Flagrant racism in France

Every day, I run by the words “ISLAM HORS D’EUROPE” spray-painted on a wall by the marina. Islam Out of Europe, it demands bluntly. Anti-Muslim sentiments like this one can be seen all over France and throughout Western Europe. As an American, I find this kind of brute racism appalling. We definitely have our racial issues in the States, but we have also been dealing with them long enough to be out of this stage. Granted, I’m not sure if the elephant in the room type of racism that we do experience in much of America is any better, but in most of the places that I have lived (South Florida and New England), you would never see something like this splashed across cement. Someone might make a racist comment to a friend in passing, and we certainly have racial issues within our government, but that is not the sort of racism that I am talking about. I’m talking about overt, in-your-face racism. I am not making any judgments on it – it is far too complicated a situation for me to even begin to understand or analyze – I am simply making observations about what I have seen and heard around France, Belgium and Spain, the European countries that I know best.

In Europe, I have heard people- normal lovely people, even close family members –make horrendously racist comments towards Muslims, in private but also, surprisingly for me, in public and even in the presence of people from this background. There is no shame in it, and people are often surprised by my horror. Petty things, such as someone cutting you off while driving, are immediately blamed on Muslims, even if the blame is completely unfounded. Parents of European children would never allow their children to be friends with Muslim children (and I’m not sure if the same is true the other way around). My teenaged cousin in Brussels began dating a Muslim and she found herself shunned by her family and harassed by the police on a regular basis. I often receive racist chain mail from my European family and friends lamenting – no, berating – the rise of the Muslim population that has become so prevalent throughout Europe.

The truth is, I hear as much Arabic on the streets of Toulon as I do French, if not more. I see just as many halal meat vendors as I do traditional French bakeries. If I wanted to get a spa treatment in an Arab hammam, that option is available to me here. Veiled women pick their children up from school, stand in line with me to buy groceries, ride local buses and attend rugby matches with the rest of the city’s population. But yet, they stand apart, congregating together in the early evening to drink their tea at an Arab café in the old city. As of yet, I have not shared a conversation with an Arab during all of my time in Europe, and I am not sure why that is. They occupy the same space as the Europeans, but unlike in America with many of our own minority groups, they do not try to mesh in the least. Language is a big barrier, religion an even bigger one. The racist graffiti that I see splattered everywhere and the constant barrage of racist slurs that are the norm in these countries do not help to ease the tension, of that I’m sure.

There are so many sides to this story. Like I said, I won’t even try to analyze. I only want to offer my shock as I see and hear these awful things being slung at this population constantly – in the media, in the government, and more blatantly, on the streets of European cities. It makes me realize that, although we have a long way to go in our fight towards racial justice in the U.S., we have come a great distance already. We once had widespread segregation laws and our own set of normative racial slurs poisoning our country. Whilst these racist sentiments might still exist among a subset of our population - and sadly, I know they do – this is no longer the norm.

This overt racism is constantly visible each time I travel to Europe, and every time, I am no less taken aback by it. In the United States, we have developed a quieter kind of racism, the plague of political corrected-ness. I try to explain to my French friends that we don’t use the word “black” when describing people of color in the States. This perplexes them; they don’t understand the historical stigma attached to these words. They don’t share our country’s shame towards slavery and segregation. They’ve never experienced this as a part of their past, but they are living it as a part of their present. I don’t think they see the connection that I see; they don’t comprehend the reason why I am so appalled by the slurs they speak so nonchalantly. When I pass by that sign each day, “ISLAM HORS D’EUROPE”, I immediately envision those horrible and thankfully outdated signs declaring “whites only” allowed in a restaurant. I see visions of police turning powerful water hoses on blacks protesting peacefully with Martin Luther King on the streets of Montgomery. These are stories that are a part of our collective memory as a nation, and they make brusque displays of racism very hard for me to comprehend.

The truth is, Europe has been around for a very long time. The cultures of Europe as we know it today have developed over hundreds of years, and that history is a huge part of these people’s collective memory. It’s hard for an American to understand the kind of deep-set cultural heritage that exists here, since we are a newborn country in comparison. But this is exactly what the growing Muslim population threatens to destroy. I can understand the concern - honestly, I can. Europeans have worked a long time to develop the social systems that they have in place. As a whole, these countries have been around long enough to “get things right,” in my opinion. People generally live good lives. Lots of time for leisure, more than enough vacation time, equal access to health care, affordable education for all, a vigorous middle class – these are the things that are important to them, and they have worked towards them over the course of their history. These are also the very things that the increasing flow of Muslims are taking advantage of and therefore, destroying rather quickly. One can understand the anger. On the other hand, I’m a humanist. People are just people. It seems so backward to me to fault an entire population for the actions of a few, and even so, is this really the most productive way to deal with it?

Another truth that Europeans might not want to acknowledge is that Islam has been in Europe for hundreds of years too. This influx is not new. The tension has always been there. Don’t you think they would have found a better way to deal with it by now? Perhaps by, I don’t know, getting to know one another and working towards a peaceful existence together? But that’s just the idealist humanist in me talking. Carry on with your racial slurs and bigoted tendencies. They really seem to be helping the situation a lot.