À lire, un article édifiant du New York Times – A Racial Awakening in France, Where Race Is a Taboo Topic – signé Norimitsu Onishi, publié le 14 juillet 2020. Morceaux choisis.

On ne naît pas noir, on le devient – « Growing up in France, Maboula Soumahoro never thought of herself as Black. […] It was only as a teenager – years after the discovery of Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, The Cosby Show and hip-hop made her "dream of being cool like African-Americans" – that she began feeling a racial affinity with her friends, she said. "We were all children of immigrants from Guadeloupe, Martinique, Africa, and we are all a little bit unlike our parents", recalled Ms. Soumahoro, 44, an expert on race who lived in the United States for a decade. "We were French in our new way and we weren't white French. It was different in our homes, but we found one another regardless, and that's when you become Black." »

L'influence américaine – « Besides fueling heated debates over racism, the killing of George Floyd by the police in Minneapolis has underscored the emergence of a new way of thinking about race in the public discourse in France, a nation where discussion of race and religion has traditionally been muted in favor of elevating a colorblind ideal that all people share the same universal rights. That ideal […]  is being challenged perhaps most vociferously by the many Black French who have gone through a racial awakening in recent decades – helped by the pop culture of the United States, its thinkers, and even its Paris-based diplomats who spotted and encouraged young Black French leaders a decade ago. »

La France raciste « à sa façon » – Even those Black French who have been inspired by the United States also consider America to be a deeply flawed and violently racist society. In France, people of different backgrounds mix far more freely, and while Black people occupy fewer high-profile positions than in the United States, like all French citizens they enjoy universal access to education, health care and other services. "When I consider both countries, I'm not saying that one country is better than the other", said Ms. Soumahoro, who has taught African-American studies at Columbia and now teaches at the Université de Tours. "For me, they're two racist societies that manage racism in their own way." »

Les voyages outre-Atlantique qui changent tout – « Pap Ndiaye – a historian who led efforts to establish Black studies as an academic discipline in France with the 2008 publication of his book La Condition Noire, or The Black Condition' – said he grew aware of his race only after studying in the United States in the 1990s. "It's an experience that all Black French go through when they go to the United States", said Mr. Ndiaye, 54, who teaches at Sciences Po. "It's the experience of a country where skin color is reflected upon and where it is not hidden behind a colorblind discourse." »

Il y a « trop d'immigrés » selon l'ancien ambassadeur de France aux États-Unis – « "Universality could work easily enough when there weren't too many immigrants or when they were white Catholics", said Gérard Araud, France's former ambassador to the United States. "But faced with Islam on one side and Black Africans on the other, this model has evidently reached its limits. And so the debate is that on one side is this universalism, which is a beautiful ideal, but on the other is how to say at the same time that, yes, it's not working." »

Rokhaya Diallo traumatisée par le Club Dorothée, puis parrainée par l'oncle Sam – Rokhaya Diallo, 42, a journalist who is also one of France's most prominent anti-racism activists, said she became aware of a shared sense of race only after she became an adult and often found herself the only Black person in an academic or professional setting. […] Like many people of her generation, she loved a children's television series called "Club Dorothée." But she could never forget an episode – a colonial trope – in which the host, a white woman, is boiled alive in a caldron by three Black men. […] Thanks to a US government program, Ms. Diallo, who founded an anti-racism organization called Les Indivisibles in 2007, visited the United States in 2010 to learn about "managing ethnic diversity in the US." »

Washington sème la pagaille à Paris – « Ms. Diallo is one of several high-profile individuals who took part in the US program, a fact that has contributed to fears, especially among French conservatives, of an "Americanization'' of French society. The US Embassy in Paris began reaching out to ethnic and racial minorities in France after the Sept. 11 attacks as part of a global push to "win hearts and minds." The embassy organized educational programs on subjects like affirmative action, a taboo concept in France, drawing nonwhite French audiences for the first time, said Randianina Peccoud, who oversaw the outreach programs and retired from the embassy last year. »

Une identité politique – « Another co-author, Rhoda Tchokokam, 29, grew up in Cameroon before immigrating to France at the age of 17. While her racial awareness emerged in France, it evolved in the United States, where she went to study for two years, watched all of Spike Lee's movies and discovered the works of Toni Morrison and Black feminists like Angela Davis and Audre Lorde. "When I started meeting Black people in France, I started broadening my outlook a little," Ms. Tchokokam said. "I still didn't think of myself as Black because that's a long process, where today I define myself as Black politically. Back then, I started becoming aware and when I arrived in the United States, it's in fact there that I was able to put it in words." »