Black activist Angela Davis struck off name of French school for views on ‘systemic racism’

Issued on: 05/07/2023 – 19:42

2 min

The conservative head of the Paris region, Valérie Pécresse, has accused the university professor and former Black Panther of having views that “feed communitarian feeling and can encourage violence”.

Speaking to a committee in March, the rightwinger also criticised Davis’s belief in the idea of systemic racism, which she denied existed in France, and said “a certain number of recent declarations about France pose a problem”.

She pointed in particular to a joint letter signed by Davis and other academics in 2021 which accused the French state of having a “colonial mentality” which was “manifest in France’s structures of governance, especially with regard to both citizens and immigrants of colour”.

On Wednesday, after months of disagreement with local teachers and the national education minister, Pécresse’s administration for the Ile-de-France region renamed the suburban school after Rosa Parks, another US civil rights icon.

It opted for Parks “in the absence of any new proposition” from the school’s administration, according to an amendment adopted by the rightwing majority of the region’s permanent commission.

The 1,200-pupil facility was opened in 2017 in the Saint-Denis area of northeast Paris, which is home to a large Black community, and was named Angela Davis by the school and the local mayor.

The move to strike off the name comes amid fresh soul-searching over racism in France, after the police killing of a teenager of Algerian origin sparked violent riots and accuations of racism by security forces.

Read moreFresh protests against police violence rooted in decades of harassment, inequality

Colour-blind state?

Education Minister Pap Ndiaye, a Black former academic and expert on race relations, opposed the move by Pécresse’s administration, telling her that “a lot of names of schools and education facilities are drawn from a vast range of references that don’t necessarily create a consensus”.

He cited Communist philosopher Karl Marx or Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin as examples.

Several other schools had already adopted the name of 79-year-old Angela Davis, Pap wrote in a letter in April. 

One such school, in a northwestern suburb of Paris, was damaged during the rioting that rattled France last week.

The idea of “systemic racism” – institutionalised discrimination against non-white people – is rejected by many rightwingers in France who see it as impossible in a theoretically colour-blind state that has “liberty, equality and fraternity” as its motto.

“In Angela Davis’s thinking there’s the conviction that racism is systemic,” Pécresse said in March. “This may be true in the US, it was certainly true in the US. But in France it’s false and this idea, which could be supported by minority groups, is really an attack on French republican universalism.”

Pécresse ran for president in April last year, scoring a humiliating 4.78 percent, but she remains one of her party’s best-known national figures.

(FRANCE 24 with AFP)