Ope Pardon, No. 31: The Calm Con

Back in 2020, when protests (and yes, riots) broke out around the world following the murder of George Floyd, there was a prevailing media framing that folks in countries outside the U.S. were marching in solidarity with black Americans, in protest of American police violence.

There were voices at the time that attempted to assert that, actually, most of these countries had their own histories of police violence to protest, their own names in which to march. But as Americans we like to think the world revolves around us and other countries were happy to dodge accountability so the summer of 2020 largely went down as an American moment.

Which is just to say, when I moved to France, I thought I was moving to a place where the police were not the existential threat to black and brown people that they are in the U.S.

To be clear, I knew better than to think they were actively a force for good, but in conversations for the last two years or so, I have couched my abolitionist opinions in the caveat that they had heretofore been formed primarily by an American context and maybe — maybe! — they didn’t apply to the same degree in France.

It is now clear to me there was never any reason to limit myself.

Last Tuesday June 27 at 8:30 in the morning — a ridiculous time to do anything, let alone murder a child — a French police officer shot and killed a 17-year-old Arab kid because he allegedly did not obey their commands at a traffic stop.

I have spent much of the last week and a half trying to get myself properly up to speed on the situation, vis-a-vis police violence and racism in France. It’s not that I hadn’t had conversations about race or police violence with French people before, more than you might expect actually, but I was remiss to generalize too quickly. My knowledge is undoubtedly still incomplete, but I have acquainted myself with recent French history enough to feel comfortable speaking — and maybe more importantly, arguing — on the subject.

I knew, fairly early in the aftermath, that I wanted to write about what’s going on in this newsletter, but I’ve gone back and forth quite a bit on how and what I wanted to say. (And whether I should say anything, it’s all part and parcel for why I have taken so long to send this.)

At first, I thought I would take an explanatory angle on what happened, then an educational one on why. Translating or synthesizing everything I had learned so that you too could be righteously indignant about racism in France. This is still a little bit that.

But as the days passed and it became clear that life was moving on for those who chose and/or could choose to, and also that it kind of never really stopped moving for many, I thought it more interesting to write about that. About the con of calling for calm when it is already quiet.

​Because I could explain how last Tuesday police shot a kid named Nahel and he died. How they said it was because he continued driving his car after he was told to stop, how testimony from the two witnesses in the car claim that the car lurched forward because it was an automatic and he took his foot off the break as a reflex after one of the cops hit him several times with butt of his rifle.

How a 2017 law expanded the circumstances in which the French police are allowed to fire their weapon, specifically allowing them to shoot without needing the grounds of self-defense and also carving out the legal use of shooting someone specifically during a traffic stop for “refusing to obey.” How 13 people were shot on those grounds in 2022 and how, according to Reuters, the majority of people shot during traffic stops since 2017 have been black or Arab and how, according to France’s own Defenseur des Droits, black and Arab men are 20 times more likely to get stopped by the police for ID checks.

How a study found the French police to be the deadliest in Europe in “homicides by police shootings and during operations to maintain order” and the UN published a call on June 30 for the country to address “deep” police racism.

How the French government would like to blame video games or America, but this is very much a French thing, born of French history and French culture.

How French cops are to colonial troops what American cops are to slave patrols — that is, the direct evolution of an armed force designed to pursue the same aims, use the same tactics and maintain the same power structures. How two days after the protests began, French police unions released a statement declaring war on “savage hordes” and “pests.”

How the hordes and pests in question included the 6,000 people who showed up to the demonstration to support Nahel’s mother, and the 3,000 people who were arrested in the first week — many of them in their teens, in the street because they saw themselves in Nahel, now experiencing fast-tracked trials and facing inordinate jail sentences for petty crimes from an openly unsympathetic ministry of justice.

How the riots are about Nahel, but they are also about how in 2005 three teenagers ran into an electrical substation to escape the police and two of them died, the third suffered life-changing injuries. How it is about the riots that followed, the posthumous criminalization of the victims that followed, the weakening and worsening social support systems that followed, the utter lack of meaningful reform or reparations that followed.

How what initially seemed like unanimous condemnation of Nahel’s killer — “one bad apple” rhetoric, sure, but better than nothing — has since evolved into widespread support of the police, theoretically as a reaction to the “violence” of the “riots,” but more likely the reflection of latent racism that is getting less latent by the day.

How a good gauge of said racism is the fact that a Gofundme for the “family” of the cop raised 1 million euros in three days — 1.6 million from 85,088 donors by the time it closed. How the organizer Jean Messiha (the former spokesperson for Eric Zemmour, a far right figure most efficiently described as French Trump) has explicitly stated and donors themselves have explicitly stated that the fund is seen as a way not (just) to support his family but to show solidarity with the police and fund far right retaliation.

How there is real fear about how this will escalate for the thousands of kids arrested and charged with no knowledge of their rights, how the government will respond with stricter and more repressive laws (but of course not for the police). How this will affect job options and generally worsen cross-the-street racism for black and Arab people in France.

I could try to explain as well how most French people won’t even engage on the subject of race which makes it difficult to name this as a racist crime, the acknowledgment of which is the only possibly way to begin to understand how riots could be an appropriate response but the acknowledgement of which is at odds with the very foundation of French identity.

How the French like to believe racism doesn’t exist in France because according to their laws and census, race doesn’t exist in France. It is illegal to collect data on race, religion or ethnicity, therefore no French person has a race in the eyes of the state. You are either French or not.

How the scope of what is “French” itself is nonetheless heavily racially coded. How, for example, one of Zemmour’s key talking points when he ran for president in 2022 and received 2.5 million votes was that immigrants needed to give their children “French” names if they truly cared about being French and also that to understand crime in France you just needed to look at all the “not French” names on prison registries.

How even this is a game that French people of color can’t win: I saw a story of a woman whose brother is black and he was asked to show ID on his way home from school, but because his name was “too French” they assumed that his ID was fake or stolen.

And I would need to explain too how, of course, not all French people refuse to recognize race — the only reason I know anything about any of this is because of the French people I know or follow who are vocal about it. How they are often dismissively and condescendingly accused of having their minds corrupted by American thinking.

And were I to have explained all that, you would now know that, but on some level, you already knew that.

Or rather, you probably could have guessed the broad strokes because they are the same broad strokes that outline these conversations everywhere.

People will tell you its different here, and sure, there is contextual and historical nuance, but functionally, it’s not. The police kill non-white people with impunity and the broader public accepts it — supports it even — in the name of civility and calm because that is how these (our) societies have historically been designed to function.

Further, it is a cursed testament to how well they were designed that any conversation about what we’re talking about when we talk about calm elicits a contradictory cognitive dissonance.

Because there were riots after the video of Nahel’s death got out. Of course there were riots.

I say riots, but some people prefer the term revolts or uprisings because riots (emeutes) is a term that lacks the connotations of righteousness that accompanies revolts. I won’t argue that, or the fact that the label of riot — like looting — whistles at a certain pitch and no matter the dictionary definitions, there is a clear difference in how destructive civil action is described according to who is doing the destruction.

Even in the context of France, where protests are known for an acceptable degree of violence and an enlightened “people matter more than property” judicial response, there is a difference between those which are glamorized (nationally and internationally) as iconically French demonstrations of free speech and the will of the people and those that are written off as the unseemly expressions of emotion of the criminally-inclined, those who receive sentences of one year in prison for lighting a trash can on fire.

You could ask why people are throwing bricks at Apple stores instead of the ministry; or destroying storefronts in their own neighborhood — and you would get half a dozen different responses based on who you ask (though if you are asking the question, I doubt any answer would satisfy you anyways). Still the simplest explanation is: This is what gets your attention. This is what — maybe the only thing — that makes people pay attention.

In theory.

Because even as presidents, football players and police unions call for “calm,” there remains this irreconcilable paradox: It was never calm and it’s never stopped being calm.

What calm are we returning to? The calm of the week before Nahel’s death when the police killed 19-year-old Alhoussein and no one reacted? Or the calm of 2022 when they killed 13 people and it did not make the news?

But of course I am being flippant: We all know the calm Macron (or Mbappe) refers to is the calm that keeps Paris pretty and profitable, the calm that keeps certain people (mostly, but not exclusively, white) comfortable and conned into believing that whatever else may be true they are not the bottom of the totem pole and that must be right and fair because look how smoothly (calmly!) the world runs, just as it was designed to.

And that particular calm? These past two weeks in Paris? Honestly? It was undisrupted.

Yes, there were uprisings in many cities and neighborhoods across France and thousands have been arrested, but the reality is that for many (most, even) it never stopped being calm. Not to the degree it did during the spring retrait protests (which perhaps I should call riots if they were more disruptive to the calm of daily Parisian life).

I do not live in a particularly bougie part of Paris, but I do live in Paris proper, which puts me in a certain class, and I work in tech, which surrounds me with a certain milieu (my office is, I will note, probably 97% French), and I hang out with a lot of expats, which informs my sources of news. And across those three spaces, there has been (almost) no discussion of Nahel or the protests — neither politically or logistically. I am, of course, not guiltless here: I haven’t brought it up either.

There was a march yesterday in Paris for a different victim of police violence, a man named Adama, and 2000 people showed up even though the police had banned the protest. The brother of the victim was brutalized and choked out by cops much in the same way his brother was killed, he is in the hospital now and there will be another march next Saturday.

Still, I am hard-pressed to describe Paris as anything other than calm.

I do not really know what to do with this information. It doesn’t really feel like it’s my place to decide whether no reaction is better, worse or simply more honest than the temporary (?) enthusiasm for the cause showed by Americans after George Floyd’s death.

I spend about one night a week at this place in Paris called La Fleche d’Or. I originally found out about it through DDR research, but when I read their website I found that they have a pretty militant social and cultural mission. They organize a "pay what you can” lunch service during the week, and food and hygiene product distribution of the weekend. At night, they host all manner of events — debates, concerts, drag shows, film screenings, DJ sets — with a programming aimed at centering marginalized communities, especially queer and of color. Their website says explicitly that in case of conflict they do not call the cops.

It is also largely staffed by volunteers, which is how I got involved. Once a week, I (and sometimes Jack) greet people and accept donations and generally just hang out in the ticket office. Unsurprisingly, this is where I have heard the most discussion and learned the most about… all of this.

Last Wednesday, they were to host a fundraising night — concerts, art vendors, food, drinks, etc. — in support of the legal fund and lawyers who were doing pro bono representation for everyone (but especially the youth) who had been arrested during the protests. It got enough attention that it was picked up by conservative, centrist and far right news channels and they subsequently received enough threats they decided by community vote to cancel the party.

Before it got cancelled, a friend asked me what I was doing that week and I told him I planned to go to this party and then I would be at La Fleche again on Thursday because that’s the night I usually work. He made some comment about how I was a “Fleche d’or lover” for going so often.

I mean, yeah.

But it’s the only place I’ve found where the calm doesn’t feel like a con.

A couple things you can do from the U.S. if you are interested:

• I am not sure the timing on this (this newsletter may be too late) but you can report the GoFundMe for the cop on the grounds of it violating their terms of service > HERE

• You can donate to the legal fund to the lawyers representing the 3000 detained during protests > HERE

• You can donate to the Nahel’s family > HERE