“HHow does it feel to be a white? Simon is not white. He is an African American. In order to escape the ferocious racism that every African American faces and seek asylum in Paris, he left his home country. There he was with an Algerian. There was a quarrel in the bar. The police put the Algerian in prison. Simon and they let go. In Paris, light-skinned Algerians were treated as blacks in the country and dark-skinned Americans. The authorities respected him. “How does it feel to be a white man? “Laughing at Algerians.
Simon is the central character in William Gardner Smith’s 1963 republished novel Stone faceSmith and Simon, like many black Americans in the middle of the last century, found a refuge in France to escape the segregation and prejudice that scarred the United States. “There is more freedom in one square block of Paris than in the entire United States of America!” The novelist Richard Wright claimed in his paper I choose exile.
However, unlike Wright, Smith is increasingly aware of his vague position in French society. “We are the boss here,” an Algerian told Simeon.African Americans may feel free France, But for others, freedom is restricted like black Americans.
Stone face Sometimes it can be clumsy and preaching. However, as the American cultural critic Adam Shatz observed in the introduction to the new edition, it not only “resonates with contemporary concerns about privilege and identity,” but “its approach to these issues is obviously Is heretical”. Smith insists that having fair skin is not always a symbol of privilege. Blacks are not necessarily disadvantaged. Context is the most important. This novel is equally acute in portraying France. A country proud of its universalist principles has embraced black Americans, but like the United States, it has established its own “n*****”.
I was reminded Stone face While watching the news from Paris almost at the same time last week, Josephine Baker And announcement Eric Zemo He will participate in the French presidential election next year. This exposes both sides of France’s attitude towards race.
In an elaborate ceremony, Baker gained a place in the Panthéon in Paris, where many of France’s greatest children were buried. Baker was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1906, at the height of Jim Crow’s segregation policy. He was one of the first African-Americans to take refuge in France. After Folies-Bergere became famous as an entertainer, she joined the resistance movement during World War II and then played a role in the civil rights struggle in the United States after the war.
For the French authorities, celebrating Baker is a way to celebrate a form of color-blind universalism while challenging the perfidious Anglo-Saxon identity politics. “Her business is universalism,” President Macron told the Pantheon audience. Her goal is not to “define herself as black before she defines herself as American or French.”
Zemmour has a very different view of what a Frenchman is. As a writer, broadcaster, and debater, Zemur regards French Muslims as “colonists” and immigrants as “invaders.” He advocated the “big substitution theory,” which claimed that whites were being deliberately replaced by blacks and brown immigrants. Zemmour was a Jew, but sympathized with the wartime Vichy regime that cooperated with the Nazis, insisting that it protected French Jews by allowing only foreign-born people to be deported to Nazi concentration camps. This is a slander in history, but even if it is true, it is an extremely immoral defense of Vichy.
Zemmour is a reactionary tradition that can be traced back to opponents of the French Revolution and regards liberalism, secularism and cosmopolitanism as enemies of social order and true French values. The spirit of liberal universalism is corrosive because, as the 19th-century novelist Maurice Barres insisted, it tried to “separate the French from the soil and social groups and free them from prejudice.”
In the time of Barres, the Jews were the incarnation of everything that the reactionaries despised—a nation without foundations, non-French, free, and international. Today, mainly Muslims are seen as internal enemies. Not only the reactionaries, but also many liberals.Many people will applaud him Josephine Baker And think that he is standing in the republican tradition of universalism.
“Zemmour’s ideas are extremist, racist, and exclusive,” Schatz observed In a recent article, “but mainstream intellectuals and politicians laid the foundation for his rise.” Intellectuals and politicians responded by accepting hard-line statements about the threats of immigrants and Muslims to “our way of life.” The rise of the extreme right has provided more fuel for reactionary thinking.
The belief of universalism is that everyone should be treated as a citizen, not as a bearer of a specific race or cultural history. This is a precious principle. However, in practice, France’s policy has led to blindness to racism in the name of “color blindness”, and believes that certain groups, whether Jews or Muslims, do not belong to the nation and are the “others” that define the national identity of France.
Stone face It ended with the events of October 17, 1961, when a large-scale demonstration in support of Algeria’s struggle for independence was met with unprecedented Police brutality. There may be 100 to 300 people killed, many of them after being tortured. Dozens of people were thrown into the Seine River, and their bodies washed up on the banks of the river in the next few days.
This is the bloodiest act of suppressing street protests in modern Western European countries. However, until recently, people remained silent on this.Until 2012, French President François Hollande even recognize massacre. This year, on the occasion of the 60th anniversary, President Macron called “Unforgivable crime”.
This is a silence that expresses universalism. This universalism refuses to be truly universal, but is aided by excluding certain groups from state institutions. As long as it does so, it will provide cover for characters such as Zemmour. As William Gardner Smith reminded us half a century ago, without challenging the reality of racism and repelling politics, one cannot challenge identity-based politics or accept the vision of universalism.
