Feasting on Notions of Racial Fixity
Tony Blair of England
Nikolas Sarkozy of France: "My new Kärcher works really well."
In 2005, Sarkozy, a candidate for French prime minister, said he would clean up the cités (housing projects) in the suburb of La Courneuve with a "Kärcher," an industrial cleaning machine.
German Army Officers
The traditional news media this week was like Black History Month but all in one day except this time there weren't the usual token classical liberal waves to a supposed homogeneous "Black culture" where every Black "hero" is portrayed as an exception: the one who overcame or pulled up her imaginary bootstraps despite economic forces.
Pablo Picasso Cités (projects) in Nanterre, West of Paris
Today the NY Times featured an article by David Reif ("Battle Over the Banlieues") on the housing projects (or cités) outside of Paris and Nikolas Sarkozy's infamous anti-youth, anti-immigrant discourse, particularly his affection for the word "scum" when referring to French sub-Saharan African youth.
The BBC featured a report on a German army officer "caught on tape" where an instructor told a soldier to imagine, "You're in the Bronx, a black van pulls up in front of you and three African-Americans get out and start really insulting your mother... act!".
Besides, of course, the Don Imus debacle (as if we'd expect anything less from someone whose notoriety is based on racialized, gendered and classed notions of difference), today the Guardian featured an article reporting that Tony Blair "claimed the spate of knife and gun murders in London was not being caused by poverty, but a distinctive black culture."
Most interesting and disappointing was the feedback of some members of the general public who commented on columnist Claudia Webbe's response to Blair. What drew the most ire to Webbe's "A Kick in the Teeth from Tony Blair" was the subtitle of her article: "The black community carries no blame for the violent crime that afflicts it - no matter what the prime minister says." Click here for the article and feedback.