I was expecting to find an account of why France is different and the roots of laicite. Instead I found a bunch of generalities. Like, sure, there might be a bunch of people who are anti-racist and anti-hijab (and to be sure I know plenty like that exist) but what's the point if you don't explain why they end up at that point of view. I know you don't like to talk about history but why even write this post then? Ends up feeling like a very tedious exercise.
I didn't talk about how France got to be this way because it's irrelevant to the limited point I'm making in this post, which is that some correlations between people's views that hold in the US don't hold in France and that it explains why people who lack the relevant context misread the situation. On this point, it's not just that there are "a bunch of people" who are both anti-racist and in favor of banning religious garments in schools. This would indeed not be very interesting, because in a country of 67 million, you're always going to find people with unusual combinations of views. It's that in France, such a combination of views is absolutely not surprising, because it's extremely common. In fact, among people who identify as anti-racist, a majority probably support the ban. Several of the founders of SOS Racisme, the most famous anti-racist organization in France, came out in support of the ban. (In fact, I think all of those who commented on the government's decision did, although the current president of the organization was ambiguous and said it should only be forbidden when there is no doubt the student wears the abaya for religious reasons.) I seriously doubt that you knew that and, even if you did, I sure as hell know that very few American liberals do and that most of them would be very surprised to learn it, even if I have also no doubt they'd quickly find a way to reconcile that information with their simplistic view of France.
The point is valid but you don't provide enough of the evidence to convincingly argue that it's true.
I actually don't think that the American conceptions of freedom of religion and freedom of speech are better than their French counterparts. I just think it's really tedious and awkward of you to make an argument that French politics and society is so different as to make direct comparisons inaccurate while largely avoiding talking about the entire content of what makes that the case.
Whether or not the American conceptions of freedom of religion and freedom of speech are better, they are certainly different in ways that are relevant to this issue. (I actually think that, on freedom of speech at least, the American conception is definitely superior, even if there is more to freedom of speech than legal protection and I think the US probably does worse on the extra-legal aspect.) It's true that I didn't bother to provide evidence for my claims about how correlations that hold in the US don't hold in France, but to be honest that's because I wrote this post quickly and didn't want to bother finding evidence for that claim, when anyone who is familiar enough with both the US and France knows that to be true. I agree that ideally I would have done so, but the fact that, as I note in the post, more than 80 of the French population supports the ban is already very telling on this point.
I'm sorry but whatever the merits of my post, if you think it's an exercise in whataboutism (which by the way is often perfectly justified, as I have noted on several occasions in the past), you clearly didn't understand it. I explain above in reply to wep, as well as in my reply to your other comment, what the point of the post was and it has nothing to do with whataboutism. And frankly I think it's already clear if one reads it carefully.
Who are you arguing with? You don’t link to anyone saying that this is like Jim Crow.
And from the coverage I’ve seen it seems that Americans do understand what’s going on in France, they just disagree with it and have different values. Nothing in this post was surprising to me as someone who gets his news about France from standard media sources.
I'm not talking about Americans in general but about American liberals specifically and of course they don't understand what is going on in France. I never said that anyone had literally called France a Jim Crow for muslims, but that it's the impression you often get about how they see the situation when you listen to them and, allowing for the fact that I was obviously exaggerating for effect, that's totally accurate.
I have literally never, not a single time, talked about this topic or more generally about immigration in France with American liberals without people making shockingly ignorant comments about the situation. For one thing, in my experience, they often don't even know the basic facts about the issue and, for instance, believe that France has banned the Islamic veil in public, which is of course false.
Just the other day, I was talking about this topic on Twitter when a well-known American journalist (who is otherwise very sensible) chimed in to say that muslims were "persecuted" in France, which he'd already done several times in the past. (I just noticed that he has since deleted his tweets on the topic, probably because he realized that he wasn't very well-informed on the topic.)
A few weeks ago, when I first pointed out that Americans were really delusional when they think the fact that the US is having an easier time with immigration than Europe was due to better policies and a more welcoming culture rather than the kind of immigrants they get, literally hundreds of American liberals lectured me by saying comically ignorant things about the mainstream discourse on immigration in France.
As usual, mainstream US liberal news outlets have neutral reporting on the issue that is often misleading in subtle ways though not shockingly so and mostly okay, but at the same time they're going out of their way to platform people who peddle a nonsensical discourse about it to the effect that France is engaging in "state-sponsored" islamophobia.
For instance, The Washington Post gave a column to Rokhaya Diallo, a French journalist who spends her time peddling that view and more generally commenting on French events through a US-type woke lense, despite the fact that her views are totally fringe in France. She was just hired to tell people who read The Washington Post what they want to hear about France and she's doing a very good job at it.
For another example, if you click on the relevant link in my post, you'll see a video by a French lawyer of Arab descent who explained that after the riots this summer she was interviewed by CNN and the host kept trying to get her to say that France was rife with racism, but she wouldn't so they just didn't broadcast the interview.
This kind of stuff is ubiquitous and I've had enough conversations with American liberals to know that their perception of French society on this kind of issues is completely warped. It's true that they have different values, but that's not all there is to it, as I explain in my post they clearly draw false conclusions from that because they assume correlations that hold in the US also hold in France and as a result vastly overstate the difference.
In particular, they really think that France is much more racist than the US and that racist speech is largely socially accepted here, but as I say in the post that's completely false. Racism is just as radioactive in France as in the US, but anti-racism takes somewhat different forms because the context is different. American liberals lack the necessary familiarity with that context, so they don't understand that.
I think part of the problem here is that you have a flawed model of the mechanisms by which the mainstream media affects most people's views that neglects the effects more impressionistic stuff in the media coverage has, but this reply is already long and I plan to write a post on this topic anyway because I think it's important and interesting, so I'll leave things at that for the moment.
Sure, and this projection is only for people who identify as Muslim so it assumes a non-negligible rate of religious attrition, but still it's true that in general people overestimate the speed of the process. France is a large country and demographic change takes a lot of time. There is also evidence that religiosity is decreasing rapidly in North Africa, so future immigrants from that area may not be very religious anymore, although it could be that the Muslim population in France will not be affected by this process and that we'll see a sort of reverse acculturation once future North African immigrants arrive in France.
Question is: would there be much less problems if those North African immigrants would not be muslim?
Closest example i can think of is Turkey and Greece, where similar people have recently (700y ago) gotten different religions. They seem to behave quite similarly despite that.
"the American media are more interested in promoting a simplistic narrative than in reporting the more complicated truth"
I found that this is true also of French media. I was in France during the recent riots and saw on TV one panel of middle class pundits after the other. There was virtually no reporting that gave a voice to the people living in the banlieues where the riots were taking place.
I'm not sure this is a best example to be honest, but to be clear, I totally agree that this is also true of the French media and didn't mean to depict them as better than the American media.
“I think the concept of Islamophobia is extremely vague”
Fine, I can helpfully define it in three words as “bigotry towards Muslims”.
There is an infinite set of modes of dress that the French state could prohibit. I am still none the wiser as to why the French state has chosen to ban a type worn exclusively by Muslims.
As admitted I have a limited understanding of French culture and society so I guess I will never know!
Your definition just replaced one vague concept by another. What counts as "bigotry against Muslims"? Violently assaulting Muslims in the street just because they're Muslims clearly counts, but most cases aren't so clear-cut.
As I already noted, in the case of the ban, the reason for the government's decision is that people think the abaya is a symbol of the oppression of women and that the people who wear are part of a broader political movement that promotes that. This isn't something regular Muslims in France wear and people who do tend to belong to a radical form of Islam that promotes various anti-social and dangerous ideas.
They are clearly right about that, by the way, but of course it doesn't follow that banning the abaya is a good idea. It may be counter-productive and, from the point of view of principles, I think it's tricky for the state to ban certain forms of religious and political expression in public schools when it forces people to pay taxes that fund those schools.
In any case, there is absolutely no doubt that, if a fundamentalist Christian movement with similar beliefs emerged in France, the government would not treat it differently. So is that "bigotry towards Muslims"?
Again, to answer that question, you will have to make your definition more precise. But I don't think it's very interesting or that it's necessary to discuss whether such a ban is morally wrong. I have no doubt that you can come up with a definition of "Islamophobia" on which this ban will come out as "Islamophobic", but that's just semantics and the question of whether it's morally wrong doesn't hinge on a decision about how to define vague terms.
More fundamentally, as I have already noted several times and as I explicitly noted in my post, this is not a question I'm discussing in that post because frankly I can't bring myself to care about this debate. This is why, as I have already explained and as I explicitly noted in the post, I didn't write a post about whether the ban was morally justified but about why, if you lack the relevant context, you will draw mistaken conclusions about French society from the existence of that ban, whether it's morally justified or not.
I understand that you would have preferred to read a post about another topic, but this is the topic I decided to write about, because the one you would have liked to read about simply doesn't interest me.
After reading your article I get the impression that Americans on the whole are more ethnocentric than western Europeans. American liberals probably more so than their conservative counterparts. Perhaps it's also a natural consequence of living in a nation which is hegemonic on so many fronts? Interesting read nonetheless.
I think it's probably true that Americans are somewhat more provincial than Europeans and, as you note, it's not particularly surprising when you're a citizen of the global hegemon whose culture is everywhere. But at the same time, I think French people are also very provincial and ignorant about the US to be honest, so I think this shouldn't be exaggerated.
1) French secularism is so peculiar that no one from outside could possibly understand; or
2) Cultural circumstances are so specific (even for relatively similar places as France and the US) that moral judgements about other cultures are impossible.
Either way I don’t think 1) is true and I don’t think that 2 is in any way scalable.
Otherwise I speak basic French, have spent time there (neither Paris nor tourist areas) and still don’t vaguely understand the rationale for legal prohibitions on Muslim dress. I understand US culture maybe 10x better than French but there are still things I don’t vaguely understand (guns, taste for massive vehicles) either.
So I’d honestly love to hear a rationale for French policy that doesn’t have Islamophobia at its root and I think you’re better placed than most to give one.
The point of this essay wasn't to provide "a rationale for French policy that doesn’t have Islamophobia at its root", so it's not surprising that you didn't find any. I think the concept of Islamophobia is extremely vague and that in practice it's often used as a cudgel to prevent legitimate criticism of Islam, so whether the government's decision can be explained by Islamophobia depends on how you define it exactly, but mostly I just don't find that question very interesting and it has nothing to do with the point I was making in this post. (The main reason why people support that kind of laws is because they see things like the Islamic veil and the abaya as backward symbol of oppression of women, think students who show up wearing those garments are making a political statement and, since they have a much more limited conception of freedom of religion and freedom of speech than Americans do, they think the state should not be neutral but clamp down on this stuff to some extent, at least in public schools. People can decide for themselves whether it's Islamophobic, but again they should keep in mind that we have done worse to Catholics in the past.) It's fine with me if you want to say that it's rooted in Islamophobia and there is nothing in my post that is inconsistent with that position. What my post criticize is the inference many American commentators make from the existence of that kind of law to the idea that, unlike the relatively tolerant and open US culture, France is rife with anti-Muslim bigotry and racism and that such things are socially acceptable here.
I was expecting to find an account of why France is different and the roots of laicite. Instead I found a bunch of generalities. Like, sure, there might be a bunch of people who are anti-racist and anti-hijab (and to be sure I know plenty like that exist) but what's the point if you don't explain why they end up at that point of view. I know you don't like to talk about history but why even write this post then? Ends up feeling like a very tedious exercise.
I didn't talk about how France got to be this way because it's irrelevant to the limited point I'm making in this post, which is that some correlations between people's views that hold in the US don't hold in France and that it explains why people who lack the relevant context misread the situation. On this point, it's not just that there are "a bunch of people" who are both anti-racist and in favor of banning religious garments in schools. This would indeed not be very interesting, because in a country of 67 million, you're always going to find people with unusual combinations of views. It's that in France, such a combination of views is absolutely not surprising, because it's extremely common. In fact, among people who identify as anti-racist, a majority probably support the ban. Several of the founders of SOS Racisme, the most famous anti-racist organization in France, came out in support of the ban. (In fact, I think all of those who commented on the government's decision did, although the current president of the organization was ambiguous and said it should only be forbidden when there is no doubt the student wears the abaya for religious reasons.) I seriously doubt that you knew that and, even if you did, I sure as hell know that very few American liberals do and that most of them would be very surprised to learn it, even if I have also no doubt they'd quickly find a way to reconcile that information with their simplistic view of France.
The point is valid but you don't provide enough of the evidence to convincingly argue that it's true.
I actually don't think that the American conceptions of freedom of religion and freedom of speech are better than their French counterparts. I just think it's really tedious and awkward of you to make an argument that French politics and society is so different as to make direct comparisons inaccurate while largely avoiding talking about the entire content of what makes that the case.
Whether or not the American conceptions of freedom of religion and freedom of speech are better, they are certainly different in ways that are relevant to this issue. (I actually think that, on freedom of speech at least, the American conception is definitely superior, even if there is more to freedom of speech than legal protection and I think the US probably does worse on the extra-legal aspect.) It's true that I didn't bother to provide evidence for my claims about how correlations that hold in the US don't hold in France, but to be honest that's because I wrote this post quickly and didn't want to bother finding evidence for that claim, when anyone who is familiar enough with both the US and France knows that to be true. I agree that ideally I would have done so, but the fact that, as I note in the post, more than 80 of the French population supports the ban is already very telling on this point.
It’s a massive unprompted exercise in whataboutery from a usually excellent writer.
I'm sorry but whatever the merits of my post, if you think it's an exercise in whataboutism (which by the way is often perfectly justified, as I have noted on several occasions in the past), you clearly didn't understand it. I explain above in reply to wep, as well as in my reply to your other comment, what the point of the post was and it has nothing to do with whataboutism. And frankly I think it's already clear if one reads it carefully.
Who are you arguing with? You don’t link to anyone saying that this is like Jim Crow.
And from the coverage I’ve seen it seems that Americans do understand what’s going on in France, they just disagree with it and have different values. Nothing in this post was surprising to me as someone who gets his news about France from standard media sources.
I'm not talking about Americans in general but about American liberals specifically and of course they don't understand what is going on in France. I never said that anyone had literally called France a Jim Crow for muslims, but that it's the impression you often get about how they see the situation when you listen to them and, allowing for the fact that I was obviously exaggerating for effect, that's totally accurate.
I have literally never, not a single time, talked about this topic or more generally about immigration in France with American liberals without people making shockingly ignorant comments about the situation. For one thing, in my experience, they often don't even know the basic facts about the issue and, for instance, believe that France has banned the Islamic veil in public, which is of course false.
Just the other day, I was talking about this topic on Twitter when a well-known American journalist (who is otherwise very sensible) chimed in to say that muslims were "persecuted" in France, which he'd already done several times in the past. (I just noticed that he has since deleted his tweets on the topic, probably because he realized that he wasn't very well-informed on the topic.)
A few weeks ago, when I first pointed out that Americans were really delusional when they think the fact that the US is having an easier time with immigration than Europe was due to better policies and a more welcoming culture rather than the kind of immigrants they get, literally hundreds of American liberals lectured me by saying comically ignorant things about the mainstream discourse on immigration in France.
As usual, mainstream US liberal news outlets have neutral reporting on the issue that is often misleading in subtle ways though not shockingly so and mostly okay, but at the same time they're going out of their way to platform people who peddle a nonsensical discourse about it to the effect that France is engaging in "state-sponsored" islamophobia.
For instance, The Washington Post gave a column to Rokhaya Diallo, a French journalist who spends her time peddling that view and more generally commenting on French events through a US-type woke lense, despite the fact that her views are totally fringe in France. She was just hired to tell people who read The Washington Post what they want to hear about France and she's doing a very good job at it.
For another example, if you click on the relevant link in my post, you'll see a video by a French lawyer of Arab descent who explained that after the riots this summer she was interviewed by CNN and the host kept trying to get her to say that France was rife with racism, but she wouldn't so they just didn't broadcast the interview.
This kind of stuff is ubiquitous and I've had enough conversations with American liberals to know that their perception of French society on this kind of issues is completely warped. It's true that they have different values, but that's not all there is to it, as I explain in my post they clearly draw false conclusions from that because they assume correlations that hold in the US also hold in France and as a result vastly overstate the difference.
In particular, they really think that France is much more racist than the US and that racist speech is largely socially accepted here, but as I say in the post that's completely false. Racism is just as radioactive in France as in the US, but anti-racism takes somewhat different forms because the context is different. American liberals lack the necessary familiarity with that context, so they don't understand that.
I think part of the problem here is that you have a flawed model of the mechanisms by which the mainstream media affects most people's views that neglects the effects more impressionistic stuff in the media coverage has, but this reply is already long and I plan to write a post on this topic anyway because I think it's important and interesting, so I'll leave things at that for the moment.
i am currently traveling around Europe, looking for someplace to settle down in.
France would be the natural choice since I speak fluent French and I really don't enjoy learning new languages
I don't see a future there, though, purely due to demographic reasons. The future of France belongs to Africa and Islam.
Someplace like Hungary or Poland makes much more sense for me. Really not looking forward ot learning Polish.
I don't understand what makes you think that way, the demographic projection of Muslim population seems reasonable: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-growing-muslim-population/
this link doesn't show a stable population
it shows exponential growth
Sure, and this projection is only for people who identify as Muslim so it assumes a non-negligible rate of religious attrition, but still it's true that in general people overestimate the speed of the process. France is a large country and demographic change takes a lot of time. There is also evidence that religiosity is decreasing rapidly in North Africa, so future immigrants from that area may not be very religious anymore, although it could be that the Muslim population in France will not be affected by this process and that we'll see a sort of reverse acculturation once future North African immigrants arrive in France.
Question is: would there be much less problems if those North African immigrants would not be muslim?
Closest example i can think of is Turkey and Greece, where similar people have recently (700y ago) gotten different religions. They seem to behave quite similarly despite that.
"the American media are more interested in promoting a simplistic narrative than in reporting the more complicated truth"
I found that this is true also of French media. I was in France during the recent riots and saw on TV one panel of middle class pundits after the other. There was virtually no reporting that gave a voice to the people living in the banlieues where the riots were taking place.
I'm not sure this is a best example to be honest, but to be clear, I totally agree that this is also true of the French media and didn't mean to depict them as better than the American media.
“I think the concept of Islamophobia is extremely vague”
Fine, I can helpfully define it in three words as “bigotry towards Muslims”.
There is an infinite set of modes of dress that the French state could prohibit. I am still none the wiser as to why the French state has chosen to ban a type worn exclusively by Muslims.
As admitted I have a limited understanding of French culture and society so I guess I will never know!
Your definition just replaced one vague concept by another. What counts as "bigotry against Muslims"? Violently assaulting Muslims in the street just because they're Muslims clearly counts, but most cases aren't so clear-cut.
As I already noted, in the case of the ban, the reason for the government's decision is that people think the abaya is a symbol of the oppression of women and that the people who wear are part of a broader political movement that promotes that. This isn't something regular Muslims in France wear and people who do tend to belong to a radical form of Islam that promotes various anti-social and dangerous ideas.
They are clearly right about that, by the way, but of course it doesn't follow that banning the abaya is a good idea. It may be counter-productive and, from the point of view of principles, I think it's tricky for the state to ban certain forms of religious and political expression in public schools when it forces people to pay taxes that fund those schools.
In any case, there is absolutely no doubt that, if a fundamentalist Christian movement with similar beliefs emerged in France, the government would not treat it differently. So is that "bigotry towards Muslims"?
Again, to answer that question, you will have to make your definition more precise. But I don't think it's very interesting or that it's necessary to discuss whether such a ban is morally wrong. I have no doubt that you can come up with a definition of "Islamophobia" on which this ban will come out as "Islamophobic", but that's just semantics and the question of whether it's morally wrong doesn't hinge on a decision about how to define vague terms.
More fundamentally, as I have already noted several times and as I explicitly noted in my post, this is not a question I'm discussing in that post because frankly I can't bring myself to care about this debate. This is why, as I have already explained and as I explicitly noted in the post, I didn't write a post about whether the ban was morally justified but about why, if you lack the relevant context, you will draw mistaken conclusions about French society from the existence of that ban, whether it's morally justified or not.
I understand that you would have preferred to read a post about another topic, but this is the topic I decided to write about, because the one you would have liked to read about simply doesn't interest me.
After reading your article I get the impression that Americans on the whole are more ethnocentric than western Europeans. American liberals probably more so than their conservative counterparts. Perhaps it's also a natural consequence of living in a nation which is hegemonic on so many fronts? Interesting read nonetheless.
I think it's probably true that Americans are somewhat more provincial than Europeans and, as you note, it's not particularly surprising when you're a citizen of the global hegemon whose culture is everywhere. But at the same time, I think French people are also very provincial and ignorant about the US to be honest, so I think this shouldn't be exaggerated.
2,000 words later and I can’t figure out if :
1) French secularism is so peculiar that no one from outside could possibly understand; or
2) Cultural circumstances are so specific (even for relatively similar places as France and the US) that moral judgements about other cultures are impossible.
Either way I don’t think 1) is true and I don’t think that 2 is in any way scalable.
Otherwise I speak basic French, have spent time there (neither Paris nor tourist areas) and still don’t vaguely understand the rationale for legal prohibitions on Muslim dress. I understand US culture maybe 10x better than French but there are still things I don’t vaguely understand (guns, taste for massive vehicles) either.
So I’d honestly love to hear a rationale for French policy that doesn’t have Islamophobia at its root and I think you’re better placed than most to give one.
The point of this essay wasn't to provide "a rationale for French policy that doesn’t have Islamophobia at its root", so it's not surprising that you didn't find any. I think the concept of Islamophobia is extremely vague and that in practice it's often used as a cudgel to prevent legitimate criticism of Islam, so whether the government's decision can be explained by Islamophobia depends on how you define it exactly, but mostly I just don't find that question very interesting and it has nothing to do with the point I was making in this post. (The main reason why people support that kind of laws is because they see things like the Islamic veil and the abaya as backward symbol of oppression of women, think students who show up wearing those garments are making a political statement and, since they have a much more limited conception of freedom of religion and freedom of speech than Americans do, they think the state should not be neutral but clamp down on this stuff to some extent, at least in public schools. People can decide for themselves whether it's Islamophobic, but again they should keep in mind that we have done worse to Catholics in the past.) It's fine with me if you want to say that it's rooted in Islamophobia and there is nothing in my post that is inconsistent with that position. What my post criticize is the inference many American commentators make from the existence of that kind of law to the idea that, unlike the relatively tolerant and open US culture, France is rife with anti-Muslim bigotry and racism and that such things are socially acceptable here.
Good job, Philippe.
I’m with you on this - . . . and on that.