PARIS. Meetings “without whites” to “free the word” of discriminated black people. This is the idea launched by UNEF, a French student union, which has already been the protagonist of many struggles on the left. “It can be a way to allow people affected by racism to be able to express what they are experiencing,” explained Mélanie Luce, president of UNEF. That was enough to create a controversy that has reached the government, with some ministers speculating to remove public subsidies from UNIF.
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The owner of the Instruction, Jean-Michel Blanquer, spoke of “racist” meetings in reverse, denouncing an alleged “fascist” drift of the student organization. UNIF had already come under accusation earlier this month for having spread posters that pilloried some professors of the University of Grenoble accused of Islamophobia. A gesture defined as serious by government officials, a few months after the attack on the teacher Samuel Paty who had shown Charlie Hebdo cartoons in class.
First there was the vice-president of UNEF, Maryam Pougetoux, who ended up under accusation for having appeared with a veiled face in a hearing in Parliament.
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A part of the left has been cautious on the case of non-mixed meetings until the reporter Audrey Pulvar intervened a few days ago. “Yes, whites can be asked to shut up every now and then,” said Pulvar, a socialist candidate for regional elections in Ile-de-France. “I am not offended that people discriminated against for the same reasons and in the same way feel the need to come together to discuss it,” he explained. “And if a white woman or a white man happens to be in this laboratory, it’s not about throwing him out, but he can be asked to be silent, to be a silent spectator”.
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The right is united in attacking the UNEF, calling for a ban on the union. Far-right leader Marine Le Pen threatened to file a racist complaint against Pulvar. The debate erupts close to the controversy over the alleged “Islamic-leftism” in French universities. The term, first used by the sociologist Pierre-André Taguieff almost twenty years ago, also mentioned in Michel Houellebecq’s novel “Soumission”, is a neologism that indicates an alleged political association between a part of the anti-racist and anti-colonial left and the more radical Islamic circles. The Minister of Higher Education, Frédérique Vidal, argued that “islamo-leftism” “makes the whole society gangrenous and the university is not waterproof”.
Vidal announced that he wanted to open an investigation in universities, asking the National Center for Scientific Research (Cnrs) to verify “what is academic research and what is militant”.
What frightens part of the government and some French intellectuals is an Americanization of France, on the wave of woke culture. “The white color of the skin, whether we like it or not, has entered the public debate, where, for example, ‘anti-white racism’ and ‘white thinking’ are evoked” notes the sociologist Michel Wievorka according to whom this imported movement from the United States it is very popular among the new generations and cannot be solved by banning the UNEF. Wievorka points out that non-mixed speaking groups have been around for a long time, from feminists to anonymous alcoholics. The sociologist downsizes the gravity of these groups forbidden to whites, provided that they are practices limited in time and that “they are not accompanied by the desire to renounce universalist values in the anti-racist struggle”.
The comparison with the historical struggles of women is also remembered by the intellectual Martine Storti. “In March 1976 – recalls Storti – the International Tribunal for crimes against women was held in Brussels, with almost a thousand participants from many countries. Only women”. Storti is less critical of the UNEF. “It doesn’t seem to me that meetings without white participation endanger the republican order which is most threatened by inequality and discrimination.” The feminist intellectual adds, however, that the UNEF should distance itself from “the decolonial ideology, which essentializes whites and non-whites, and considers Western modernity as inherently colonial, imperialist and racist”.
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