In his Wednesday column, “The boomers, these racists! », Jean-François Lisée criticizes an educational video of which I am the author, entitled Racism, its origins, its history and read by Professor Laurent Turcot.
According to the columnist, my video teaches us that “it is only in the West that we ‘find a perfectly assumed discrimination'”. Here is the full excerpt: “Of course, racism is not exclusive to whites or even to the Western world, but it is only in the West that we will find the paradox of supposedly egalitarian societies and where we also find discrimination that is perfectly assumed. »
This excerpt, which we hear in the first minute of the video, invalidates the intentions attributed to me by the columnist, who accuses me of conveying a “historical falsehood”. I never claimed that racism was exclusive to the West. I even affirm the opposite in this sentence which is only half quoted. On the other hand, it is true that it was only in the West that the institution of slavery was maintained while claiming that “all men are born free and equal”. The African or Arab countries where slavery was practiced did not claim to share these universal ideals.
The columnist continues: “Besides, ‘we have to wait for the Europeans to discover black Africa so that we can start talking about racism as we hear it today’. Here is another sentence quoted out of context and emptied of its meaning. This excerpt from the video explains that before the Renaissance, discrimination pitted whites against other whites — Slavs enslaved by the Germanic Empire, for example. It was not until the exploration of sub-Saharan Africa and the ensuing start of the slave trade that the association between black skin and servility began. The purpose of the video is to explain how racism in the West has evolved over the centuries, not to point fingers at white people.
According to Mr. Lisée, “young people coming out of this screening would be shocked to learn that slavery was present on all continents, that Africans practiced it among themselves before the arrival of the whites, that Native Americans practiced among themselves before the arrival of European settlers”. Young people would be shocked to learn this only if ethics and religious culture teachers were content to let this video teach the lesson for them. Having participated in the training of several cohorts of future teachers, I dare to believe that this is not the case.
Last criticism addressed to me by the columnist: “Not a word either about the fact that French-speaking Quebecers were victims of racism, or at least of linguistic discrimination. The video is aimed at a wide audience and is not specifically aimed at Quebec students. My goal was to summarize in 20 minutes the history of racism in the West. So I had to make choices. Why talk about Quebecers rather than Bretons, Catalans or any other linguistic minority? When we talk about racism in the XXe century in the West, it seems to me more meaningful to describe German anti-Semitism, American segregation and South African apartheid.
Mr. Lisée’s criticism is based on the intentions he attributes to me and to the teacher quoted in his column: to make white people feel guilty in general and Quebecers in particular. It is a reflex, alas, widespread among certain nationalists, who place themselves on the defensive as soon as they are told about racism. If we don’t state in bold that it has been worse elsewhere, that racism also exists in English Canada, that Montreal is not Detroit and that New France was not New Spain, we are accused of putting Quebec on trial. And an educational video is accused of being propaganda when it only seeks to explain and make people think.
Jean-François Lisée is quite right to believe that my video is not enough to make people understand “the reality of racism and anti-racism in Quebec”. I do not pretend otherwise, since such has never been my objective. I regret, however, to see my work being considered part of the “misleading and guilty porridge” denounced by the columnist.
Columnist’s reply
Dear Alexandre Dumas,
First, congratulations again for your recent works on the Duplessis era. I obviously do not hold you responsible for the lamentable comments made in the rest of the course, but allow me to insist: it is false to assert, as you do in this video, that discrimination on the basis of racial distinctions originated with the western trade in black slaves. The slavery of the Vietnamese by the Chinese is 2000 years old, that of white Europeans by the Muslim Empire is also earlier and “perfectly accepted”. It is also not a question of being, as you say, on the offensive or on the defensive on the question of racism and slavery, but of respecting historical reality and recognizing both the cruelty of racism, the bravery of those who set it back and real progress. Thus, I was saddened to note that you attribute the great American anti-racist advances of the 1960s to Washington’s African policy imperatives rather than to the colossal work of Martin Luther King and black Americans supported by a large number of Whites, including several Jews, who put their lives on the line for this cause.
Best regards,
Jean-Francois Lisee