Where Wokism Is a Oui Bit Different (Europe Series Part 1)

[Valin]

Real Clear Investigations

Richard Bernstein, RealClearInvestigations
December 28, 2021

First of Two Articles
Part 2: In Scotland, They'll Take the Woke Road

PARIS — Rachel Khan is a 45-year-old writer and actress, half Gambian, half Polish Jew born and educated in France, who was appointed by the mayor of Paris to be co-director of a cultural center called La Place, or The Place, dedicated to hip-hop music in France.  Then she became a target of the wrath of “le wokisme,” French version.

Khan, who was already well-known as a dissenter from the identity-politics orthodoxy on race and victimization, published a slim volume titled “Racée” — meaning racy, daring, but also a play on words — in which she lampooned the politically correct idea that to be authentically black meant that she had to incarnate a “woke” ideology.

“It's supposedly anti-racism, but in fact it's dogma,” she told me in Paris in November. “A black actress is supposed to be anti-colonialist. But just as I'm not obliged as a black actress to play a cleaning lady or a prostitute, I'm also not obliged as a black person to be 'anti-colonial.'”

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“Where is this racist school?” reads a public letter written by the protesting group of Bagnolet residents. “Where are these malicious teachers? Nowhere in reality, and we all know that.”

“To speak of the state and the schools as systemically racist is to declare war on the republic,” Marilou Brossier, a neighborhood activist, told me. “Never in a French school does one treat black children differently from white ones. This is what's directly related to the values of the republic. France is built on an idea of universalism, that each individual is a free citizen living in a secular republic, but the woke mania for identifying everybody as black, or Muslim, or whatever stands in direct contradiction to this fundamental principle.”