Here’s a marvelous, blistering piece by Zineb El-Rhazoui in reply to the December 2013 one by former Charlie Hebdo editor Olivier Cyran saying CH was racist. Seth Ackerman at Jacobin translated it. Zineb el-Rhazoui is religion editor of CH.
She learned from Cyran’s piece that she’s a racist.
Being of French citizenship, I was anxious to identify, before the malady could advance any further, which races were likely to activate my white-woman antibodies.
She flips sarcastically through many possibilities, then zeroes in on the real one.
I didn’t have to make it far into the piece to be reassured that his diagnosis was more precise: my racism, thank God (that idiot), is only aimed at Muslims, and I contracted this dangerous syndrome from the editorial staff of Charlie Hebdo.
An occupational illness, then. Since Olivier Cyran is himself a veteran of the shop, though I never had the pleasure of meeting him — since he had the luck, and the balls, according to him, to get out before the infection could spread through the paper — I’ve decided to address him as tu, since we use tu among colleagues at Charlie.
Olivier, you start from the premise that the Muslims of Azerbaijan, of Bosnia, of Malaysia, Egypt or Burkina Faso, represent a single whole that can be designated as a “race.” Well, it so happens that that’s the one I belong to. The fact that I’m an atheist, and proud of it? It makes no difference, since you don’t ask us what we think; you talk about racism, and therefore race. I won’t keep beating around the bush, since I don’t doubt for a second that, like me, you perfectly understand the distinction between a religion and a race. If you make this lamentable conflation, it’s because you engage in a sociological fallacy whose origins lie in the demography of France: our Muslims are most often those we call “Arabs.” I’m sort of starting to understand why you speak of racism. But let’s try to be precise: we’re not talking about the Arabs of Lebanon, who are rarely encountered in the French projects, nor the persecuted Arab Ahwazi minority of Iran, whom nobody in France talks about, and certainly not the Arabs of Qatar who keep Louis Vuitton in business. No, you’re talking about the “Arabs” of North Africa — and here again, it so happens that that is the “race” from which I spring. Moreover, for your information, those “Arabs” aren’t always Arabs. The best-informed people in France know that they are Berbers, a word of Greek origin, “Bearded,” which refers to us Amazighes, Imazighen — Free Men, as we like to call ourselves. I am thus triply qualified to dispel the obvious confusion you manifest when you identify those you claim to be defending: the Muslim race.
We’re all (or most) sick of hearing “Islam is not a race!” from Bill Maher or Richard Dawkins, but hearing it in that style with that panache from a French citizen of Berber origin who is also a woman and an atheist and an editor at Charlie Hebdo – that’s not so boring.
Among the individuals that you assign to this racial category, there are militant atheists like me, obviously secularist (laïque). There are atheists who have other fish to fry, they are secularists too. There are atheists who love Charlie Hebdo and support it; others less so or not at all. There are agnostics, skeptics, free-thinkers, deists; they are secularists as well. There are believers who are non-practicing but politically Islamist, practicing but secularist, or even those with “no opinion,” whose daily lives do not suffer because of Charlie Hebdo. There are converts to Christianity — and oh, are they secularist, for they’ve endured the terrors of theocracy in their countries of origin. And finally there are the fundamentalists (intégristes), the militant Islamists, the adherents of an identity defined above all by religion, and those are the ones you have chosen to defend. Those are the ones who, given the reality of French laïcité, have no other choice than to cry racism, a tear in their eye and a hand on their heart, on the pretext that their “religious feelings” have been mocked by a drawing in Charlie. Among them you will find many who stand for laïcité in France but vote Ennahda in Tunisia, who do their shopping at a Parisian halal butcher but would cry scandal if a misfit decided to open a charcuterie in Jeddah. Who are outraged when a day care center fires a veiled employee but say nothing when someone they know forces his daughter to wear the veil. They are a minority. But they are the standard to which you have chosen to align the identity of all of us.
Enough generalities, which I didn’t think a man of the pen needed to be reminded of. If I’ve taken up mine to answer you, it is not solely to defend myself from racism, but above all because in my journalist’s memory I have rarely resented an opinion column as much as I did yours. If you will allow an “Arab” to address her own complaint, let me tell you that your rhetoric and arguments are the most sophisticated variety of racism that exists in France. Rare are those today who would risk shouting from the rooftops,”Ragheads Out!” The extremists who would do so would immediately be jeered by you, by me, and by a majority of the French people. First of all, you quote Bernard Maris, Catherine, Charb, Caroline Fourest. What about me, what about me! You preferred to omit my name, when it was my articles that you pointed to as dangerously “Islamophobic,” thus, according to you, necessarily racist. Frankly, I wondered why , and I see only two options. Either you didn’t want to let Charlie Hebdo‘s detractors (who can only subscribe to your thinking if they never read the paper) know that the author of these racist ravings belongs precisely to the Muslim race. Or you simply didn’t think that, as a person, I was worth naming, since in a fascist rag like Charlie I couldn’t be anything but the house Arab.
Wow. I want to be her new best friend.
That’s only the beginning; read on.
That’s a powerful article.
That’s really good stuff.
So, what’s going on with the charges of racism against CH? It can’t just be random stupid – there is a reason for it, I just don’t know what it is. Is it the same kind of faux liberalism that makes certain atheists try to put A+ off the table because it would force them to actually, you know, believe something? That’s what it seems like to me, a subconscious strategy that allows certain people to feel superior both to the violent extremists, and their pathetic “racist” victims.
Of course dismissing CH’s speech as “racist” rather neatly captures it, un-freeing it. Game, set, match.
Marcus@2:
My view is that it’s part of the theocratic agenda (see also the Pope’s recent apologia for religious violence) — they are happy to protest the killings at Charlie Hebdo so long as they get to blame Hebdo itself, because that way they get to (A) pretend to be anti-violence while (B) upholding physical punishment for blasphemy.
That’s how so many theo-friendly autocrats could turn up at the Charlie Hebdo rallies with a straight face. They’re only against religious violence when it’s vigilantism; when it’s part of the tools of state, they think violence is a good thing.
Meanwhile, I ran across this:
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2015/01/16/turkey-erdogan-continues-move-away-from-west-blaming-paris-attacks-on/
Apparently Erdogan is trying to weaponize the “No true scotsman” argument. Maybe this is where the “CH are racists” trope comes in – blaming “the west” and its decadence for bringing violence on itself.
So ‘Islam is not a race’ is somehow LESS TRUE, when Dawkins or Maher say so?
That’s not what I said, is it. I said it’s LESS BORING when someone like Zineb el-Rhazoui says it, and that most or all of us are sick of hearing it from Dawkins or Maher.
There are reasons for that, after all. A snotty tweet is one thing and Zineb el-Rhazoui’s article is quite another.
@2 – Marcus
It might be mostly about whether it’s okay to offend Muslims with pictures of Muhammad or not. But I took one of their other controversial images, a picture of Taubira, France’s black justice minister as a monkey, and analysed it. I should perhaps mention that I have a degree in art history/history and I used techniques for evaluating visual imagery which belong to that field. The image has a very complicated backstory I won’t go into, so briefly:
a) anyone coming to the image without the backstory, especially from another culture can really only see it as racist BUT it was an image which was supposed to only be diffused to those who did have the backstory: the French at the time of the event in question.
b) more damning is the way the image is structured. Centrality and scale are important in giving viewers the main subject of an image – everyone who works with the visual arts knows that perfectly well. Charb (the cartoonist) made the racist depiction of Taubira large and central, so that lots of viewers automatically responded to it as the subject of the image – even in France in 2013. He made the elements which attribute the racist depiction to the Front National and criticize the FN small and peripheral, placing them where they are not the first thing the eye sees. So although he could claim his cartoon was anti-racist in content, he was deliberately capitalizing on the shock value of the racist image. I would call that a highly questionable practice, at the very least.
Anne Fenwick:
How so “questionable”?
Why? Should a racist image instead be presented timidly, in pastels, with discretion, when the goal is to undercut it?
This line from the article absolutely jumped out at me. I mean, it’s perfect.
Anne Fenwick – Why is it questionable? Don’t you think that making the image “in your face” racist was the point? The cartoon says, without subtly or euphemistic presentation, that this is FN racism. This is what it looks like. It should shock and appall the viewer. That’s the point.
. So although he could claim his cartoon was anti-racist in content, he was deliberately capitalizing on the shock value of the racist image. I would call that a highly questionable practice, at the very least.
You mean kinda like the way Dave Chappelle uses the word “nigger” a lot in his performances, to capitalize on its shock value and to discomfit people like myself who were raised with the idea that you never, ever, use that word because of its horrible history of past wrongness? Like that?
I don’t think that anything needs to come with a dissertation on its interpretation, or it’s failed communication. But, then, I’m more a fan of Banksy than Eco, if that makes any sense.
@ 8-11 = I don’t know David Chapelle but that’s close to how I was going to explain it. It’s like screaming a racist insult in the headline of an article, and explaining that ‘so-and-so said that, aren’t they racist?’ in the body of the text underneath. Exploiting racist imagery to titillate the audience and attract attention (as clickbait, essentially) does tend to undermine the criticism of its existence.
I suppose that’s fair enough. It just happens to be one of the things I do. But how can you label anything racist or not racist unless you interpret it?
Of course, you don’t know that “exploiting racist imagery to titillate the audience and attract attention (as clickbait, essentially)” is what they were doing. You just really really really want to insist that CH is racist, so you frot up an interpretation until it works.
I’ll tell you why I think SOME* of CH’s cartoons are racist. A picture of a black woman’s head on the body of a monkey is blatantly, glaringly, conspicuously, absolutely racist. Yeah, I’ve read the excuses and apologetics that “you don’t understand French culture and/or how satirical that cartoon is supposed to be.” I don’t buy it. There’s no tap dancing or hand waving or bullshitting which will convince me that a obviously racist cartoon isn’t racist. In short, while CH may (that’s MAY) have been trying not to be racist with that cartoon, they failed. It’s racist.
*”Some” is a word which means “not all of.” I give this definition because certain people seem to think that “some” means “every one.”
It’s not “excuses and apologetics” and it’s not “tap dancing or hand waving or bullshitting.”
Epic essay, and translation too. Marcus, you asked in #2:
El-Rhazoui offered a reason: Fear of being called a racist, under The Art of Muzzling Criticism:
My personal antidote to that fear is Lenny Bruce in How to Relax Your Colored Friends at Parties. This is one thing Penn Jillette got right by citing Tony Hendra’s book Going Too Far (because Jillette can’t be all-wrong, all-the-time; nobody is that good). Hendra’s book is about the anti-establishment versus the establishment, but it applies equally to liberals versus conservatives, and other divisions. Every camp has its foibles and is subject to satire.
Al Dente @14, have you seen the original FN image of Christiane Taubira as a monkey here? Do you think that FN image is off-limits from satire?
Al Dente @14 – I don’t know what you mean but “excuses and apologies” but do you know the context of the drawing? CH didn’t just pull it out of their asses.
That’s plainly false. The words “RASSEMBLEMENT BLEU RACISTE” are in large text directly above the drawing, and you don’t need a degree in art history (which I also have, by the way) to see them.
And by the way, as I mentioned in my post, when drawing the “It’s hard to be loved by jerks” cartoon, Cabu bled the text of “Mohammed, overwhelmed by Islamists” into his headgear to make it that much harder to separate the image from the text and claim it was calling all Muslims jerks. People with an agenda still did it, but you can hardly claim he didn’t work to obstruct racist readings.
Yes, I’ve seen the original. As I said before, no amount of apologetics will convince me that a cartoon showing a black woman’s head on a monkey’s body isn’t racist. I understand that this is a minority view and everyone else thinks it’s great satire. I don’t. I see both FN’s pictures and Charlie Hebdo’s cartoon as being racist. I’m willing to accept that the cartoonist may not have intended the cartoon to be racist but I believe he failed.
Al Dente:
In other words, you’ve been asserting, not arguing. Repeatedly.
I note you refer to “showing a black woman’s head on a monkey’s body”, so clearly you imagine depicting that image verbally is fine to make a point, but doing so pictorially is racist.
(Also, your faint concession is duly noted)
Hang on, it’s not the case that everybody else thinks it’s great satire. I’ve said about nineteen times over the past ten days that I don’t like CH’s style of cartooning, because it’s ugly and crude. I’ve said that that style can look like racism when it isn’t. I’m not at all convinced (I don’t think I’ve said this part) that that cartoon was a good way to satirize the racism of the NF, and I’m even less convinced that the Boko Haram one was.
I just don’t think CH is racist.
And to repeat: I would like you to stop calling it “apologetics.” I won’t label what you say that, so how about reciprocating.
@Al Dente #21
Nobody is arguing that the image isn’t racist.
The image is being explicitly attributed to the right-wingers who that week had compared her to a monkey..
I don’t know why everyone thinks that my opinion about CH’s racism is such a wicked and uncouth thing. I look at a particular cartoon and the first, second and fifty-seventh thing to enter my mind is “that is a racist picture.” Somehow this makes me a double-plus ungood person. Yes, I understand the cartoon is in reaction to FN’s undoubted racism. Yes, I understand that Christiane Taubira doesn’t object to the picture. I even understand that holding an opinion about this particular cartoon results in me being a failure as a liberal atheist since I’m someone who doesn’t accept that CH is the epitome of all that is great about satire.
You all have your opinions and I have mine. I can’t convince you about the racism of the cartoon and you can’t convince me that the cartoon isn’t racist. I’m not going to say anything more about this topic.
@John Morales #22
It’s like the visceral reminder that people really think that way, and wish to legislate accordingly, is as bad, or the same kind of thing as, the fact that people really think that way and wish to legislate accordingly.
Except that I don’t think CH is the epitome of all that is great about satire. Their satire isn’t my style at all. I just don’t think it’s straightforwardly racist full stop.
[meta]
Al Dente:
You really see the situation in that light?
I assure you I merely think your opinion as ideologically-blinkered and simplistic; certainly not wicked or uncouth. And we’ve co-commented over years now so I hardly think of you as ungood to any degree.
(Nor do I think others have thus characterised you, either)
So you don’t dispute that you imagine depicting that image verbally is fine to make a point, but doing so pictorially is racist.
Fair enough.
Jeez, Al Dente, climb down off that cross. Nobody thinks you’re double plus ungood or a failure as a liberal atheist or anything like that.
But how can you label anything racist or not racist unless you interpret it?
I interpret it. Without requiring a manual of pseudintellectual gobbledeygook. Because, if something is intended to be understood, it should be understandable; that’s the essence of effective communication. It’s not fair to say “Well, if you knew this obscure such-and-such about whatever then you’d see this exactly the opposite way” which is basically what you said. If someone wants me to agree with them, the burden of getting me to understand is – unfortunately for them – theirs.
So…
Back when I was a student in art history, I wrote a paper that was a critical analysis of the art and politics (and artistic politics) of the Italian Futurists.
A few years later, I learned (can’t remember how or where) that one of the analyses in that paper was mistaken. Because I was ignorant of one genre of Italian painting (which would certainly have been known to the Futurists’ audience), I had completely misinterpreted one of their paintings. My professor hadn’t called me out on it and it didn’t fundamentally affect my thesis, but it was a lesson in intellectual humility. It made me realize how much I don’t know, how ignorance about a work’s artistic references can throw off an interpretation, and just how easy it is to go wrong. And that was before I realized how many people have an interest in actively misrepresenting art and artistic motives.
This was humbling, and it concerned artists who were long dead. In the case under discussion here, we’re talking about people who were just murdered and their surviving colleagues, who can be directly hurt by misinterpretations and misrepresentations. Some art historical and intellectual humility is in order.
I don’t know why everyone thinks that my opinion about CH’s racism is such a wicked and uncouth thing.
I don’t.
I think I mostly agree with you; if CH uses a woman’s head on a monkey’s body and expects me to think it’s not racist because I am expected to be abreast of French popular culture and the activities of the French right wing they’re wrong. It’s the failure mode of clever, basically,
And by the way, some of that humility could come in the form of actually engaging with the article that was the subject of this post.
Erm, that that image was published in a French magazine, for French people.
Wait, is everybody all over the world supposed to make sure that everything they say or publish can be understood by Americans? I thought we leftists were against cultural imperialism?
@Al Dente
I guess I may be a little bit dull, but I’m all the same somewhat puzzled by your insistence that Charlie Hebdo’s cartoon is racist. For example, do you make sentence “gobshites in FN think that black people are animals” have a racist meaning? Because, for me, I find the sentence to be more or less analogous with what I take to be the cartoon’s intended message.
Does having a one element which does by itself have a racist meaning make the entire cartoon -or the written sentence containing the part “black people are animals” I contrasted it with- racist? I’m afraid don’t really get it. Charlie Hebdo’s cartoon might be essentially repeating what the paired photographs a certain FN candidate chose to put in Facebook were about, but isn’t the cartoon’s crudeness meant to amplify that as to give a good look of the underlying dehumanizing sentiment and point how the whole thing really wasn’t just about the candidate making some ultimately harmless mockery? Perhaps it’s a very basic lesson to give but apparently it’s still quite needed.
I would like to point out that I’m not a native English speaker so I wish to apologize should I’ve somehow made this post hard to read.
I don’t know why Cyran left el-Rhazoui’s name out of the article, and neither does he. Other than that, and one quote that is salutary, his article does little to address any point Cyran made.
It was so rich to read el-Rhazoui cry ad homenim when he made his article about who he was, and not his arguments, from start to finish.
Zineb El-Rhazoui is a woman.
LOL
Okay, my mistake. Any reply to the substance of my comment?
Very good read, indeed.
It seems to me that this boils down to whether or not it is okay to use racist imagery to criticize racism. I have conflicted feelings about that…or more generally, using -ist imagery to criticize -ist things. Splash damage is a real thing and it shouldn’t be dismissed.
markerickson, Cyran left out her name because erasure of women of color is a thing that is done all the time. That he didn’t even bother to acknowledge her is racist and misogynistic. He doesn’t give a shit what she thinks.
Kellyw, you are not a mind reader.
There was no substance. It was simply a false characterization based on what had to be the most superficial reading of the article imaginable, illustrated pointedly by your failure to recognize that the author was a woman, a fact that was discussed repeatedly throughout the article itself and should have been abundantly clear from Ophelia’s post. You’ve given no indication that you can recognize a substantive argument or distinguish it from a baseless assertion, and there’s no reason for anyone to waste time providing you with more to misunderstand.
This will likely be my only response to you.
Should suffice.
markerickson, I don’t have to be a mind reader. This happens all the fucking time. That you don’t know this is unsurprising given that somehow you attributed the article to a dude, despite numerous references to Zineb el-Rhazoui’s gender by Ophelia and Zineb el-Rhazoui herself. You either didn’t read this post or the link or are engaging in the same erasure that Cyran did.