United States where the militarization of civil society has already been normalized.

After the events of Baltimore, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the mayor of Baltimore, went on air to establish that, thanks to the police and the military, the city was back in order, adding that Baltimore was resilient. Resilience rhymes with silence, and, as Audre Lorde taught, “silence and invisibility go hand in hand with powerlessness”.

The indifference to the ordeal of millions in the Global South is a racial issue that is used to promote and allow an absurd, but for a few profitable, bio-economic order that needs racism to impose so-called free trade markets and their dehumanization through militaristic means. Organizations as respected as Amnesty International or Medecins Sans Frontières MSF (Doctors without Borders), whose President once opposed the Western military actions in Libya, present in their latest reports evidence of this racist indifference and its consequences for real human beings. Nicolas Sarkozy, former president of France, continues to defend his government’s decision to involve France in the bombing of Libya. At least, another French president refused to participate to the destruction of Iraq but that was then.

Amnesty interviewed refugees to document the reality of the very long journey to the Mediterranean Sea shores. Libya is often the destination. People risk abduction and extortion by smugglers and police. Women face the additional risk of sexual violence, and all in the context of growing racial and religious intolerance. The next goal is to escape Libya where the rights of allegiance to local powers prevail over human rights. With the complicity of many, the smugglers have developed a new crude business in this zone of no rights.

The smugglers are merely taking advantage of a situation that has it source somewhere else. As Loris De Filipi, MSF President explained, “A mass grave is being created in the Mediterranean Sea and European policies are responsible.” Both Amnesty and MSF are demanding a change of European policies.

The European Commission has proposed to create a quota system to distribute the migrant population among European countries according to their size and economy, “share the burden.” Thus far, only six countries out of the twenty-eight countries have agreed to participate to this program. British Home Secretary Theresa May has rejected participating in any EU migrant resettlement proposal. Her conservative counterparts in the EU have agreed with her. Instead, they have offered a military intervention to destroy the smuggling business in Libya.

The formula of “nothing for refugees and everything for the military” comes from a radically racialized world vision. The “refugee crisis” is is not a question of choice or opportunity, to use neoliberal language. People just want to escape the impossibility of life.

With about 19 000 km of walls built in the world, the message is violent and the violence it creates. We should instead look at opening the borders and learn about the racialization of humanity. Only by freeing the movement of people can the world start a desegregation process that is necessary if we want to survive. Every serious geographer agrees people thrive when they can move and not be fixed in place.

We have been told the markets should be free because they can regulate themselves. It’s not so. Having no real existence, markets, can never be free. Only the people can regulate, and only the people can know freedom.

(Photo Credit: MSF / Ikram N’gadi)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Amnesty International, Audre Lorde, Baltimore, Brigitte Marti, European Union, Frontex, Mare Nostrum, Medecins Sans Frontières, Mediterranean, racism, refugees, Resistances

No Black children allowed!

May 7, 2015 by Ivy Ken Leave a Comment

Schools are segregated. So groups of kids who gather together after school are often homogenous. In the sliver of Washington, DC where I live, this means groups of high schoolers and middle schoolers are Black, while the kids on toddler playgrounds are white.

Corner stores have dealt with this gentrification in the typical ways: They have begun to stock kombucha, organic almond milk, and craft beer. They have taken the bullet-proof partitions down. And they have banned anyone under the age of 18 from coming into their stores after 3PM without their parents.

3PM means after school. And kids who are not with their parents are those who are old enough to be out on their own. Combine this with the racial dynamics of the neighborhood and you’ve got a community full of Black kids who are not welcome in neighborhood stores.

This is not the case in all neighborhoods. It is the case in mine.

Last night we sent my 10-year-old daughter and her friend to the corner store to pick up some cooking oil so we could get dinner ready. She carried a reusable shopping bag and a $20 bill, and walked three blocks to the store where we have shopped since she was a baby. When they got there, the shop owner turned them away, citing the 3PM policy.

We paused when they came home empty-handed. My daughter is biracial and her friend is Black, and this is one of the many times when a parent has to wonder how much that matters. So we called a white friend and asked her to send her son to the same store. He went in by himself, and came out with gummy bears.

My partner and I separately had long conversations with the store owners after this. It felt like a bunch of busy words filled up the air while we spoke. This couldn’t possibly have happened, they said. Or the kids must have gotten mixed up and gone to a different store by mistake. Or they must have done something wrong while they were in the store.

These are small businesspeople. I know they work long hours and they have been friendly to us in the past. They probably have families of their own to protect. But they turned away 10-year-old kids trying to buy cooking oil. I have no idea what is in their hearts and minds, nor do I care. What I have is evidence that the 3PM policy has turned into a cognitive finger-snap for them. They see Black kids in the store [snap!], they send them away. They see a white kid, they allow him to spend his money.

To help register the impact that we and our neighbors hope to make by not shopping at this store anymore, the kids have made stamped postcards with the market’s address on them. They say, “Because you turn Black kids away, we have chosen to spend our money at a different store today. We spent $______.” Let’s hope their mailbox fills up, and their cash register empties out.

(Image Credit: Patrick Smith / Getty Images / Washington Post)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: #BlackLivesMatter, Black children, gentrification, Ivy Ken, racism

Najat Vallaud-Belkacem fighting racism and sexism in France for real equality

September 5, 2014 by Brigitte Marti 1 Comment

Najat Vallaud-Belkacem

Not long ago, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, then the French Minister of Women’s Rights, introduced and successfully defended a bill entitled “For Real Equality Between Women and Men.” This bill supported the normalization of parity. After the recent reshuffle of the government, Vallaud-Belkacem has become France’s Education Minister. This position is the fourth most important in the ranking of ministers in France. She is also the first woman to hold this major ministry.

Her nomination could have been a sign that something was working toward real parity in the highest political representation in France, but alas no. Immediately after her nomination, Vallaud-Belkacacem was targeted in right wing magazines by sexist and xenophobic attacks. These attacks used her dual Moroccan and French citizenship, her Muslim origin, her youth (she is 36), her sex, her support for same sex marriage, her support for the inclusion of gender theory in regular primary and secondary education, and, finally, her active feminist support for women’s rights.

Valeurs Actuelles, a magazine that the former president Nicolas Sarkozy uses regularly to make statements about his eventual return to politics, staged her as “the Ayatollah” on its front page, with an edited photo that accentuates the darkness of her eyes, making the portrait loaded with negative representations of Islam. The subtitle uses play on words to suggest that she is going redesign the National Education system. The title of another magazine “Minute” does the rest: “A Moroccan Muslim at the National Education, the Najat Vallaud Belkacem provocation.”

None of these displays of hatred is new. The latest was Christiane Taubira, the Minister of Justice, whose origins and skin color sparked off racist and sexist slurs. Both women epitomize the fight against all inequality, including gender, ethnic and social inequality. Christiane Taubira reacted and wrote to her colleague in a tweet, “They must have nothing in their heads, be empty in their heart, and have hardened souls. Najat, you’re flying high with our ambitions for schools. Thanks.”

Meanwhile, the line between right and extreme right becomes increasingly blurred. In a tweet by a right wing city counselor of Neuilly sur Seine, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem was accused of using her femininity, also called “skirt promotion”, to access this position. The counselor, of course, added a suggestive picture. Another right wing enclase, the city of Puteaux, in a charity effort to support families with children returning to school, distributed strong blue backpacks to boys and strong pink one to girls, making clear the separation in colors and roles of girls and boys in a binary society.

“Najat Vallaud-Belkacem is the ideal target for all those who would like to distill the idea that an immigrant woman could not legitimately be part of a government” says SOS Racism, an association that denounces all sorts of racism. These attacks go beyond that. They exploit the old demon of colonial countries to block advances in women’s rights and human rights and to achieve various goals: controlling the population at large, curtail all debates, policing the whole of the neoliberal environment.

When Najat Vallaud-Belkacem was Minister of Women’s Rights, she declared that we needed to be politically proactive to address gender inequalities. She was right about that. When she said that gender, class, ethnicity are the bases of inequality and that hatred is the way “to emptied hearts and hardened souls” where inequalities grow, she was right again.

(Photo Credit: RTL.fr)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Brigitte Marti, Christiane Taubira, equality, France, Najat Vallaud-Belkacem, racism, Resistances, sexism

The false case against Christiane Taubira

May 21, 2014 by Brigitte Marti 17 Comments

Next weekend, Europe goes to the polls. Betting on the destabilization and nationalist sentiment fostered through neoliberal economies of fear and debt, the right and extreme right parties hope to win more seats in the European parliament. Their strategy is simple: announce a time of turmoil and crisis and then reduce political discourse to the mythology of the white male moralistic views as the only source of security. In fairness, the leftist parties have not done much to propose real alternative discourses and policies.

Last week, the right used this strategy in France against Christiane Taubira, the French Minister of Justice.

At the beginning of her appointment, Taubira brilliantly passed a same-sex marriage bill. When the most conservative constituents launched sordid assaults, Taubira responded with literary quotations that won the day. It was a virtuoso performance.

No virtuoso performance and no victory in the name of justice and equality can go unpunished.

And so the French right wing has launched an all-out campaign against Christiane Taubira.

They Americanized their techniques, using the power of repetition of simple and nationalistic slogans against her. Their goal was to blur her message and vitiate her work on undoing the politics of security that criminalized the vulnerable, at-risk populations attacked by anti-migrants sentiment or austerity measures.

After innumerable racist attacks, the neoliberal conservative coalition finally created a buzz around a song. The song was the National Anthem, La Marseillaise, sung by a chorus and soloists. Along with other members of Government and the President of France, Taubira attended a ceremony to commemorate the abolition of slavery. It was a solemn occasion, althought not for the Front National (FN), the nationalist party, that marked its denial of the offense of slavery by refusing to participate. They also refused to celebrate General Dumas, the first French General born in slavery and father of Alexander Dumas.

What happened was this. Taubira didn’t sing. This was presented as refusing to sing, which triggered a methodic orchestration in the media of repetitive messaging. The only problem is that singing the national anthem has never been popular in France. None of Taubira’s colleagues sang the anthem that day, but it was Taubira who was viciously attacked. Some questioned her “Frenchness” and demanded her resignation. The message was already prepared. A series of attacks and accusations overloaded the media. What is remarkable it the technique; the terms used repetitively by the members of this political “SWAT team” went from accusing her of sectarianism and of being unworthy of her position to being lax and having a contemptuous tone.

Thanks to her strong background in racial and social justice and activism in Guiana where she was born and grew up, Taubira was undaunted. Guiana is a French overseas department located in the Caribbean side of South America. Her political engagement is linked to this land, and she embodies a liberating ideal that has made her the bane of the elite of the right and extreme right in France. Before she became Minister of Justice, Taubira had been a French parliamentary deputy for Guiana between 1992 and 2002. In 2001, she put her name on a bill that recognized the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery as a crime against humanity. At that time, she published a book, L’esclavage raconté à ma fille (Slavery explained to my daughter).

At the beginning of her career, Taubira denounced the crude mistreatment by the post-colonial French state of the overseas population. As Minister of Justice, she has denounced the politics of mass incarceration. She has also asserted the responsibility of civil society to respect human dignity as France’s overcrowded prisons have resulted in France being reprimanded by the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment in 2012.

Taubira’s problem is not singing the national anthem. Her problem is keep open the possibility of a fair debate on her penal bill in a National Assembly in which some members have gendered and racist slurs prepared for her. The manipulation of public opinion is not new, but these violent and ongoing attacks on Christiane Taubira signal that the project of hyper incarceration knows no limits.

This instrumentalization of language and communication is there to obscure the real responsibility of conservatives in the advancement and normalization of fascist and extreme right parties in Europe, not to forget the Tea Party and the dramatic turn to the right in the United States. The songs we should pay attention to are those of social destruction as multiple trade agreements are secretly negotiated, in particular TAFTA that threatens women and social cohesion in Europe, in France and elsewhere. The global prison is inscribed all over this agreement.

Christiane Taubira did not make any faux pas. If you must attack someone, attack her neoliberal detractors, who are not worthy of public position and who know neither the lyrics nor the melodies to the songs of justice and humanity.

(Photo Credit: Libération / Kenzo Tribouillard / AFP)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Brigitte Marti, Christiane Taubira, France, neoliberalism, prison, racism, Resistance, sexism, slavery

Eritrean and Sudanese women asylum seekers protest in Israel

January 15, 2014 by Dan Moshenberg 19 Comments

Thousands of mostly Eritrean and Sudanese women and children asylum seekers marched through the streets of Tel Aviv today, protesting Israel’s new `immigration policies’ and new `open’ immigrant detention center, Holot.

In September, the Israeli Supreme Court declared Israel’s 2012 Prevention of Infiltration Law unconstitutional. Under that law, an undocumented resident, including asylum seekers and refugees, could be held without trial for up to three years. They were previously held in the notorious Saharonim prison. One of the reasons Saharonim is notorious is the number of infants, toddlers and young children, held for what were basically indefinite periods.

When the Supreme Court declared the law unconstitutional, the State swung into action and, first, passed a new amendment to the law. Under the new legislation, the undocumented, again including asylum seekers and refugees, can only be `detained’ for one year … but they can be held in an `open’ facility indefinitely. Welcome to Holot `open’ facility, where `residents’ can walk outside, but must report for roll call three times a day and can’t seek work. And it’s in the middle of the Negev Desert. It’s a prison.

Last week, mostly Eritrean and Sudanese refugees and asylum seekers went on a three day strike. This affected primarily restaurants, hotels, cafes, and cleaning services. One of the strike organizers, twenty-eight-years-old Eritrean Kidane Isaacs, explained: “The new law basically gives us two choices: be a prisoner indefinitely or self-deport. We have been here for years without any sort of human treatment. We are forgotten, neglected.” In Eritrea, Isaacs experienced torture, imprisonment, forced labor, and more.

Today, the women, and children, by thousands, resumed the public struggle. They chanted, “We are refugees!” They carried placards that read, “We need freedom” and “Stop racism!” As one Eritrean woman, Zabib, explained, “We are seeking asylum. We’re not criminals. Our kids have no legal documents so they don’t have any basic rights. We have no kind of support for us and the kids … we’re in survival mode.”

The women’s formal statement read, “The Israeli government treats us like we aren’t people. We live here without states, without basic rights, without hope and without the ability to support our children with honor. We are not criminals. The Israeli government summons the heads of families to the Holot detention facility in the south, separates women from their husbands, fathers from their children, and breaks families apart. The detention and arrests of asylum seekers destroys the one support we have – the support of our family and our communities.”

No one disputes that Sudan and Eritrea are under repressive regimes, but these women, children, men, somehow, despite that consensus, pose `a threat’ to the State’s Jewish character. Indefinite detention, torture, racism, inhumanity, is the threat, not the “negligible number” of Black African bodies.

(Video Credit: YouTube.com)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: asylum seekers, Dan Moshenberg, Eritrea, Haunts, Holot, indefinite detention, Israel, prison, racism, Sudan, torture, women asylum seekers

Why wasn’t Barbie a domestic worker? Who cares?

December 24, 2013 by Leo Settoducato 25 Comments

Following her creation in 1959, Barbie leapt from toy store shelves into the hearts and minds of children all over the world. Her position as an influential figure in American popular culture is undeniable, and her reach has been as expansive and varied as her résumé. Despite holding a plethora of positions from doctor to rock star to astronaut, Barbie has never been a domestic worker. While domestic work may not have been one of the careers Mattel had envisioned girls dreaming of when Barbie began using her motto “We girls can do anything,” the company eventually did release a doll that was equipped for domestic work, but it was not marketed as such.

Mattel claims that the 1991 Jamaican Barbie wears “a costume native to her homeland”. As scholar Ann Ducille points out, `Jamaican Barbie’ is actually wearing a maid’s uniform, thereby presenting a deeply troubling caricature of both Jamaica and domestic labor. Clearly there are racist implications behind the fact that domestic work is acceptable for this ethnic other, but not for Barbie herself to have as a career. Jamaican Barbie is the only doll to be depicted as a domestic worker, but that word does not appear in the doll’s name or official description. If it had, that would have spelled out even more troubling consequences for the ways in which Mattel depicts not only domestic work and people of color, but entire countries. Moreover, in overlooking the doll’s actual depiction as a domestic worker, Mattel contributes to the conventional wisdom of domestic workers as an invisible and silent workforce.

The world around us shapes our perceptions of domestic work and domestic workers. The narrative of domestic work being devalued persists because value and prestige are conflated, suggesting that because domestic work is not prestigious, it is not valuable and vice versa. Barbie projects a specific vision of American upward mobility, aspiration and imagination, and domestic work does not fit the profile of the extravagant and extraordinary careers in which Barbie has dabbled over the years. The idea that domestic work is somehow inferior or less important benefits the State’s capitalist machinery that relies on the extraction of surplus value from low-wage and unwaged labor. In the current neoliberal political moment, the precarization and casualization of labor has proven a formidable obstacle in bringing about any consistency in the way domestic work is regulated, legislated, and salaried.

Add to this the lack of `universal understanding’ of what a domestic worker is or looks like. Ideas surrounding workers’ attitudes, abilities, and obligations are as varied as the workers themselves. While Mattel has a history of capitalizing on difference and constructing a form of multiculturalism that is palatable to consumers, it would be impossible to dress and market a domestic worker Barbie in a way that is accurate and respectful. Mattel would be hard-pressed to convey the nuance and variety in the forms of domestic work. Would consumers buy Childcare Barbie? Eldercare Barbie? Cleaning and Maintenance Barbie? Home Healthcare Worker Barbie?

We need to consider domestic workers not just as consumers, but also as agents who deserve more than to be held to Barbie’s standards of visibility and success. If having an official Barbie doll career outfit really mattered to domestic workers, wouldn’t they have asked for one by now? For domestic workers, life is neither plastic nor fantastic. They face a multitude of challenges with very real impacts on their everyday lives, ranging from lack of legal protection to separation from their families, to living with undocumented immigration status to physical and sexual abuse, and much more. In this context, Barbie would barely register as a priority.

(Photo Credit: The Barbie Collection)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Barbie, domestic worker, Jamaican Barbie, Leo Settoducato, racism

These racist attacks assault the heart of the Republic

November 13, 2013 by Brigitte Marti 12 Comments

Christiane Taubira

Last week, France’s much acclaimed Minister of Justice, Christiane Taubira, a Black woman from the French Department of Guyana, was confronted with yet another series of racist slurs in the city of Angers where she was to deliver a speech to the magistrates. A group of men, women, and children, evidently representing the good Christian family model, was waiting for the minister outside the courthouse. When Christiane Taubira passed by them, they shouted, “Taubira, get lost, you stink, piss off.” Then, a 12 years old girl hurled a racist slur involving monkeys and banana, something she learned in her family circle no doubt. Even a Catholic priest was seen screaming racist epithets.

These attacks have been Christiane Taubira’s everyday life since she was appointed Minister of Justice, but initially they were somewhat more limited. Last spring, however, after Taubira passed the “le mariage pour tous” (marriage for all) bill, the vitriol escalated. Many have applauded her determination and her superb appearance at the Assembly, echoing Simone Veil’s fight for abortion rights. She received a standing ovation, from representatives of the left, center as well as some right wing supporters. She is no average politician.

Coming from a family of eight, Taubira left Guyana to study. She holds two PhDs and quotes commonly René Char, Paul Ricoeur or Aimé Césaire and Léon Gontan Damas, the poets of Negritude. Now, she is courageously introducing a bill to reverse the penal policies of increasing lock up at a time of reduction of funding for social services, introduced by the previous government under Sarkozy. Sarkozy and some of his ministers and collaborators were known for statements and actions that encouraged the racialization of French society by stigmatizing and insulting many from various origins.

First, there was Sarkozy’s infamous address at the University in Dakar in 2007, where he argued that Africa is backward. He said, “The tragedy of Africa is that the African man has not entered history”, suggesting of course that the white man had a “civilizing mission”. Then there was his collaborator Claude Gueant who proposed that “not all civilizations are of equal value” (toutes les civilizations ne se valent pas). Then there was the “identity discourse” debate that he wanted to bring to the Assembly, out of which emerged the newly created Ministry of National Identity. Sarkozy’s political approach has ripped apart the social fabric of France.

In a recent interview, Christiane Taubira, remarked that under the previous government “an inner enemy has been constructed … It has thrived under the doctrine of decline.” These attacks are part of the deconstruction of social cohesion, which is the constant inspiration for Taubira’s work at the Ministry of Justice. For Taubira, the “not republican right” has forgotten the history of the French nation. This is more serious than a slip up. It signals that something particular has been going very wrong, even though racism has always been rampant in the former colonial powers, especially at the time of financial crisis. Here, the sense of impunity that these demonstrators showed is “a challenge to the republic,” said Taubira. She called on the political leaders of the country to speak clearly as the foundations of a country are shaken when a Minister of Justice is attacked in these racialized, sexualized terms. She expressed her surprise “that there hasn’t been a clear and distinct voice decrying this drift in French society.”

Instead of the “clear and distinct voice,” the right and extreme right wing has done everything to control the debate through a reverse attack against Christiane Taubira , so as to signal that they are the masters.

Some voices have been heard not only to denounce the attacks but also to express distress, as Christiane Taubira has been an iconic figure of the hope for a better republic for many French women and men. In the face of these nationalist racist, sexist attacks, it is clearly time to finish the work of the revolution and rewrite the emblem of the French Republic. Let “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” become Liberty, Equality, Humanhood.

(Photo Credit: Liberation / Francois Guillot / AFP)

Filed Under: General Tagged With: Brigitte Marti, Christiane Taubira, France, racism, Resistances, sexism