France continues it's clusterfuck of Islamophobia

[poetic_pixie_13]

France bans public Muslim prayers

MUSLIMS will be banned from praying outdoors in France from today in the latest move by officials to remove Islam from the public sphere

Comments

[spyral_path]

Apparently liberte, egualite and fraternite only apply if you're ethnically French. I'm pretty solidly athiest, but I can't see how people praying and wearinf head scarves because that's what they believe in is offensive. As long as they aren't forcing me to wear a scarf or pray, I'm okay with it.

Do they not remember their history of colonizing North Africa? Complaints of being occupied by Muslims sound ludicrous in that context.

[stormqueen280]

I'm not even sure 'ethnically French' exists.

[astridmyrna]

It's like "ethnically American." Which basically means white. And not just any sort of white, but the royal stamp of approval white.

[doe_witch]

That's generalizing a bit much. To be ethnically French is indeed to be white and indeed to have mixed ancestry from several other ethnic groups- Celtic, Germanic, Roman, etc.- but that population has been around a lot longer than the Anglo-American population, so while I'm not a geneticist, I suspect there is more genetic diversity amongst Anglo-Americans than amongst ethnic French people. Additionally, the construct of American whiteness was developed along a specifically Teutonic/Nordic model which often excluded the French as ~Latin like Spaniards and Italians. Not that this has any bearing on the racism France is displaying here, but it should be noted that historically speaking, France's whiteness has evolved differently from whiteness in the US.

[doe_witch]

Ethnicity vs. nation can be used interchangeably but in this case and in many cases it's very misleading to do so. There is unquestionably a group of people who have lived in France for >1000 years as an increasingly concentrated gene pool derived from an original blending of Gauls, Romans, and Franks. If you don't want to call them "ethnically French" then that's fine; arguably "French" does indeed mean something now that has national rather than ethnic connotations. In some countries you will even find a linguistic distinction like that- for instance, in Russia you can call yourself either rossiskij (a citizen of the Russian federation) or russkij (having heritage from Rus' which became modern Russia

[doe_witch]

Ah, okay, now your comment makes a lot more sense to me! Yeah, all this stuff is definitely very complicated, in that I think those concepts like ethnicity vs. nation vs. citizenry etc. can be legitimately distinguished as discrete categories, but when some people use the same term to refer to any of them, the semantics rapidly get ridiculous- and things get sensitive. Semi-OT but I can't believe I didn't comment before: "ethnically American" shouldn't really have been mentioned here as white, nor should white American citizenry use that exact descriptor for themselves, 'cause uhm, the real ethnic Americans are the indigenous people who got to the Americas first.