Might Barack Obama really have a chance at being United States president? In France, I'm often asked that question these days by blacks and beurs. France has very few prominent political figures who are not white and no directly elected people of north African origin in national government. Obama, a black man, who seems to have a very real chance to be president of the United States, fascinates people in France. For a minority, the success of America's black community is unparalleled in the world.
Yet just last week Obama was at the centre of a controversy emanating from comments by Senator Joseph Biden, a liberal Democrat, and the latest member of the Democratic party to announce his candidacy for president of the United States.
In an interview with the New York Observer on 31 January, Biden described his fellow senator as "the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy." It was a huge blunder, this series of offensively applied positive adjectives.
Biden's use of the word "clean" was simply imbecilic for a man hoping to be supported by black voters, but it was the term "articulate" that resonated in the ears of America's well-educated blacks. An article in the weekly analytical section of the New York Times reported the comments of several successful black Americans. All said the same thing in different ways: "there it is again". (One of George W Bush's talented speechwriters was instrumental in circulating the phrase that most aptly describes subtle racism in America, "the soft bigotry of low expectations").
It is to be expected that a man of Obama's education and achievement would be able to express himself with sophisticated words and language. Why demonstrate surprise that Obama is a sophisticated speaker, i.e. Biden's equal? But in responding to Biden's comments, the tone from the black Americans quoted in the New York Times - among them prominent politicians and academics - was rather gentle; more mild exasperation and weariness than anger. For my part, I simply snickered when I read the senator's remarks: readers of this column will know that I prefer it when people's prejudices cease to be hidden.
(I would like to note that being articulate however - able to express one's thoughts clearly - is a common and prized trait among black Americans regardless of education. For a time I lived in Harlem, one of New York's black communities of modest income, and people conveyed their points very well. The grammar may not always have been perfect, and sometimes the point came across so harshly that you felt you'd been licked by a lion, but you knew what people were trying to tell you).
KA Dilday worked on the New York Times opinion page until autumn 2005, when she began a writing fellowship with the Institute of Current World Affairs. During the period of the fellowship, she is travelling between north Africa and France.
Also by KA Dilday on openDemocracy:
"The freedom trail" (August 2005)
"Art and suffering: four years since 9/11" (August 2005)
"Rebranding America" (September 2005)
"Judith Miller's race: the unasked question" (October 2005)
"France seeks a world voice" (December 2005)
"A question of class" (January 2006)
"Europe's forked tongues"
(February 2006)
"The worth of illusion" (March 2006)
"The labour of others" (April 2006)
"A question of class, race, and France itself: reply to Richard Wolin" (May 2006)
"The writer and politics: Peter Handke's choice" (June 2006)
"Zidane and France: the rules of the game"
(19 July 2006)
Across the great divide
But I am keenly aware of this subtle prejudice in America. Even for black Americans who have progressed through many levels of education and achieved a successful position, to some white people it still seems worth commenting when they display skills commensurate with that education.
It's an old story for me, so rather than thinking about Biden's comments (I knew that black pundits and the news media in America would skewer him easily and handily) for more than a moment, I thought about a young Moroccan man I met last summer in Tangier, whom I will call "Ali". Ali is from one of Morocco's most privileged families. What struck me about him was his insistence that he spoke no Arabic, the official language of Morocco. (After gaining independence from France in 1956, Morocco went through an "Arabisation". Foushha, pure Arabic, is the national language while the local Arabic dialect is what most people speak.)
Yet in Morocco, French functions almost as a secret language for the elites. It prevails in business, government and diplomacy. It is possible for something to be published in a French-language publication, discussed by francophone Moroccans and be unknown to the rest of the population, since almost half of Moroccans cannot read and among the poor who can, it is more likely that they read only Arabic.
Driss Ksikes, the talented (and polyglot) Moroccan journalist who was recently prosecuted for publishing jokes the law deemed offensive, wrote a brilliant piece about the paradox of Morocco being run by a francophone oligarchy in the Moroccan French-language magazine Tel Quel, shortly before he became editor of Tel Quel's new Arabic-language sister publication, Nichane.
I remembered Ksikes' piece when Ali insisted that French was his maternal language. Only after much prodding would he admit that he spoke some Arabic. As we spoke I kept thinking of Kitty, the young Russian aristocrat in Anna Karenina, who thought French the language of culture and used it as much as possible to the disgust of her suitor, a nationalist Russian who thought her affinity for the language a shameful pretension.
I asked Ali why he did not want to speak Arabic, and as he is an aspiring filmmaker, I told him about an Arab film festival I had attended at the Arab World Institute in Paris. Arabic was the common language among the filmmakers from across the Arabic world, even though all seemed to be fluent in at least one other European language. Ali said he thought speaking Arabic kept Arabs separate. Yet Ali, with his perfect French, had never been to France. He was travelling there for the first time for an extended stay in the fall to study film at a French university. "Ah, Ali", I thought, "you are in for a surprise."
In his 18 years, it is unlikely that Ali had ever made his own breakfast, conducted his own clothes to the washing machine, or cleaned a bathroom. No doubt he had been "sirred" by servants all of his life. It Morocco, the social hierarchy is strong and pronounced. The country has a small upper class that is treated almost as a different species: one that by birthright deserves respect. It's quite shocking to a westerner like me.
But in France, I knew Ali would just be one of the many Africans speaking accented French and being randomly asked to prove his right to be in the country by police officers to whom he would appear decidedly non-French and decidedly suspect. Being toppled from the top of the social hierarchy is a lot for an 18-year old to handle.
Despite protestations of an egalitarian republic, France too has an entrenched social hierarchy that is carried out everyday in casual interactions. It's common knowledge that young men of north African origin men like Ali don't measure very well in the lightning-quick first impressions - one young French man told me of how he returned to France from a vacation with his skin darkened by the sun and spent the next few weeks being asked for his papers by the police.
The shock of this treatment isn't as stark for women who arrive from north Africa yet it is still there. In Paris I had a conversation with a woman of Algerian origin, who emphatically insisted to me that, contrary to the media narrative in France, most Arabs were middle class - they weren't thieves and criminals. I pointed out that being working class did not directly correlate to being a criminal any more than the middle classes and upper classes have any sort of claim on rectitude.
But the sentiment that she initially expressed is one that I hear again and again: the loss of status, particularly in a western society that is supposed to regard everyone as equal is humiliating and infuriating for those who are not accustomed to it. It cannot be a coincidence that some of the most ardent theorists of anti-western Islamic identity, like Sayyid Qutb, an important figure in the development of the ideology of Muslim Brotherhood, adopted their beliefs after living in the west for a time. It is also true that many of the masterminds of recent terrorist attacks in Europe have been wealthy, often western-educated young men from Arab countries.
France's blurred vision
This past week I've been waiting for the French newspapers to report the Biden-Obama story, curious as to how they might interpret it. The French media is intrigued by Obama and by examples of American racism as France still clings to its identity as the country black Americans fled to when escaping systemic bigotry in the mid-20th century. But the major French papers have been curiously silent about the Biden-Obama affair. It was reported perfunctorily and without comment in Le Monde, but in Liberation and Le Figaro, nothing.
It is a story that the French cannot understand. France dislikes admitting the racial and ethnic difference among its citizens. Prejudice is only just beginning to be acknowledged, and dialogue about it is not very evolved. The nuance of the condescension inherent in using a word that means well-spoken to describe a black man will perhaps be a topic in fifty years.
As a black American I have an educational advantage in France, an education that isn't part of any curriculum, but is passed down to most black children by their parents. I expect the "soft bigotry of low expectations." Blacks are taught from childhood that a black American is something distinct, an identity that is full of possibility, yes, but also fraught with myriad complications.
Here in France, I'm usually taken as an African immigrant or an Antillean until I speak. Then people usually realise that I am from an Anglophone western country and everything about the way I am dealt with changes. I'm not treated as an "African interloper" in search of economic opportunity - a supplicant as you may, but a fellow westerner. It isn't only Africans who receive this treatment. An Italian friend whose accent is often mistaken for eastern European also comments on the shift in behaviour when she reveals her Italian roots.
I'm used to this. It also happens in Morocco, where sub-Saharan Africans are not always treated well due to a myriad of reasons including a not so distant history of slavery, and the recent wave of southern Africans passing through Morocco on their way to Europe. In north Africa, when I reveal my nationality, I become someone to be envied.
And of course, it happens in the United States when I speak. My syntax and vocabulary indicate a level of education. I am "articulate." In France when I note the change in treatment, at the most, I feel like the people quoted in the New York Times article, mild exasperation.
But I wonder what Ali feels now that he is here. His prominent name which carried so much weight in Morocco means nothing here. His maternal-language French which gave him passage to the discussions of government, diplomacy and business in his home country, is just African-accented French. He will lose his status, his identity and likely his idealism about the communal nature of humanity in one fell swoop and he might find that the people who understand his experience best are other Arabs. The Arabic knowledge he tries to deny might become a comfort. We can only hope that Ali will feel only the mild exasperation that people who have been prepared for subtle racism all of their lives, like Senator Obama and I feel.