, ruffled feathers at the César Awards last February when she took the stage and counted aloud the handful of Black people in the audience. After the ceremony, Maïga received an avalanche of criticism, was ridiculed by her peers and was threatened on social media.
As such, if there were ever a momentum that could have disrupted the status quo in France, it would have been the clarion call for representation against the backdrop of last summer’s renewed Black Lives Matter movement. But the resulting paradigm shift that happened elsewhere in Europe, like the U.K. — where broadcasters including the BBC set up inclusion rider initiatives and stricter diversity targets — simply didn’t take hold.
“Once upon a time, until around the 1960s, many high-profile Black Americans, intellectuals, writers and musicians found refuge in Paris to escape segregation. But since then, a lot has changed, and it’s the other way around,” explains Régis Dubois, a film historian and the author of “Black People in French Cinema.”
The incident sits with an uneasy backdrop of recent Islamic terror attacks, including the murder of Samuel Paty, a French middle school teacher who was beheaded in October after showing cartoons to his students of the Prophet Muhammad. Such events have amplified nationalism, with the state discouraging civil rights movements and the scrutiny of police.
“I wanted to express my relationship with the police, [and] my French and Black identity. As a Black director, I never had the means to explain myself,” says Zadi. However, any discussion of racial equality through positive discrimination or quotas — practical measures that have gained traction through the Black Lives Matter movement — is perceived by some as an attempt to import an American model of inclusion that’s unsavory to French society, suggests Rebecca Zlotowski, director of “Les Sauvages” and co-founder of the organization 50:50 Future , which in 2019 convinced the country’s main industry guilds to sign a parity and diversity pledge for...
While around a third of the French population is nonwhite, according to France’s broadcasting authority, CSA, the body’s latest survey reveals that out of 37,800 people who appeared on French TV over a period of two weeks in 2019, only 15% were “perceived as non-white” — half of whom were “perceived as Black.” The share is down from 17% in 2018 and 16% in 2016.
“The revolts scared people, and they were forced to listen. We saw some progress in the following years,” says Diallo. Then-President “Jacques Chirac demanded that TV channels bring in more minorities in front of and behind the screens, and broadcasting authorities CSA also questioned the existence of minorities in the media for the first time.”“For the most part, Black characters are invisible.
That girl works for Macron government. She's that kind of 'antiracist' person speaking of races and colours the entire day. More than an obsession, a true business.
Ffs!