Resistance to revolutionary love: The struggle to decolonise the republic

Dear Houria, it is wonderful to be in conversation with you. Your intellectual and political career are impressive when it comes to questions of decoloniality, race and gender—from being a member in the “Mouvement des Indigènes de la République,” to state reprisals, recurrent public attacks, law-suits, to an actual physical attack in 2012 by a member of the Jewish Defense League (JDL). All the while you continue organizing, speaking, writing, and publishing and have a new book out this year, called Beaufs et barbares–Le pari du nous. For this piece, however, I would like to focus again on your last book Whites, Jews, and Us: Toward a Politics of Revolutionary Love and extend the conversation into a broader context of academic politics in Europe today, the way women of color thinkers are perceived within these embattled power fields of male hegemony, and how all of this plays out against the backdrop of rising white supremacy in Europe (France and Germany alike). Another issue we were asked to comment on was the accusations of “Islamogauchisme” against the so-called “too liberal” pouches of academia. Do you agree that the so-called “Islamogauchistes,” those that are “too left-wing” and “too Islamist” at the same time, have taken over French universities?

I rather disagree with this statement which looks more like a form of panic than a reality. In reality, decolonial anti-racism has made considerable progress in society, but only a very small minority of the academic community takes these issues actually seriously. But this is seemingly already enough for the political and media class to say that this “trend” is a form of “colonization” of the university. This is completely absurd. It is, in fact, a manipulation of public opinion to prevent anti-racism from unfolding and ultimately to prevent non-whites from anti-racist and decolonial organizing: it aims at intimidating the decolonial and anti-racist support within the university and amongst their teaching staff.

Yes, it is indeed fascinating how an absolute minority in numbers, that is also marginal in terms of epistemologies and methodologies in the scientific world, can be portrayed as a “colonizing movement” that takes over the university. It is absolutely insane in the way that it fully inverts relationships of power and, thus, shows how threatened a white academic mainstream as well as social mainstream is by a radical decolonial critique: This persecutory white supremacist thinking portrays a minority as the conqueror, and the powerful as victims. Yet, I would like to know how you see your own role within that movement in France? Alana Lentin (2020) argues that the (French) state reins in on decolonial activism these days because autonomous voices of color take the “parole” in national debates. However, when they claim the right to speak and define the nation just like their white peers do, they come to represent a threat to the state and to who gets to make claims and statements about French culture or the French nation. Do you agree with that analysis? And how do you see the future of decolonial debates in a climate where the reality of power positions has been turned on its head and the powerful become the victims?

Alana Lentin is absolutely right. There is a moral panic among the ruling classes that view the participation of non-whites in public affairs with great suspicion. We are no longer subject to the norm. We want to help set the standard. As for the future, I think that it is necessary to think of the future on the scale of Europe and even of the entire West. It can be summed up in one question: which one of these two hypotheses will prevail among the whites - fascism or human emancipation? This question can only be answered by coming up with a positive outcome that includes whites and in particular the white working classes. For it is the white working class that will tip the balance either to the side of the fascists or to the side of a unity of the white and non-white working classes.

How was the work of Les Indigènes de la Republique received generally in France—can you give a re-cap? How did the so-called “white” Left, the anti-racist movements, but also media, politics and in particular academia respond to the work you all did?

Badly. But this was the condition for a transformation of the left, which today has a better understanding of the racial question and how it links up with class.

So the way racism plays out in France is by stigmatizing the Muslim as enemy, which in turn serves as an antidote to white class conflicts. Let's stay with the antidote for a moment: In your work you are however also making use—as you say—of the concept of “decolonial feminism” as an antidote to “white feminism.” And then you interestingly say you are also not fully convinced of the utility of “decolonial feminism” either. Instead, you make the compelling argument that choosing “feminism” is a matter of for women of color in the Third World or in poor neighborhoods in Europe. In your analysis, class and gender intersect and you cite Assata Shakur (1981) to get your point across: “We can never be free while our men are oppressed.” For you it is predominantly class, that determines if women can choose freedom or if they will be crushed again by either white patriarchy or by indigenous men-of-color patriarchy. And then, at the end of the “We, Indigenous Women” chapter, you call for the “neutralization of violence” in the testosterone-laden virility of the indigenous and Black male, in order to orient that virility toward a project of common liberation. I am curious to know more about how this “neutralization of violence” as an antidote can happen and how we can enter the stage of a common liberation. You suggest it happens through “respect” and here my scepticism comes in: Why start with “respect” and how do we get to a society where people “respect” each other, if respect itself is already conditioned by the psychosocial borders the history of material inequality has engrained in us—for men, women and queer folk alike?

I would like to clarify that I do think white feminism has a certain coherence: in a context of white domination, white women oppose a real patriarchy that structures the entire society and is embodied by men who have real power—in this case, notably bourgeois white men. Among indigenous or postcolonial communities, however, Black or brown men who reproduce white patriarchal violence because they inherit a mandate of masculinity from birth do not necessarily also have power, be it social, economic, political, or symbolic. They are, in fact, the repositories of a powerless masculinity that finds a way out through violence or self-destruction. In this respect, I understand the need for indigenous women to struggle, as women, against patriarchy. But it is important to understand that this struggle must first and foremost target white supremacist patriarchy, of which indigenous patriarchy is only a pale product (or reproduction). The question, to my mind, is strategic: if women attack indigenous nonwhite masculinities that are already heavily humiliated, they end up provoking and increasing male violence tenfold. On the other hand, if indigenous women show that they have understood the source of male violence—namely, white supremacy—then they can divert indigenous male energy to confront the perpetrators of that white supremacy. This is what I call “neutralizing the violence” that usually, without political outlets, falls on women and children. This experience has already been carried out in working-class neighborhoods. It is by recreating community links — in other words, by refusing the war of all against all encouraged by the state—that women gain respect. From a white feminist point of view, this strategy may seem unsatisfactory, but the social context does not allow poor, nonwhite women to mobilize infinite resources. They are objectively limited in their choices.

And neutralizing that violence is quite a lot of emotional and physical labor, but it can also be very dangerous. In your work, you are thus drawing a picture of a world of and in violence, from where you theorize. In this picture, violence is imposed via circuits of unequal material social relations that transcend nation-state borders. In a way, again, that is very Fanon (1968), and similarly you remind us that a world cannot be thought of, or acted upon, without taking vertical and horizontal violence or internalized violence into account. This is opposed to a lot of epistemological work from the so-called West, where topics such as reconciliation, nonviolence, and repair become keywords in discussions that attempt to hail from the present to the past and then “back” to the future without us ever having had a really honest and historical conversation about violence and injustice to begin with. And, connected to these phantasmatic “reconciliation and healing” discourses, some people would also counterargue that not every violent action by “indigenous males” is influenced by white supremacy. How would you counter that, especially in relation to “neutralizing the gendered and adult violence” that you describe?

White supremacy is not associated with a culture or an identity but with a system. What I mean here is that it is the capitalist mode (and all that it entails in terms of competition and competition of all against all) that is structuring. And gender relations are no exception to this. This is what it means to claim white supremacy is the source of this violence. It is not to deny that there was patriarchy in Muslim and other societies before. The indigenous patriarchy of today is above all a modified form of the original patriarchy that has gradually merged with white patriarchy. It takes on the face of Islam, Africanness, and subaltern cultures. But it only prolongs and confirms white patriarchy and its domination. It's also important to note the way that the problem of indigenous male violence is framed is very much to do with white supremacy and racial and class solidarity. In France, the elite relate very differently to the sexism of those at the top than they do to the sexism of those at the bottom. We mustn’t forget that white patriarchy structures French society. Gender violence and wage disparities are getting worse in France. The elites do not care. Let's recall the almost unanimous support for Dominique Strauss-Kahn, the former minister of the economy and IMF director accused of multiple rapes. Those apologists for him and those like him suddenly become feminists when the perpetrator is Black or Arab.

This particular racial marking of difference if the perpetrator is Black or of color have also been the main pillars in the works of Fanon, obviously, but also other Black radical thinkers like bell hooks, Shakur, Baldwin, and many others. Now, you say that “certain of our men slip on a white mask. They don’t wear it well. It disfigures them for life.” Can you explain what you mean by disfiguration? Is it Black and Brown men “getting rid” of women of color when they find better (sexual) grounds or opportunities? And how do you think that disfigures them? And does it really “disfigure” them as you state? According to Fanon (1952), gendered and sexual bonding with whiteness (white cis-/hetero-/women in this case) for those men means to secure a better (transnational) class status as well. Is that what you were trying to say? And that that upward mobility through whiteness disfigures?

By “wearing a white mask”, I meant that nonwhite men, in order to escape the stigma of “being violent” or of being “the man with the sex knife” ¹ try to improve themselves, to civilize themselves according to white criteria, effectively to become whiter. But they are prevented from escaping that stigma. Indeed, on the one hand, society expects them to be men, to work, to start a family, to protect their wife and children, according to the patterns of the patriarchal family, the schema of which is always evolving. But indigenous men are victims of endemic unemployment due to racial discrimination, and in a much higher proportion than the average in most countries, for instance. Or they find themselves in very precarious labor conditions that prevent them from realizing their “dream.” It is those men who are most often involved in petty crime and in prison. This is why it is wrong to say that they succeed in their own whitening. They are not allowed to be fully virile indigenous men because that shocks and endangers “good white society,” but they are not allowed to be white either. They are in a dead end. The whitewashing proposition for women is more real and feasible. Sure, women are confined to precarious jobs, but they are more successful at university. I am profoundly aware of the toll on women, and I know that my argument on this point invites a lot of opposition, but I still believe that in the Western world today, the competition between the genders is mostly at the expense of men of color.

Yes, that argument does indeed invite a lot of critique because it troubles an often all-too-easy conceptualized victimhood of women. Here, I would like to bring in an example from Germany, where a young Palestinian German woman, Nemi el-Hassan, was denied a job as a TV moderator for a children's science show, because according to the public opinion of some journalists, she is an Islamist and anti-Semite. The moral universe of white supremacy judged her, as a women of color, differently, for sure, but I wonder if the position of women isn’t equally precarious to that of men of color, but precarious in a different way. El-Hassan for instance was slandered in articles and misinformation campaigns by mainstream tabloids and right-wing policymakers — and even after these networks of misinformation campaigns were be made public, it did not change anything of the decision made, the allegations blasted out, or the misinformation published. El-Hassan lost her job no matter how many articles were written in her defense. A destruction without asking for proof can be done to brown bodies, because whiteness seems to embody or carry with it “truth” whereas non-whiteness is “suspicious” and “tainted.” It seemed to me, however, witnessing that spectacle around el-Hassan, that a man of color with her background would have had a harder time to even get that TV offer in the first place. Our society already filters out male of color subjects, especially when it comes to public positions where (public) education and opinions might be involved. To my mind, this is very often based on an assumed propensity to aggression or violence - in other words, they are actually filtering out “male of color anger,” which seems even more threatening than the anger of a woman of color, which can still be seen as effeminate, hysterical, and irrational. And I was again shocked - why I don't know - by the zeal and righteousness of the attacks on her, which to me resembled an almost “innocent joy” of destroying the Other in public. Men of color are however usually “destroyed” without society trying to even appear as “innocent” about it—a male body already invites and also justifies the violence imposed on him, for a woman, and in El-Hassan's case too, the Hijab (which she formerly wore and has since removed) was mobilized as a signifier to mark her as “not innocent” enough and thus as a justified target for public violence.

I am a nonwhite woman myself, and I am well placed to know that “uneducated” women are subjected to vilification campaigns and untold media violence. My point is not to deny these facts, because globally all indigenous people are subjected to structural racist violence. My point here is not to give in to a kind of feminist claim in which women are the absolute victims at all times and in all places. I have written in several articles that women ultimately pay the price of the racialized male condition. I'm speaking from a decolonial perspective that seriously takes into account male gender oppression. I'm talking from a perspective that does not consider, always and systematically, women as the ultimate victim. For me, gender relations among racialized people in the Global North are dialectical. Consider state violence—and not domestic violence. In France, it is objectively men who suffer the brunt of state violence (prison and police brutality). In the United States, where Black men and boys are disproportionately criminalized and incarcerated, Black feminists show us that this violence against males should be understood as a war against Black communities. Women holding together families in the absence of fathers and brothers and sons have to pay a particular kind of price and carry a particular kind of burden. It is similar in France. Moreover, not all indigenous women experience the same intensity of violence from white society. A veiled woman suffers far more violence than I do. The reality is obviously contrasting and dialectical, but my feeling is that non-white men are in a certain sense at the bottom of the racial and social scale. This feeds into their bitterness and hostility toward the women in their environment. That is why I say that women at the bottom are experts in this situation and generally avoid exacerbating the gender war. They are like the deminers able to prevent bombs from detonating, and this is what white feminism does not understand.

You read the violence inflicted by men of color inflicted on their own communities and women then as an act of hostility brought about by white supremacy and indigenous patriarchy. Is that why you also say you have “come to prefer big fat machos who own up to it” over the others who “reform themselves at the behest of white people.” I do understand the dichotomy and predicament you are describing, and I understand it as an allusion to a structure rather than a statement of truth. However, if men of color are confronted with “castration” by white societies, how can they deal with their social, personal, and political dehumanization without taking it out on the women, queers, and children in their communities?

The subject of “castration” is related to identity. And you’re right—stopping violence against the community members you mention requires addressing the dehumanization of the heterosexual men in those very same communities. As long as there are no political opportunities, prospects for the emancipation of indigenous people, or constructive solutions toward the abolition of race as an oppressive social category, such violence will persist. In terms of the debate over the resurgence of the hijab in France, we have an oppressed community (indigenous Muslims), asserting, within the framework of white supremacy, values that the white and feminist Left defines as “anti-progressive.” This is not, in and of itself, problematic. It is the colonial and postcolonial context that gives meaning to Muslim women's affirmation of their identities. The resurgence of the hijab comes after a long colonial process of division of the social body, which created or widened a rift between brown men and brown women. And women are not passive in the reaffirmation of identity that the hijab represents. For me, all this means that both parties—indigenous men and indigenous women—have a common interest in the hijab. And it actually relates to your question about how indigenous male violence against community members could be neutralized. Part of my answer is that it can be neutralized by the reaffirmation and consecration of the male gender is made possible by the hijab. To be clear, I'm not making an apology for the veil. Depending on the context, it has multiple meanings. I am speaking in the specific context of French Islamophobia. Only within the context of Islamophobia has this reaffirmation of the hijab by Muslim women, as everyone knows, been fought by the French state through Islamophobic laws and the repression of Muslim women. This onslaught has also been buttressed by ideas of social liberalism and supported by the (white) Left, as well as an important fringe of the indigenous or postcolonial French population.

In the chapter, “We, Indigenous Women”, you say: “In a society that is castrating, patriarchal, and racist (or subjected to imperialism), to live is to live with virility.” This statement is a fundamental critique of what bell hooks called a system of “imperialist, white-supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.” When we believe what you say, or what bell hooks says, then that means that only by attaching ourselves to such imperialist, white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy and its many modes and figurations are we able to circumvent castration, live virile lives. Indeed, “living with virility” becomes almost a mantra, a slogan and a public PR stint interpellating subjects and marking success in society. My question then is, can we be virile otherwise, too? Can we—in this system—live virile lives outside of the framework of white-supremacist patriarchy and capitalism? Or do you think that the person that steps out of this framework (in practice) is either “not understood,” “misinterpellated,” or simply not seen by society, as Butler would argue? What is the political and social alternative for people of color to “living with virility” in a white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy?

As for that quote, “to live is to live with virility,” I meant it in a more descriptive than prescriptive sense. I am not seeking to prescribe that response. And yes, I think we can live in ways other than virility, but as James Baldwin said, to do that we have to challenge the West. I remain convinced that “virility” (which I say must be respected in the indigenous space-time if only for its capacity to resist) must be overcome. This requires a certain pacification of male–female relations within indigeneity, and the mobilization of our energies against white supremacy both within our national borders and at the international level.

This means that we cannot deprive men of their virility, that is to say, of a relationship to the world in which they feel valued, without thinking about both moral and material compensation. One cannot fight virilism without offering something in exchange that would make men not lose—speaking from a sociological perspective. In the world as you describe it and as it exists, that is to say, dominated by white suprematism, which is both racist and patriarchal, it is hard to see how men could survive other than by asserting their manhood. This is why the question is badly put: to devirilize, one must start a process of un-whitening the system, since the matrix of modern patriarchy (and I am not talking about ancient forms of patriarchy) continues today within white supremacism. Additionally, I believe that white proletarian men experience similar dilemmas. The feminist refinement of the white upper classes and the aspiration to overcome gender is a luxury of the enlightened bourgeois classes. Only they can do and live their lives without a masculinist habitus, because their sociabilities are valued differently. In short, for the white and non-white working classes, virility is a positive value because in a certain way it is an experience of dignity. My question as a decolonial thinker is thus: what do I offer men of color in exchange for their manliness? And what do I offer white men in exchange for their whiteness? There is no “concrete” answer to these questions, because they are still a project to be implemented and it depends on a political strategy which is predominantly aimed at the “masses.”

If I were to summarize that epistemological approach, you believe then that it's a matter of actual physical as well as social survival for men of color, and virility is the means to ensure survival. That also resonates with another part of your work that moves from the question of heteronormative binaries to queer sexualities and virility. “The Arab that is losing his virile power,” you write, “is considered not quite a man.” You say that when “white people rejoice at an indigenous man's coming out, it's both out of homophobia and out of racism.” Can you elaborate a bit more on what you mean?

I start from the idea that homophobia, contrary to what national mythology claims, is structural in France and that only a minority fringe of the social body is really opposed to homophobia. Also, openly racist whites (especially that category called “civilizationists,” who believe that Muslims pose a threat to Christian, European civilization), are products of this homophobia. They feel great satisfaction at the sight of an indigenous man they see as weak, not fully masculine, “de-virilized.” It is then a powerless enemy that they have before them, an enemy that no longer competes with them, a disarmed enemy. This is how we have to understand the fact that heterosexual masculinity of color is a radical enemy for whiteness, which is why, in a way, the Islamic veil came to protect that masculinity. We find among certain white liberals an exaggerated interest in gay men of color, especially noticeable in people who are not otherwise invested in gay liberation but are fascinated by gay men of color. Part of the motive is racist: they consider our families and culture backward, and take a prurient pleasure in stories of coming out, especially when they involve societal violence, or family rejection. In France, which is institutionally patriarchal, homophobic, and racist, those supposed “liberals” with their outsized interest in the condition of gay men of color (but no concomitant general interest in people of color), are driven, whether they realize it or not, by homophobia and reactionary ideas about manhood.

Yes, here you bring in a critique of liberalism concerning questions of race and sexuality—I would like to switch to questions of liberalism for a moment. In your book, you also cite Dominico Losurdo's (2011) critique of Western Liberalism as a concept and tradition. You cited him saying that colonialism and slavery engendered a system within which white people started cultivating “relationships of equality within the white community,” but not outside of it. The outside was, according to Losurdo, there to maintain the economic profit margins and surplus productions made possible through violence and inequality. It was also there to manifest difference in racial and legal terms by manifesting it as a naturalized and ahistorical fact of “underdevelopment” in the racialized and exploited other, thus leading to legal and political frameworks manifesting essentially democracies for white (cis) males with money and property (land and slaves), businessmen, nobles, aristocrats—the bourgeoisie, as well as, the elite of empires and kings. That's essentially the majority of the history of legal and political liberalism writ large, and a lot of authors would agree with that today. However, how can we prevent that from happening again since there seems to be a reifying circuit logic in-built in Western liberalism closely tied to economic prosperity? Essentially, with liberalism's help, Europe outsourced the inhumanity of resource extraction and slave labor to the outside of Europe, while reaping the benefits inside of Europe on a material level as well as by expanding (often through conflict brought about in the colonies) more liberties and social justice to their own (women, farmers, and workers).

The problem we witness today again, to my mind, is that the minute people have full bellies and are comfortable, their desire to risk that comfort is minimized if not even neutralized. Later in the book, you even provocatively state that “this will be our eternal dilemma: to stay and suffer humiliation, or to leave (to the former colonies) and starve.” Your work very much highlights the predicament of fighting an antiracist struggle in the Western world. The fight only seems to work when we foreclose the formative influences of a coloniality of power that persists today in our own lives and subjectivities—we do not want to “give up” the statuses and privileges in Europe that we have for a greater common good that nobody can guarantee will happen. Instead, people often choose “safer” roots that eventually co-opt radical thinking into an easier digestible format that often sees its radical roots obscured, blurred, if not even eradicated—and the first move to do that is to separate anti-racism from anti-colonialism. Palestine is a great example: more and more politicians and NGOs speak of anti-racism or anti-policing within a national context such as Germany but remain silent on anti-colonialism or the by now globally operating Israeli military industrial complex, which tested its weapons on Palestinian bodies first. It leads me to a rather provocative question then: Is a decolonial approach in Europe even possible? Or does it maybe have to be imposed from the outside maybe?

This is the whole problem of integration, which I believe is a form of whitewashing unless it comes along with a dismantling of whiteness and of global colonial and imperialist power imbalances. This is why the decolonial movement refuses any form of antiracist struggle if it is not also articulated in an anti-imperialist project. A decolonial movement that is not a radical critique of Western, capitalist, and imperialist modernity is not a decolonial movement. An antiracist struggle limited to national borders is only a struggle to become fully white, which is both an illusion and a moral tragedy. That is why I wrote: “We cannot rethink social relations, the family, gender relations, or sexuality without rethinking the nature of the state, North/South relations, neoliberalism, and its metamorphoses. Moreover, we must question the notions of equality, emancipation, freedom, and progress, and even refuse to conform to the liberal model of the individual.”

We can observe that in Germany, too, and I think we would need to challenge such discourses a lot more from our midst, but then we face the problem of attacking our own in public in front of a majority white audience. In a way, it then ends in a brown-on-brown or black-on-black struggle in front of a white consumer-citizen audience where people are pitted against each other solely based on the interpellation brought about by structures of racial capitalism. How would a decolonial movement that works through your analyses interfere in public discourses where the people you are criticizing are voices of color that are already pitted against each other within larger circuits of racial capitalism that want to eliminate radical critique?

This is essentially a question of power relations. The media machine will always be stronger than us and we must be able to bring into existence and maintain a radical decolonial thought which can exist in competition with other narratives that emanate from the liberal and integrationist part of the non-white population. That is why we need to get smarter and address the soul of color, the part of us that has not yet been digested. In other words, we must know how to defend non-white political territory, dare to criticize non-whites who are sucked into the white-washer, maintain distance from them (which is what bell hooks did) while maintaining a form of dialogue with them. On the other hand, we must know how to break with them if they drag us out of the political territory that we have liberated.

I would call your writing “revolutionary prose,” a prose that is very much reminiscent of, if not very much like, Frantz Fanon's: Like him, you write with urgency, humor and sarcasm; your examples move fast, you use language to provoke visceral reactions to your writing, your arguments passionately call on the reader instead of trying to maintain a cool and detached approach of ostensible objectivity and scientificity - there is a constant position/-ing in your work, a positioning of you, your thoughts, others and their predicaments, and a positioning of your intellectual trajectories that is always traceable for the reader. You maneuver elegantly between the personal experiences of yourself and others, French national and global politics, and radical Black and decolonial theory. The groundedness and viscerality of your work, I believe, stems from how you weave the sensual and psychic experiences into philosophy and vice versa. You also return to the optics of a meta-analysis and risk the accusation of being over-simplifying and too generalizing in your work. Furthermore, your work goes even further and doesn't stop at “analyzing.” Just like Fanon's oeuvre, you call for a revolutionary awakening, as well as for new forms of social love—Fanon similarly called for a “New Humanism” (1952). These new forms of social love that you write about simultaneously form new modes of attachment. Even if doomed to fail and against all odds, they try to bring into being a new system—the “art of failure,” that is also so important for Fanon's analysis of our material and psychic conditions.

Do you think it is strange that decolonial and antiracist academics speak of Fanon but still have problems citing or inviting a woman of color like you today that embodies what others are talking about? What is the role that women of color have today in a so-called “Europe in crisis” and in need of decolonization for our own future, but also for the future of life on this planet?

We need to put things in context. At the time of the Algerian war, academics were not likely to quote Fanon that much either. The reason is that the university system is an ideological apparatus of the state and as such is counterrevolutionary. It can love dead revolutionaries, but not the living ones.

Such analytics would position the university within a necropolitical structure itself, a structure that likes “dead thought” rather than “living thought,” which is definitely some food for thought for future conversations! Thank you, Houria.