Stéphane Charbonnier in the Toronto Star in 2013 said firmly that Charlie Hebdo is not racist.
Charlie, our Charlie Hebdo, is feeling decidedly ill. Because an unbelievable lie is going around, among more and more people, and we hear it every day. According to them, Charlie Hebdo has become a racist sheet.
One day, an Arab taxi driver tells someone who works for the paper, whom he recognizes, to get out of his car – supposedly because of images mocking the Muslim religion. Another day, someone refuses to do an interview with us because he “doesn’t speak to a newspaper full of racists.”
We’re almost ashamed to recall that anti-racism and a passion for equality among all people are and continue to be the founding principles of Charlie Hebdo…
Mockery of religion does not equate to racism. Yes, it can be used as a proxy or stalking horse for racism or classism or xenophobia or other kinds of othering and hierarchy-policing. It can, but it needn’t, and it’s not right to treat the two as simply interchangeable.
Charlie Hebdo is the child of May ’68, of the spirit of freedom and insolence… The Charlie Hebdo of the 1970s helped to form the critical spirit of a generation. By mocking the powers and the powerful. By laughing, sometimes uproariously, at the ills of the world. And always, always, always by defending the human individual and his universal values…
It remains to understand why. Why has this ridiculous idea been spreading like a contagious disease? We are Islamaphobes, claim those who defame us. Which means, in their own kind of Newspeak, that we are racists. That’s how this backward thinking has won over so many people.
Forty years ago, it was considered obligatory to jeer, run down, even crap on religion. Anyone who set about to criticize the way the world was going could not fail to question the great power of the biggest clerical organizations. But according to some people, in truth more and more people, these days you’ve got to shut your mouth.
And yet, what could be less legitimate than the power of religious institutions? What could be more elitist and authoritarian and mystification-mongering than deriving authority from an absent god?
Charlie still devotes many of its cover illustrations to Papists. But the Muslim religion, imposed like a flag on innumerable people across the planet, as far away as Indonesia, must somehow be spared. Why the hell? What is the relationship, unless it’s just ideological, between the fact of being Arab, for example, and belonging to Islam?
We refuse to run away from our responsibilities. Even if it’s not as easy as it was in 1970, we’ll continue to laugh at the priests, the rabbis and the imams – whether that pleases people or not. Are we in the minority on this? Maybe, but nonetheless we are proud of our traditions.
That’s an example right there – in English*, the word “Papists” has a terrible ring: it sounds quasi-racist. But in France, of course, where Catholicism is the majority religion, it wouldn’t. As a Yank, I would never say “Papists” but I do say god-botherers; the strict meaning is fairly comparable.
Now, obviously, Charb wouldn’t have said “yes, we’re racist, so what?”…but then again he did say “yes, we bash religion, so what?” so maybe we really do get to take him at his word.
*outside Ireland, at least
It’s too bad he’s no longer available. I for one would be FASCINATED to hear from this middle-class white gentleman how the CH cover depicting Boko Haram’s sex slaves – victims – as toothless shrieking welfare queens was Not Racist.
This thread has an attempt to defend it: http://www.quora.com/What-was-the-context-of-Charlie-Hebdos-cartoon-depicting-Boko-Haram-sex-slaves-as-welfare-queens
I read a few such defenses, and every one of them takes the tack that CH mocks everyone and/or “actually has far-left pro-immigration policies”. “They aren’t ALWAYS racist” and “They support immigration!” are neither arguments against instances of racism, nor do they excuse things like that victim-mocking cover.
That cover was a riposte to the right-wing and racist depiction of refugees as “welfare-queens.”
And do not sneer at the murdered editor of CH as “this middle-class white gentleman.”
Did he somehow retroactively become not a middle-class white gentleman because he was brutally and tragically murdered?
Of course he fucking didn’t, which has nothing to do with the fact that I don’t need you sneering at him for it on my blog.
Something I just posted on another forum, in (my approving) response to the Star article:
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I’ve seen multiple pieces complaining that Hebdo’s brand of satire was guilty of “punching down,” of attacking people (i.e., poor Muslim immigrants within France) who have far less power than the Hebdo producers themselves did. But the lack of attention within these analyses to the reality of overwhelming religious power and privilege just drives me up a wall. Can it really be disputed that extremist Islamists—including the ones who just murdered Stephane Charbonnier and several of his employees—actually have a huge amount of power over the lives of millions of people? How is mocking brutal thugs on precisely those grounds “punching down”?
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I think the alchemy involved in that conversion mostly comes from religious privilege, from the notion that religious people have an inherent right to demand that no one else speak ill of their beliefs, ideologies, and heroes. Thus open disrespect of religion—religious ideas, characters from religious mythology—becomes “racism,” “hate speech,” “Islamophobia,” and the like. Making rank-and-file believers unhappy by criticizing their ideas or violating their taboos is converted into immorally injuring, and indeed into broadcasting base hatred of, those believers. Even setting aside the deep misrepresentation and injustice of that move, the pragmatic result of it is little different from a flat-out blasphemy code: certain ideas and figures are exempted from challenge (criticism, dispute, mockery) just because those ideas and figures have been declared Exempt. (And, to return to the “punching down” point, that very declaration requires, and demonstrates the existence of, religiolatrous power.)
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Charb and his magazine were obviously fervently opposed to that kind of religious privilege. So, frankly, am I. I think blasphemy is a good and valuable thing, and vastly more so in a context in which real people who possess real political power are all too eager to silence it.
Yes, it’s too bad this man was just viciously murdered along with his colleagues, because now he’s not here to respond to your ignorant, obnoxious demand. Honestly, is there some sort of virus going around that causes people to become callous assholes?
Hi Ophelia, have you seen this? I want to say false-equivalence, that Muslims today aren’t in the same boat as Jews in the 1930’s – being over a billion of them and lots of power, but I’m not sure.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/ng-interactive/2015/jan/09/joe-sacco-on-satire-a-response-to-the-attacks
I think Sacco’s full of it. As was noted in Salty Current’s (terrific) post from Wednesday, Hebdo’s work is emphatically not targeted at Muslims writ large (“tweaking the noses of Muslims” is Sacco’s irritatingly soft euphemism); I think it’s frankly offensive to analogize it to racist depictions of Black and Jewish people. Hebdo mocked Islamists and Muhammad, not Muslims.
Once upon a time, openly impious treatment of other revered figures—Christian ones, as well as more-or-less secular political leaders—was rewarded with brutal violence in the same parts of the world that are now brimming with Je Suis Charlie avatars. More recently, though, in those same places people have somehow figured out ways to get over their offendedness without demanding the death of, or even (at least severe forms of) social sanctions upon, the people who dare to attack their sacred cows.
I hope and trust that there are millions of Muslims who are not in fact, as Sacco puts it, “unable to laugh off a mere image”… but to the extent that he’s right, he’s highlighting a social change that very much needs to happen. His implicit solution—that we do the theocrats’ work for them by censoring from our expression images (and inevitably arguments, and identities, and…) that offend these same people—is flatly untenable. His pretense that the only alternative to living under de facto blasphemy codes is “dri[ving offended Muslims] from their homes and into the sea” is ludicrous.
It’s fascinating to me how many self-identified rational people seem to be twisting themselves into knots claiming that racist, misogynistic caricatures are somehow magically NOT THAT ANY MORE because of the murders.
Intent is not magic. Why is it suddenly magic post-mortem? Why is the big cloud of “You’re not X, you don’t understand” and “These members of Oppressed Group say it’s okay, so shut up” valid this time, but not any other time? Why, exactly, is this the one time ever that it is RIGHT to take the word of a white guy when he says “I’m not racist, but…”?
And why are you behaving like my criticizing their work, speech criticizing speech, is somehow akin to thinking they deserved it?
Yeah that’s not what’s happening, abbeycadabra.
Many here have interalized this “Intent is not magic” comeback to the extent that they could seemingly justify any misinterpretation/misunderstanding as being the actual truth, no matter the original speakers intent, and no matter how obvious that intent may seem.
There are such things as misunderstanding something, especially when you are ignorant of critical context.
Here’s the reality, abbeycadabra. You are ignorant on this subject, and have misunderstood the cartoons.
Your criticism of them is flawed and your sneering at the murdered editor is callous and shameful.
Also, I for one never say “intent isn’t magic,” so brandishing it here falls kind of flat.
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abbeycadabra to SC:
The behaviour is one thing, your interpretation of it another.
It was calling your demand ignorant and obnoxious, and you an asshole for making it in these circumstances. Ironically, it is your very protestation that suggests you’re apprehensive at being seen as “thinking they deserved it”.
Bluster.
I dare you to attempt to cite or quote a single one of those “many self-identified rational people” making that particular claim.
@ 10 abbeycadabra
Yeah, especially since your grief over this atrocity is so palpable:
@ 1 abbeycadabra
BTW, the answer to the rest of your #10 is at #2 and also earlier posts.
Rieux:
Yes. It also seems to rest on the erroneous assumption that Muslims (and nonbelievers and religious minorities in predominantly Muslim countries) don’t care about their own freedom of expression, so CH defending this right is meaningless for them.
And another thing…
And it makes sense this way – the same people so many claim to care about in that context somehow magically morph into moochers if they’re somehow able to get to Europe; seems like a comment on French hypocrisy. I’m not seeing how it would even work as an overtly or covertly racist cartoon, or why people would want to insist on such a strange interpretation even in light of knowledge about the publication’s mission. I mean, on the face of it the image seems to call for some other reading than “they’re showing these girls as welfare queens.” Wouldn’t that be weird?
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