Grandstand. The putting on line of the open letter of the novelist Virginie Despentes on Monday denouncing the persistence of racism in France and pointing out the refusal to recognize the prevalence of the "white privilege" was a shock in the context of the Floyd and Traoré cases.
The use of this expression from the American social sciences provoked a multitude of hostile reactions, denouncing a dangerous, racialist, essentialist concept, a " inept category ", even writes Corinne Narassiguin in The world June 10.
Abolition erased by Napoleon
The latter, former member of the French of North America and national leader of the Socialist Party, adds: "To import the expression" white privilege "into France is to want to tackle the history of the United States over the history of France, without respecting either. It is to fabricate historical nonsense. In the French context, to speak of abolishing white privilege is to suggest that the fight against racism would be a fight against the status of white people. "
As a historian from the United States, a research professor at the University of Lille, I protest against this fallacious presentation of the history of these two countries. If the history of racism and discrimination presents obvious differences between the two shores of the Atlantic, it is appropriate today to no longer present the American experience as the absolute counter-model of which the blessed French Republic would have been preserved.
Everyone knows today that the American Revolution was the work of white men for whom the ideals of freedom, equality and the pursuit of happiness knew strict boundaries. Thomas Jefferson, the main author of the Declaration of Independence of 1776, third president of the United States, considered blacks in essence to be inferior and took one of his slaves as a concubine.
In France, the first abolition of slavery in 1794 was erased by Napoleon in 1802. It will certainly be noted that the Second Republic ended by triumphing abolition in 1848, when it was necessary in the United States to pass the test terrible of the American Civil War so that finally, in 1865, the 13e amendment which emancipated the slaves.
Second-zone citizens
Yet slavery in both countries was only the first step in the imposition of white supremacy.
In France, the Republic took over the colonial adventure. Jules Ferry emphasized in 1885 the responsibility of "Superior races" towards "Inferior races". In particular, the Republic of Algeria established legislation based on the racial distinction between French and Indigenous people.
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