The scene takes place at Nice airport, three weeks ago. After collecting their luggage, travelers head for the exit. The way is clear, but you still have to cross a last checkpoint.
Posted at 11:00 a.m.
It’s basically just a formality. I traveled many times to France, where I lived, studied, worked. Whether with my Canadian or French passport, I never had to stop at this last customs post.
There were about twenty people in front of me. The two customs officers hardly seemed to notice them. Then I saw the customs officer on my left winking at the customs officer on my right. ” Your papers please ! The young black man in front of me stopped. He didn’t look surprised.
The scene takes place at Paris airport, a month and a half ago. After collecting their luggage, travelers head for the exit. The way is clear, but you still have to cross a last checkpoint. People advance in front of us, in a continuous flow, without being worried. Until a young black man is asked for his papers. He doesn’t look surprised either. “Routine” check in his case, I imagine.
“It’s so obvious why he’s the only one arrested,” Sonny remarked.
In effect. In France, we do not pretend that systemic racism does not exist. It appears without complexes. Liberty, equality, fraternity, they said…
I’m not talking about anecdotes. Parisians who fit the profile of the “young man perceived as black or Arab” are 20 times more likely than others to be stopped, often in a more violent way, according to a study carried out in 2017 by the Defender of Rights, a independent French administrative entity.
A scene fromA little brother, poignant film by the French Léonor Seraille presented in competition at the last Cannes Film Festival, illustrates the phenomenon well. Ernest, a young man who arrived in Paris at the age of 2 from the Ivory Coast, is a philosophy teacher in a high school. He goes out one afternoon to get a coffee, is arrested on the outside staircase of the university residence, and as he has forgotten his identity papers, he has a bad time with the police.
It’s revolting. But that is unfortunately the lot of many people. Valerie Complex, African-American film critic, tells this week in Deadline Hollywood, magazine specializing in cinema, how during the Cannes Film Festival she constantly had to endure microaggressions. Each time she presented her accreditation, we checked at length whether the photo was really hers. Which was not required of any of his colleagues.
The photo of my accreditation from the Cannes Film Festival dates from the (distant) time when I had no gray hair. And no one ever asked me if it was really about me.
I hear from here the exasperated sigh of those who believe that microaggressions are a fad of multicultural millennials (the ultimate insult according to them). Let’s try an exercise in empathy: you are a French-speaking Quebecer attending a convention in Ottawa. Every time you walk into a conference room, you are verified to be who you say you are. We are suspicious. We never do that for your anglophone colleagues. Would you find that normal?
It is not normal. And yet, we live in societies that take it for granted.
Joseph-Christopher Luamba, a 22-year-old black man, has been stopped a dozen times without reasonable cause, he says, since he obtained his driver’s license three years ago. He was in court this week to have random police stops of motorists declared unconstitutional and an end to racial profiling.
According to a 2020 study on racial profiling in Montreal conducted by Anne-Marie Livingstone, a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard University, Marie Meudec, an anthropologist specializing in anti-racism, and legal expert Rhita Harim, “rates of police arrests are systematically higher for racialized people, without any correlation with offense or crime rates”.
In Montreal, a young black man between the ages of 15 and 34 is 4.4 to 5.3 times more likely to be arrested than a young white man of the same age “for weak and unfounded reasons”, whereas an Aboriginal woman is arrested 11 times more often than a white woman, according to a 2019 study from the University of Quebec at Chicoutimi.
I never felt that because of the color of my skin, I was subject to differential treatment or any form of discrimination.
I’m talking about real discrimination. Not a musician aware of the issues of media representation of the Afro-descendant community, who makes the free and informed choice to withdraw from a role of spokesperson, so as not to overshadow a festival that she particularly appreciates . A leading woman who is aware of her white privilege.
Divert his gesture for ideological reasons as much as you want, recover this story for political purposes if you like, even sigh, it won’t change anything.