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

[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).

I was just pointing out that if you're going to say "ethnic French" is similar to being "ethnic American," and if you're going to say that being "ethnic American" means someone is white, then some delineation between French whiteness vs. American whiteness is in order. It's really splitting hairs. If you don't think that white French people should be called "ethnically French" but rather "ethnically Gallic" or what have you, I actually like that idea myself, but then the comment you should really take issue with is the one I responded to that conflated ethnicity with nationality in the first place. In the meantime, it's of course perfectly reasonable for people in immigrant populations (POC or white) of France to identify as French and be called French.

[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.