In his editorial this Thursday, November 11, Paul Sugy returns to “wokism” and a surprising exchange that took place Tuesday evening between Laure Adler and Franz-Olivier Giesbert on the France 5 plateau.
It takes place on the program “C à vous” and Franz-Olivier Giesbert is invited to promote his book, Intimate History of the Fifth Republic. Among other excerpts from the book read on the air by the presenter Karim Rissouli, this one arrives, I quote to you: “I live in Marseille, the French capital of cosmopolitanism, a world city where I am happy and where I feel at home. .
But often when I walk to Saint-Charles station via La Canebière, my heart is heavy because, during the journey, I heard hardly anyone speak French. What will happen to our language? This does not seem to please Laure Adler, who interrupts the columnist in his explanations to express his disapproval with a loud noise. “Well it’s weird to say that Frantz, why are you writing this? »Wonders the former director of France Culture. Then suddenly, the coup de grace: “You are white what, and proud of it. “” There aren’t enough white people around you. “
You see, by putting a little of yours into it, it doesn’t take much to become a real little woke soldier! I immediately call Sandrine Rousseau to warn her that you have become a deconstructed man! More seriously: yes, this is the shortcut made by Laure Adler, and fortunately there has been a large enough number of Internet users for the past two days to underline how unfortunate her words are.
Now the sequence deserves that we dwell on it for two seconds. Why ? Because this exchange is emblematic of a speech of assignment to identity residence, which has seized a part of the chic bourgeoisie and which, however, each time we want to denounce it, seems to play hide and seek.
In France we have become accustomed to calling this movement “woke”, or “wokism”, following the Black Lives Matter movement which has the apology of this form of awakening of consciousness. The word had appeared in Erykah Badu’s RnB Master Teacher track. During the chorus, musician Georgia Anne Muldrow proclaims: “I stay woke” and, in an interview in 2018, she explains: “Being woke is definitely a black experience.”
But since then we have been explained that wokism does not exist, that it is a reactionary fantasy. Yet everything in this exchange between Laure Adler and Franz-Olivier Giesbert is symptomatic of this new dialectic.
We first find a notorious claim to distribute the good and bad points. Everyone is therefore called upon to justify themselves, even Comrade Giesbert: “why are you writing this, Frantz?” »Laure Adler launches at him.
Identity assignment then: FOG is a white man, so he thinks and speaks like a white man. Then comes the insinuation, which believes it discovers hidden intentions under the speech: the woke knows more than the others, he reads the underside of the cards, probes the kidneys and the hearts. FOG speaks of the French language, he is told that in reality he counts white people. And what does it matter if he protests vigorously!
Finally the coup de grace, the moral judgment par excellence, the verdict pronounced without jury or deliberation, without possibility of appeal: “it is tendentious!” »Laure Adler concludes. In the end, subject to combating the allegedly racialist thinking that she blames on her opponent, Laure Adler indulges herself in it by seeing whites and blacks where FOG only saw French speakers or not.
And by separating the camp of good from that of evil, it reestablishes a Manichean logic where one is either all white or all black. The court of wokism does not bother with nuances.
Because such a discourse is blind precisely to what FOG emphasizes, who feels a stranger in his own country because of the Republic’s renunciation to promote a policy of assimilation, and in particular of assimilation through language. It has been since June 16, 2011 that French skills are no longer appreciated for naturalization decisions, and it is regrettable.