Recovering Community: Part I

Remembering the Jungle at Jules Ferry

We know the scene; there is a gathering, and someone is telling a story. We do not yet know whether these people gathered together form an assembly, if they are a horde or a tribe. But we call them brothers and sisters because they are gathered together and because they ...
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Recovering Community: Part I

White European Women’s Rights

France’s Paradoxical Women’s Liberation

While Clinton ran on the notion that “women’s rights are human rights,” Le Pen’s slogan might best be summed up as “women’s rights are white European women’s rights.” Employing xenophobic rhetoric all too familiar to Americans under the Trump administration, Le Pen has become the face of contemporary French nationalism, ...
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A Burkini Removed and Secularism Exposed

France has apparently overturned its “burkini ban.”  This happened after images surfaced of French police forcing a woman to undress on a beach. It’s worth pausing to consider what secularism even means at this point. Secularism, at the level of the state, means setting public institutions and laws on a universalist footing ...
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A Burkini Removed and Secularism Exposed

Charlie Hebdo and the Appeal for French Context

White & Black Analytics

The attacks on the offices of the French satirical magazine, Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket in January 2015, during which fourteen people were killed, pose a specific problem for the white left. The call to contextualize Charlie Hebdo foregrounded a structurally white French context, in which people of colour ...

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A Postcard from France: A Canadian in Avignon

To provide some context for what follows: I live in France, in the small southern city of Avignon. My wife, Audrey, is French, but I’m not. I, like so many others here, am “an immigrant.” Recent events have made the last few days emotionally and intellectually complex. I’ve been, at ...

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A Postcard from France: A Canadian in Avignon

The Weird Global Media Event

It will be made of half-facts and one-and-a-half facts. And made quickly, as the desire for a media story quickly outstrips the reliable data. Certain corrections will later have to be made -- silently. It is only global in appearing to speak of a world; somewhere indifference reigns. But it does ...
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The Weird Global Media Event