Jacobin, Topic: Can the Yellow Vests Speak?
Link: Can the Yellow Vests Speak? by Éduard Louis
France's elites were quick to condemn the gilets jaunes protesters as stupid and backward. But as novelist Édouard Louis writes, they're just standing up for their rights.
Excerpt:
"The gilets jaunes speak of hunger, of precarity, of life and death. The “politicians” and part of the journalists reply: “the symbols of our Republic have been tarnished.” But what are these people talking about? How dare they? What planet are they from? The media also talk about racism and homophobia among the gilets jaunes. Who are they kidding? I do not want to talk about my books, here. But it is interesting to note that whenever I have published a novel I have been accused of stigmatizing poor and rural France precisely because I mentioned the homophobia and racism that existed in the village where I lived as a child. Journalists who had never done anything for the popular classes were enraged, and suddenly set themselves up to play the defenders of these same classes.
For the dominant, the popular classes are the perfect representation of what Pierre Bourdieu calls a class-object; an object that can be manipulated by discourse, one day represented as the salt of the earth — the authentic poor — and the next day as racists and homophobes. In both cases, the underlying intention is the same: to prevent the popular classes’ speech, about themselves, from ever coming to the surface. Too bad if you have to contradict yourself from one day to the next, so long as they keep quiet.
Of course, there have been homophobic and racist comments and acts among the gilets jaunes. But since when have these media and “politicians” been so concerned about racism and homophobia? What have they done to combat racism? Have they used their power to speak out about Adama Traoré [a twenty-four-year-old black man who died in police custody] and the committee for Adama? To speak out about the police violence that strikes blacks and Arabs in France every day? And wasn’t it they who gave [anti-LGBT activist] Frigide Barjot and countless priests a platform at the very moment of mariage pour tous [the campaign for equal same-sex marriage rights] and, in so doing, permitted and normalized homophobia on the TV?
When the ruling classes and certain media talk about homophobia and racism in the gilets jaunes movement, they are not really talking about homophobia and racism. They are saying “Poor people, shut up!” In any case, the gilets jaunes movement is still a work in progress, and its language is not yet fixed in place: if there does exist homophobia or racism among the gilets jaunes, our responsibility is to transform this language...."
France's elites were quick to condemn the gilets jaunes protesters as stupid and backward. But as novelist Édouard Louis writes, they're just standing up for their rights.
Excerpt:
"The gilets jaunes speak of hunger, of precarity, of life and death. The “politicians” and part of the journalists reply: “the symbols of our Republic have been tarnished.” But what are these people talking about? How dare they? What planet are they from? The media also talk about racism and homophobia among the gilets jaunes. Who are they kidding? I do not want to talk about my books, here. But it is interesting to note that whenever I have published a novel I have been accused of stigmatizing poor and rural France precisely because I mentioned the homophobia and racism that existed in the village where I lived as a child. Journalists who had never done anything for the popular classes were enraged, and suddenly set themselves up to play the defenders of these same classes.
For the dominant, the popular classes are the perfect representation of what Pierre Bourdieu calls a class-object; an object that can be manipulated by discourse, one day represented as the salt of the earth — the authentic poor — and the next day as racists and homophobes. In both cases, the underlying intention is the same: to prevent the popular classes’ speech, about themselves, from ever coming to the surface. Too bad if you have to contradict yourself from one day to the next, so long as they keep quiet.
Of course, there have been homophobic and racist comments and acts among the gilets jaunes. But since when have these media and “politicians” been so concerned about racism and homophobia? What have they done to combat racism? Have they used their power to speak out about Adama Traoré [a twenty-four-year-old black man who died in police custody] and the committee for Adama? To speak out about the police violence that strikes blacks and Arabs in France every day? And wasn’t it they who gave [anti-LGBT activist] Frigide Barjot and countless priests a platform at the very moment of mariage pour tous [the campaign for equal same-sex marriage rights] and, in so doing, permitted and normalized homophobia on the TV?
When the ruling classes and certain media talk about homophobia and racism in the gilets jaunes movement, they are not really talking about homophobia and racism. They are saying “Poor people, shut up!” In any case, the gilets jaunes movement is still a work in progress, and its language is not yet fixed in place: if there does exist homophobia or racism among the gilets jaunes, our responsibility is to transform this language...."
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