“When you hear bad things about Jews, prick up your ears, people are talking about you. » These are the words that Frantz Fanon, Martinican and French psychiatrist, thinker of anti-black racism, had heard from his philosophy professor, also of West Indian origin, and which he reported in his book Black skin, white masks (1952). Fanon says that he first understood this phrase in an abstract way, in the sense of universal fraternity. But he later understood that it was a very concrete alert: “An anti-Semite is necessarily negrophobic”, he observed. A few decades earlier, the itinerary of the notoriously anti-Semitic writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline had begun with a stay in Cameroon, the story of which gave rise to anti-black racism of rare brutality, denying any self-awareness to the “negroes”, “negresses” And “niggers” whom he had made to work as porters in his predatory enterprises in the equatorial forest.
A Negrophobe is logically anti-Semitic. At the beginning of the 1970s, the National Front (future National Rally) was born as a racist mobilization resulting from two converging movements: the anti-Semitic nostalgics of Nazism and collaboration, and the supporters of French Algeria. Mobilized against the Algerians, all indiscriminately referred to as “Muslims”.
This term, using colonial language, described Algerians in general – even those of the Catholic religion – which gave the strange identification of “Catholic Muslims”. This meaning comes back today, for example with the expression “Muslim in appearance” used by Nicolas Sarkozy in 2012 when referring to the facies alone.
Anchoring migrations in all societies
From the 1980s, the National Front converted its racist ideology by taking postcolonial immigrants (Maghrebi and sub-Saharan) as its political battlehorse, who since the end of the 1990s have become the “migrants”. The circle has come full circle: anti-Jewish, anti-black and anti-Muslim racism is the driving force of the far right from yesterday to today. And the theme of migration, presented by the National Rally as an urgent problem of security and identity for all French people and their territory, masks a reactivated racist infrathink in the face of the movement of people from formerly colonized countries.
The facts themselves, those which concern human globalization and more precisely the movement of people on a planetary scale, speak of a much greater and ordinary reality than all the fantasies conveyed about them. France’s relative share in the arrival of migrants and refugees is rather below European averages. And the systematic link between migration and insecurity is not proven by statistical data.
You have 57.79% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
