I was just 11 years old when we got our first color TV. I snuck by the doorway of our living room as my parents watched a French reporter standing, a foot deep in blood, sobbing as he described the streets of Srebrenica, a small Muslim city a “Christian” army had just emptied of its Muslim population.
I was just a few years older when the first bomb exploded in the subway in Paris, in a series of attacks meant to bring the Algerian Civil War to French soil — but had it ever left it, with its wake of colonial racism and religious and state-promoted violence?
I was 16 years old when we won our first soccer World Cup in 1998. The million-strong crowd on the Champs-Elysees sang the Marseillaise deliriously, as the faces of its team leaders were projected on the Arc de Triomphe, along with the words that would become France ’98’s unofficial motto: black-blanc-beur.
Zinedine Zidane’s smiling face rejoiced millions of French of Maghreban descendance, while Lilian Thuram’s unflappable force inspired thousands of young, black French citizens. They were the new heroes of a generation that was too young to remember Africa’s fight for independence, the negritude movement that reclaimed the African roots of French blacks or the massive and peaceful demonstrations of the 1980s that gave birth to the NGO SOS Racisme.
The United States had its midnight basketball program; we had soccer. For a blessed second, all of us forgot all the violence that had steeped the post-war period in France, as my country steadfastly refused to deal with its colonial past and present, and we aspired to the dream of a diverse and inclusive France.
For one blessed minute, this new generation really believed that France’s colors weren’t blue-white-red any longer, but rather black-white-brown.
I mull these events that happened over the course of my lifetime today, as I just learned that my roommate lost a high school friend in the Friday attacks. I think this over as I read superficial reactions on Facebook: angry anti-French posts and anti-Muslim rants. I brood over this — safely hidden behind my iPad — as I read the painful accounts of deaths in Lebanon and Kenya and look at the expectant faces of University of Missouri students who have decided to take their fate in their hands and debate freedom of speech. All of these events are linked, like all of us are.
Paris’ motto is fluctuat nec mergitur. It sways but it doesn’t sink.
Paris, the racially divided and yet multicultural city, will survive. It stands today, as it stood 70 years ago, bloodied, battered, but free. It stands with its brothers and sisters in Lebanon, Syria, the United States, Iraq, Kenya and other places where people are afraid and die just because of their skin color, their religion or irrational hatred spawned by the fear of others who are different.
Paris has lived through two fascists governments: one in the 1790s and one in 1940-1945. It has survived three revolutions, including one that left deep scars as it marred the walls of the city in blood in 1871. But it endured, and it thrived.
Paris will survive, just as New York did, and just as Beirut painfully and slowly survived its almost-destruction after many years of civil war. I have no doubt that human life endures, and that eventually, we start laughing again, smiling and singing — but what I question is how we stop this cycle of violence that links issues of race and religion. How do we go on tomorrow?
Yes, my home country doesn’t have a good track record with our Muslim brothers and sisters — just as it doesn’t have one with our Jewish population or our black community. And it is not likely to get better, as I have little hope that we won’t respond to violence with more hate rained upon the Muslims of France, as the extreme right wing stands to benefit from a wave of Islamophobia.
But violence calls on violence, and I want to reiterate here what I said this weekend.
Whether it is now or yesterday, as someone who strives to be an ally and wishes to thank allies of my community, I want to borrow that hashtag that our Muslim brothers and sisters shouldn’t be pressured to use to distinguish themselves from fanatics and say #NotInMyName.
It is not in my name that my government closes its borders or discriminates against people of color. It is not in my name that European countries will build camps to “house” refugees of whom they are scared. It is not in my name that people insult Muslims today, calling for the eradication of Islam to avenge Paris.
I cannot stand idly and say nothing. I am not afraid of Muslims, just as I am not afraid of any other people of color. I don’t need to be told that America will fight for us — I don’t need to be told that I should be afraid because I am not. I refuse to be.
Whether it is the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, or any Christian fanatic, they might try to tell you that you should be scared of anyone who prays to Allah or anyone whose skin color isn’t yours. They might attempt to convince you that you should punish the many for the crime of one; that the many shouldn’t be allowed the same rights as “us;” that they shouldn’t be left to live their lives; that they shouldn’t be let in. Fanatics might try to reduce this issue into one of “us” against “them.”
But I am here to tell you, as a French person who scrambled to learn the whereabouts of my family and friends on Friday, that in the pitch black darkness of this gripping panic, not once did I think that further discrimination, hate and violence were the answer.
I am here to tell you, whether it is sectarian, racial, private or state-promoted violence, that I am not afraid, that I stand with all of you, from Beirut to Syria, from Ferguson to Missouri. Even as here domestically our students of color are denouncing hundreds of years of state-promoted violence, and after we lost precious lives to a white supremacist in Charleston, and even as Kenya, France and Lebanon are still reeling from religious violence, I am proud of those who stand up to better the peace between people of all creed, color and gender.
You all are my heroes, and it is your cause I wish to further, not that of those who wish to silence peace or solve the many problems of mankind through more bombs and more policing.
There is one thing in my president’s declarations that I agree with: This is not a war of civilizations or races. It has never been, and in the name of democracy we should stop thinking of it this way.
A democracy that propagates cycles of injustice and uses power and punishment rather than reason and education isn’t worth fighting for. It isn’t one I recognize myself in, especially when it discriminates against my fellow human beings for their skin color or religious beliefs.
#NotInMyName
Anne-Caroline Sieffert GS can be reached at anne-caroline_sieffert@brown.edu.
