Blacks in France Documentary Reveals Systemic Racism in France

On Tuesday January 18, 2022, France 2 TV Channel broadcasted a documentary film titled Blacks in France, which depicted the racism against black people in France.

The documentary reveals the reality of the historical suffering experienced on a daily basis by people of African descent in the country. Racist words and attacks follow them from a young age, as well as stereotypes in the public media as well as before the law.

The film conveys this reality through living life testimonies of the victims of this daily violence, celebrities or the public, to confirm that the phenomenon exists and has its historical roots rooted in the collective memory through France's role in the slave trade as well as its colonial crimes.

This comes in a clear response to the political right, which denies the existence of this phenomenon and its breadth and its roots in the French public sphere, as they consider the struggle of this part of the population imported from other societies.

 

Everyday Suffering

Told by the writer Alain Mabanckou, the documentary retraces black people’s stories made up of prejudices and stereotypes, but also shot through with hope and pride.

According to the documentary, these blacks in France build a history in constant transformation, with the participation of tennis player Yannick Noah, rapper Soprano, actress Jean-Pascal Zadi, historian Pap Ndiaye, Kathy Laurent Pourcel, journalist Karine Baste-Regis, Didier Vieillot, or even Laetitia Helouet.

The documentary traces blacks’ lives from kindergarten to the world of work; everyone recounts those moments when, in the eyes of others, they realized that they were primarily "black," and that this property carried with it a number of biased attitudes.

A schoolgirl said in the documentary that was once told that she looked like "crap," the health-care provider looked dryly at the people he dealt with, and the dancer who came to record classical dance at the Conservatory was asked to undergo a hip-hop test.

To create a kind of realism on these testimonies in the documentary, Alain Mabanckou relied on relevant texts from the 19th and early 20th centuries, when powerful black stereotypes, developed through the slave trade, colonialism, and brutality, were published, and prejudices are still very present, a century later, in advertisements and in children's songs, according to the French newspaper Le Monde in a report on the film.

Soprano, who once traveled first class by express train with a number of musicians, recalls hearing the band leader point to them before turning to the manager, who is white, to ask him, "They speak French, don't they?"

 

Too Black to Be French

The new documentary is part of a series of activism and campaigns to a centuries-long problem in France.

For example, Jean-Paul Guerlain, 75, an heir to his family's cosmetics empire, made comments in a 2010 interview on France-2 television describing the creation of one of the company's most famed perfumes.

He said: "I worked like a nigger. I don't know if niggers have always worked like that, but anyway."

Following this statement, several anti-racism groups filed legal complaints, and protests were staged in front of the Guerlain store on the Champs-Élysées. Some called for a boycott of Guerlain products.

The documentary movie Too Black to Be French was released on European channel Arte in July 2015. The documentary combined an intimate approach with the testimony of black-skinned French citizens, and historians or sociologists like Pap Ndiaye, Achille Mbembe, Eric Fassin, and Patrick Simon.

Isabelle Boni-Claverie, the film director, said that she delivers a moving yet instructive documentary in which "she peels back the layers of race relations."

 

 

 

Exhibit B

Another example of the long history of black activism against the French state was the announcement of Exhibit B art installation.

Exhibit B was screened without controversy in France in 2013—at the Centquatre and the Avignon Festivals—and again in Scotland in the summer of 2014—at the Edinburgh Festival.

When the Barbican in London announced it would stage Exhibit B, it was met with such a storm of protest and an online petition with over 25,000 signatures, that the Barbican was forced to cancel the production eventually.

The Centquatre and the Théâtre Gérard Philipe defended their upcoming show in an open letter, insisting that Brett Bailey's Exhibit B was not racist.

“This work of art denounces all forms of dehumanization and racism without ambiguity,” the letter states. “Each living tableaux is extremely precise on the historical facts, which puts them in the proper context.

“This work of art demands that viewers rethink their view on what humanity means. Do we, in the 21st century, really know how to be human beings?”

French historian Pascal Blanchard in a statement to France24 said that he wasn’t surprised that Exhibit B had prompted outrage: “That’s the point.”

“It is an extremely disturbing work, there is a powerful undercurrent of violence that serves to reject the violence of a previous era,” he said to France24.