Burkinis accepted: for a poor woman scrubbing France’s floors

Hassan Ammar/AP/Press Association Images. All rights reserved.The legendary African-American novelist James Baldwin once noted on his trip
to France, in 1949, the extent of violence “Paris policemen could do to Arab
peanut vendors.” The crime of an Arab, it seems, was to be visible, and
therefore it was safer for Arabs to be invisible, with the help of the French
authorities – be it through the prison cell or the ironing out of their
cultural distinctions in the public sphere.

Yet I have always found it quite peculiar, this French manner of
discriminating against the visible in order to make them invisible – often the
people France needs the most.

My encounter with French racism and hypocrisy came about when I stayed at a
bed and breakfast in northern Paris in the autumn of 2009. I was hosted by a middle class lady who, during one chilly October morning over breakfast,
told me about her work in art/decor and went on to disclose her politics
as “left and progressive.”

Yet soon enough she was mouthing racist statements against Arabs (apparently
I was the “civilised” Arab that would be sympathetic to her rants). She then
moved onto specifics, abusing Algerians, and lastly Muslim women who wore
the veil. The only “concession” she could make was that French colonialism had brought its “subjects” back in the form France has to deal with today.

Before I could reply, she had to leave for work in a hurry. Exhausted
from her conversation, I sat back at the breakfast table, in a beautiful 1850s
apartment from the Baron Haussmann era, trying to wrap my head around
all she had said (I usually hear bigots out to the end, and try to
deconstruct their line of thinking).

At that point, I heard the echoes of Arabic singing
reverberating through the courtyard of the building’s interior. I peered
out of the window to see a group of Algerians/Moroccans fixing the broken pipes. I
gazed down at them despondently, saying to myself: “How utterly sad France is. Many
of you are the backbone of this country. The French need you but don’t want to
see you.”

This set off a series of questions that I started to ask Arab residents of
the city, making careful observations of the race relations they encountered.

There was something haunting and disturbing about the necessity and
invisibility of these workers. This shed some light on French hypocrisy and
their craven need for cheap labour that often comes out of France’s thriving
shadow economy, that mutually complements the official economy, which is
populated with immigrants, their descendants, and refugees.

The French need Arabs for service and maintenance, but only when such
Arabs are doing this out of sight.

The French need black Africans in restaurants, but as long as they are in
the kitchen and not the ones serving the customers (more than enough East
Europeans to do that).

The French don’t mind the poor Muslim woman who is veiled as long as she is
scrubbing their apartment and office floors on her knees but God forbid if her
kind were to invade French recreational spaces and attempt to be an equal on her own terms.

The Burkini was a non-issue elevated to a political and identity war. It
took a non-issue to expose, once again, the hypocrisy of France’s ideals and its understanding of both liberalism and feminism.

The poisonous sting of hypocrisy will not only consume the
intended target – Arabs and Muslims. But it sets irreversible precedents
and opens up pores in the nation’s body politic to illiberal infection from all
directions.

Hatred never runs on
rational thought, it is irrational and all-pervasive, and will seek new targets
once it exhausts its initial victims.

The rise of the far right is one obvious example, but they are just one
manifestation of a larger ominous current that is yet to come. One should never
think that the xenophobic tide will stop at Arabs and Muslims. Hatred never runs on
rational thought, it is irrational and all-pervasive, and will seek new targets
once it exhausts its initial victims.

Supposed liberals and feminists are not only aiding and abetting in
this assault, but are conducting a grievous self-harm that will see their
legitimacy undermined, value system compromised, and ethical standards
dismantled. The consequence is that it will leave them vulnerable, in a
worst-case scenario, to French anti-democratic political forces that will seek
their destruction or cooptation. French history is already a testament to such
undesirable possibilities.

When Baldwin was imprisoned in Paris for an unintentional petty crime (he used the bedsheets that his acquaintance had stolen from another hotel!), he
observed that, unlike the other lifeless clay-like prisoners in his cell,
the “North Africans, old and young… seemed the only living people in
this place because they yet retained the grace to be bewildered.”

The woman on the beach in her human quest to be visible, had the grace,
understandably, to be bewildered. A large swathe of your citizens are
bewildered, France. The world is bewildered, France.

This piece was first published on 25 August 2016 on Amro Ali's blog.