Obama-wama

I’m a couple of days (or weeks) behind the American news cycle so it has only recently come to my attention that Barack Obama recently made a speech about race in America. I haven’t watched it on YouTube but I skimmed the New York Times transcript and it struck me as very thoughtful discussion of an important aspect of American culture. So I thought I would seize the opportunity to describe some observations I have made about race in France.

[Again, I make a pause. Again, I am not anti-French. But this is the aspect of French society that I have found the most shocking since I have been here.]

I suppose I should start by explaining that French people do not think of race as being part of their society. French population censuses do not collect data on race; the French are proud to say that French is French, regardless of color. This is why they also have no conception of political correctness. Actually, that’s not true. They know about political correctness. But they think of it as some quaint American construct that has nothing to do with their daily lives and everything to do with America’s obsession with all things race.

Because of this lack of political correctness French people can say things that will shock the average bleeding-heart, uber-politically correct, liberal arts undergraduates. For example, they will refer to Asian people as “yellow”… on the news. French cartoons are full of drawings that any American will immediately cringe at as an example of blackface but that French people just see as a normal caricature, same as a caricature of Sarkozy will have a huge nose. These comments or attitudes are not, for the most part, generated by racism (although it would be dishonest of me say that there are not racists in France- there definitely are) but rather by ignorance. Specifically about the situation of minorities in America. Some African-American girls on our program last semester were asked if they had ever been in a music video. My host father once asked me, “Black mayors tend to be more corrupt than white mayors, right?”. Multiple students told us in out small group English sessions that they had learned the word “wetback” as a normal term for Mexican immigrants in their high school English class. I also had to explain to a member of my Pepiniere group that it didn’t matter how many rap videos he watched- he could not use the n-word. This ignorance seems to come from a shallow understanding of how complicated race is in America.

That is not to say that France does not have its own race issues. They just don’t have the same frame of thinking about it that we do since it’s a comparatively recent issue for their society. But the fact is that there are parts of Paris that are just as diverse as New York City and that diversity leads to all sorts of cooperation and tension, much like in America. French history and society just do not include the same polarized history that America does.

That being said, I thought that Barack Obama’s speech was a brilliant discourse on the state of race in America and that he articulated a lot of things that are important for our society and our political life but that we rarely discuss in a public sphere. Honestly I think that his speech spoke to today’s issues of race just as much as Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech spoke to the Civil Rights movement. I would recommend any American to read the speech and any French person who wants to understand “political correctness” in a deeper context to read it as well.