Book Around the Corner

Thanks a lot for the link to this article. Having a real writer write about it is what Morrison’s essay deserves.

Romain Gary wrote that racism is when people don’t matter, have no value, are “other”, not like you so what you do to them doesn’t matter, doesn’t count as a wrong. Here’s the quote:

Le racisme, c’est quand ça ne compte pas. Quand ils ne comptent pas. Quand on peut faire n’importe quoi avec eux, ça ne compte pas, parce qu’ils ne sont pas comme nous. Tu comprends ? Ils ne sont pas des nôtres. On peut s’en servir sans déchoir. On ne perd pas sa dignité, son honneur. Ils sont tellement différents de nous qu’il n’y a pas à se gêner, il ne peut y avoir… il ne peut y avoir jugement voilà. On peut leur faire faire n’importe quelle vile besogne parce que de toute façon, le jugement qu’ils portent sur nous, ça n’existe pas, ça ne peut pas salir… C’est ça, le racisme.

I’m not sure but here’s my suggestion of a translation (even if you don’t need it)

Racism is when it doesn’t matter. When they don’t matter. When you can do anything to them, and it doesn’t count because they’re not like us. You understand? They don’t belong. We can use them without demeaning ourselves. We don’t lose our dignity, our honour. They’re so different from us that there’s nothing to worry about, there’s no…there’s no question of them judging us, that’s it. We can have them do whatever lowly task we want because the judgment they pass on us doesn’t exist anyway. It can’t sully us…This is what racism is.

I’m currently reading a novel set in the convict era in Australia and it’s the same sort of concept: you can flog the prisoners and it doesn’t matter, there’s no stain on you from it because they’re “other”, not like you, not acknowledged as your equal. And somewhat, the novel The Murderess by Papadiamantis seems like a cousin to Morrison’s Beloved.

America has problems with the color black and that’s what Toni Morrison points out.

James Baldwin wrote in his short-story This Morning, This Evening, So Soon that the French treat immigrants from the Maghreb countries the way white Americans treat black people. It horrified me and it made me think.
And you know what? He’s right. They are victim of the same deep and irrational racism. They have recognizable features, like hair and different names. And no matter how long their family has been in France, they are “Arabs”, which is a term I hate because it doesn’t mean anything.

In French, you have a very effective way to make someone feel their “otherness” : you say “tu” to them instead of “vous”. As you know, you’re not supposed to say “tu” to an adult you’ve never met before. And I remember as a child seeing adults say a condescending “tu” to immigrants from North Africa, just because they felt they could, that this person was not their equal, was below them. And I was shocked then just I am shocked now to hear someone being called “Arab” because she has curly brown hair. As if they had to be branded as immigrants for eternity because someone on their family tree left his country in search of a better life. And it’s often used with a veiled contempt.

And like white Americans conveniently forget that they brought black people in America, French people conveniently forget that they invited these workers in France at the time. We’d need a James Baldwin or a Toni Morrison to explore how we treat people with origins from North Africa. I think it’s a different racism, more frequent and differently rooted than the one towards black people. It’s probably because, like Americans have the shameful past of slavery, we have a shameful past of colonization, especially in Algeria.

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