A response from Houria Bouteldja to the Open Letter from ‘100’ French Scholars, which singled her out for special mention.

France is no longer a light among nations.

Sartre, Beauvoir, Foucault, Deleuze or Bourdieu are from another era. As for the ultra-white elites who offer themselves as their replacements, they increasingly deserve the name ‘Pale’, as given by the Native Americans to their torturers. Their radiance, now reduced to the dim halo of waning lanterns at a funfair, impresses no one outside their cliques and courtesans. As Rokhaya Diallo noted recently, ‘thanks to the great marketing of a few white intellectuals, “the birthplace of Enlightenment” is sold as an example of peaceful coexistence devoid of all racial tension.’

Therefore, in a strange version of events that only they subscribe to – and which in many ways sums up their entire world view – a significant number among the intelligentsia in France is completely perplexed by the dismay expressed by international onlookers. Faced with the view from outside France, where there is little understanding of their devotion to the myth of French republicanism, and where secularist fundamentalism or the obsession with the veil are met with puzzlement, these French intellectuals insist that foreigners ‘do not understand our values.’ Anyone who dares utter the words ‘race’, ‘whiteness’, or ‘Islamophobia’ is accused of doing the work either of the extreme right or of Jihadists. And if one persists and goes on to mention racial discrimination or social Apartheid, the accusation is none other than treason to universalism!

The right of reply of which they availed themselves in openDemocracy in response to the Open Letter signed by many scholars justifiably worried by the appearance of a form of French McCarthyism within French academia, is a perfect illustration of this attitude…

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