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Is Multiculturalism Europe's New Taboo?
“Who in this room is French?” Nourdine Nabili asks a group of 25 eighth-graders in Bondy, one of the concrete working-class suburbs just outside Paris. It is April 2011 and Nabili, the 44-year-old editor-in-chief of the popular website Bondy Blog, is visiting a journalism workshop at the Jean Renoir junior high school. I am sitting…
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How Do You Say the N-Word in French?
The word nègre is being bandied about in the French media in an unusually intense way these days, thanks to the blatherings of the cosmetics tycoon Jean-Paul Guerlain, who said on French television recently that he had “worked like a nègre” to develop the perfume Samsara. When the newscaster Audrey Pulvar, born in Martinique, called…
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Art of the African Diaspora Comes to Paris
The French like their African art to be traditional. Nobody uses that outmoded word “primitive” anymore. The term of choice these days is arts premiers: the first arts. Bowls, masks, finely carved statuettes. Ageless objects made by anonymous artisans, appreciated as much as anthropological artifacts as they are works of art. “It’s Europe’s colonial heritage,” explains…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
