BLACK SOCIAL HISTORY THE JUSTICE MINISTER AND THE BANANA: HOW RACIST IS FRANCE

There has been a sudden spike recently in expressions of racism in French public life—one that has provoked a national debate and may lead to legal action this week. It began last month, when a candidate for the right-wing National Front likened Christiane Taubira, the Justice Minister, who is black, to a monkey, pairing her photograph with one of a chimpanzee on a Facebook page. Although the leader of the National Front, Marine Le Pen, forced the candidate to withdraw, the attacks continued. During some of the protests against France’s new gay-marriage law (which Taubira, as Justice Minister, pushed), the crowds chanted “Taubira, t’es foutue, les Français sont dans la rue.” (“Taubira, you’re fucked, the French are in the street!”) At one rally, a twelve-year-old child symbolically presented Taubira with a banana.

Last week, in a long and exasperated interview with Libération, Taubira said, “With me, people feel they can say, ‘The French are in the streets,’ ” the implication being that Taubira is not one of them. (She was born in French Guiana, an overseas département of France, and so has been a citizen since birth.) “Apart from my own personal case, these racist attacks are an attack on the heart of the Republic,” she said. “Our social cohesion, the history of the nation, is placed in question.” The right-wing magazine Minute promptly responded with a cover story bearing the title “Taubira Finds Her Banana.”

This does not appear to be an isolated case. The National Commission for the Rights of Man (C.N.C.D.H.), which has been charged by the French parliament to monitor incidents of racism in France, noted a twenty-three-per-cent increase in incidents of racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism last year, and a five-fold increase over the past twenty years.

The Taubira affair has set off something of a national debate on the origins and responsibility for this ugly recrudescence of racism. Is French culture deeply racist? Is racism itself increasing, or only its public expression? Is it partly a reaction to growing unemployment and the recession? Until fairly recently, the debate around prejudice in France has concentrated on the difficulties of integrating France’s sizeable Muslim minority, estimated at between four and six million people, or less than ten per cent of the population. Is there a line between Islamophobia and traditional forms of racism? Why, when the right-wing National Front has been moderating its official message and gaining in respectability, have cruder forms of racism been on the rise? And how should France respond? The Minute cover prompted the Interior Minister, Manuel Valls, to announce that he would study “ways to prevent the distribution” of the magazine, among other legal action. (Inciting racial hatred can be a crime in France.)

“Our politicians are responsible,” said Arnaud Mercier, a professor of political communication at the University of Lorraine, in a forum published last week in Le Monde. “Some of them have blown on the embers of racism.” In 2005, young people in banlieues, the suburbs where many poor French live, staged violent riots across the country after two teen-agers from a Paris suburb were shot and killed by police. Nicolas Sarkozy, then the Interior Minister, dismissed the rioters as racaille, “scum.” It represented, according to many observers, the crossing of a rhetorical line in which using colloquial language to insult or characterize entire groups of people became acceptable, even fashionable. Sarkozy’s tough-guy language helped elect him President in 2007.

“All sorts of dams on what you can say have burst,” said Aline Le Bail-Kremer, the spokesperson for S.O.S. Racisme, a group that advocates for France’s minorities.

The failure of both Sarzoky’s center-right party, the U.M.P., and the current socialist government of François Hollande to turn around the economy has created an opening for the National Front. Marine Le Pen, the daughter of the party founder Jean-Marie Le Pen, shrewdly developed a kind of good cop, bad cop routine with her octogenarian father. She became the public face of the party, polished and seemingly moderate in tone, hammering on economic issues and offering easy-sounding solutions—withdraw from the euro, protect farmers. But she has never distanced herself from her father’s unrepentant xenophobia, keeping the National Front’s original base happy.

At risk of losing votes to the Le Pens, a number of politicians from both main parties began competing to play the anti-immigrant card. During the 2012 elections, after Marine Le Pen began asserting that it would be soon impossible to buy anything other than halal meat in France, Sarkozy, down in the polls, announced that “the subject of halal meat was the most important in the minds of French voters.”

During the campaign, the center-right singled out Taubira as a reason to fear the election of the left. As one member of the U.M.P. confessed anonymously in Le Monde, “Taubira was a perfect target, a perfect punching bag for the right.”

Taubira, who has a long and impressive political career, became one of the most visible members of Hollande’s government. Opposition to the same-sex-marriage law—the result of a difficult and divisive battle, in which the minister did not back down—has, in some ways, melded with a larger sense of threatened national identity and anti-immigrant sentiment. “There has been a long slide, in which we have constructed an internal enemy,” Taubira said in her Libération interview. “Those who are unable to imagine a future spend their time telling the French people that they are being invaded, under siege, in danger.”

Hollande’s decline in popularity—his approval rating is now twenty-one per cent, the lowest ever recorded by a French President—has, according to some, dissuaded him from speaking out more forcefully. “The argument at the highest level of the Elysée Palace is that we are being pressed by the National Front, and so we can’t do anything, if not, it will only get worse,” a source described as “close to the President” told Le Monde. Another socialist deputy complained, “We have reached a point where we accept everything.”

Why does race-baiting and fear of Islam work as a political tactic? “Is France racist?”Libération asked in Tuesday’s paper. “No, but some French people are.” Seven per cent of French people (according to the last C.N.C.D.H. report) acknowledge being “rather racist,” while another twenty-two per cent consider themselves “a little racist,” twenty-five per cent “not very racist,” and forty-four per cent described themselves as “not at all racist,” down by ten per cent. Then again, the politician who compared Taubira to an ape, Anne-Sophie Leclere, insisted that she was not racist, so it is hard to know what to make of these numbers. Sixty-five per cent of those polled believe that “certain behaviors sometimes justify racist reactions.”

Joan Wallach Scott, an American scholar at the Institute for Advanced Studies, at Princeton, argues in her book “The Politics of the Veil” that the Republican values of egalité and laicitéwere historically entangled in the racist roots of French colonialism. The idea that people of all races could become French was coupled with an implicit (and often explicit) assumption that they came from inferior cultures, and needed to submit to France’s mission civilatrice to be equal. The French, in her view, need to learn to “negotiate difference.”

Egalité makes France officially color-blind: the government is not allowed to count, let alone consider, whether individuals belong to a racial, ethnic, or religious minority. And yet, the reality is that the Algerian workers who were encouraged to come to France in the nineteen-forties and fifties were placed in temporary housing on the periphery of France’s cities, and these geographically segregated banlieues are where later immigrants have continued to live. Numerous studies show that job applicants with such addresses or with “foreign” names are much more likely to be rejected out of hand, regardless of their professional qualifications. Many in France continue to consider as immigrants people of North African or African descent whose families have lived in the country for generations, and who are French citizens. Fifty-five per cent consider Muslims to be a “group apart,” and twenty-six per cent still consider Jews to be a “group apart,” surprising given that Jewish immigration is very old and highly assimilated.

“The French position on race is that you can come from anywhere and become French, as long as you speak French, adopt French customs, and act French,” Justine Marous, a French-American of African descent who grew up in the U.S. but currently lives in Paris, told me. “That’s great, but they have a hard time with difference, people who maintain customs, dress, or religion that makes them appear different. And, in the case of black people, we are conspicuously different no matter how French we feel.” Different—but very French.