Yesterday evening, an extremely dangerous, racist candidate in the French presidential elections held his first official political meeting on the outskirts of Paris, attended by 10K supporters. This candidate has been previously accused and found guilty of stirring racial hate, specifically towards Muslims. It will come as no surprise that his meeting was laced with violence, from his speeches to the physical brutality unleashed by his supporters onto counter-protesters, who came to the meeting wearing t-shirts that read “No to racism”. The videos of the altercations are bone-chilling. They rush us into elections season, and I can already tell that we POCs are in for a wild, dangerous ride. Now more than ever, we will have to protect and look out for each other in public spaces. Things are and will get nasty.
I can still remember how my French peers would scoff at Trump’s election in 2016, heads shaking while they muttered “Ils sont fous ces ‘ricains…”. Today, at the culminating point after decades of islamophobic and racist policies, the French are stunned that a man who has been fined for being a racist is actually an official contender for the presidential seat. And that he is backed by a solid following.
Some still scoff: “No, but he’ll never go through. Nobody will vote for him.” The question is not who will or will not vote for him. Right now in France, the political spectrum is heavily skewed on the right, if not far-right. Even the so-called leftist parties share common, “universal” grounds with right-wing parties.
Even if he, or the other far-right/right candidate, don’t make it to l’Elysée, their ideas and values have already been absorbed into the fabric of French society. They have already won.
I don’t want to go through all of their programmes and dissect them here, but I urge you all to do so to make up your own mind. What I want to highlight here is the anger and frustration I feel when I see how easily people forget the past. How easily they can undermine the danger of looming fascism just because it won’t affect them personally. Most of the policies upheld by the far-right and the right are direct attacks on POC’s existence in this country. If you don’t feel outraged, it’s because you are protected by your privilege and proximity to white supremacy. You can go on with your life, unphased because you won’t be deported. You won’t have to change your name. You won’t lose social benefits. You won’t lose your job.
I am currently reading “The Dead are Arising”, an investigative book by Les and Tamara Payne analysing Malcolm X’s life and the period before his birth. In the first chapters, the Paynes paint a dire picture of what it meant to be a Black person in the 1920s, when. In one horrific passage, they describe how an innocent Black man was dragged in the streets, lynched and burned by a horde of angry, white men. The descriptions of these men’s rage, their barbarism, and their sense of entitlement, all state-sponsored, does not feel like a distant past. As I closed the book on that chapter, I fired up the Twitter app on my phone. My feed was flooded with videos of angry, barbaric, white men punching and hitting and kicking women and men who came to protest, peacefully, against the racist rhetoric of the far-right meeting.
If trauma and violence can be transmitted from one generation to the next, then so can hate. These men are the living embodiments of this structural violence, the true heirs of a violent colonial legacy that has, in France, transformed into racist institutional warfare against French Black people and Muslims.
I’m sick of being told I’m too pessimistic (thank you Grammarly for tone policing me aha).
But things are bad - the house is on fire and the flames are blazing hot. If you’re not angry, it’s because you’re privileged enough to turn your gaze while the rest of us have to bear the brunt of racist, sexist, neo-liberal politics.