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KamelBThirdPaper 3 - 19 Aug 2009 - Main.EbenMoglen
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Constructing Black France: Thoughts about the US model of affirmative action.
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-- KamelB - 17 May 2009
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- I think this is an interesting and valuable beginning. It gets the issues out. Tighter organization and the offering of a coherent argument seems to me one draft away. I assume that argument, like that of the post-racialists in the US, will be about directing government effort according to poverty rather than race. The manifest difficulties with that approach, which are not hidden from you anymore than they are from me, will then remain to be dealt with. It is not conceivable that the French would be willing to elect a person of North African, let alone sub-Saharan, descent as President of the Republic, no matter how perfect his accent. Discussion of racism as though it were merely a form of hatred directed at the poor would be incoherent, and social policy for dealing with racism on that basis would not be very useful.
- If you can go that far, you might be able to take on the real difference between the two societies. US society is built of people who chose to be here, with the exception of the people about whom we are discussing how the government should structure social life to deal with the consequences of their forcible inclusion, and an aboriginal population which—though our treatment of its rights raises every sort of moral problem, including a history of virulent racism—is tiny. The "hexagon" that is France, however, is a forcible amalgamation of a number of separate societies, each of which has been short-changed for generations by the central authority centered around Paris. The overwhelming effort of that State has been to declare everyone within it "French," and to inhibit any sense of particular identity, hence the refusal to make ethnic identifications or be responsible for acceptance of cultural pluralism. The real enemy of racial dignity in the form in which it has been sought in the United States, and in other places around the world, is the absurd myth of French identity. But consideration of that idea would require precisely entertaining precisely the possibility your last paragraph denies, that a French knife might ever be the wrong tool to wield altogether in trying to understand France,
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