Musab Younis teaches politics at Oxford. His first book, On the Scale of the World: The Formation of Black Anticolonial Thought, was published in 2022.
In 2004, the political theorist Françoise Vergès decided to go to Martinique to interview Aimé Césaire, the poet, politician, anticolonialist and co-founder of the négritude movement. She was surprised to discover that most of her acquaintances in Paris hadn’t heard of him, or ‘thought he was dead’. This tells us something about the...
The point-blank shooting by police officers of 17-year-old Nahel M. during a traffic stop in Nanterre last Tuesday was not a unique occurrence. On 7 June, three weeks before Nahel’s death, police in Paris killed a 21-year-old passenger in a car that had allegedly refused to stop for a check. The passenger was not named in media reports; she was described only as a ‘young woman’. On 14 June, two weeks before Nahel’s death, a 19-year-old Guinean supermarket logistics worker, Alhoussein Camara, was shot dead near Angoulême at a roadside checkpoint.
At school, I would sometimes be approached in the playground by children I didn’t know. I must have been about seven or eight. Appearing in front of me, they would call me racist names. Then they wandered away. I don’t remember being distressed by these incidents. Sometimes, though, children came over to tell me that they weren’t racist. They knew that racism existed; they...
There was an illegal demonstration for Palestine in northern Paris on Sunday, 15 May. It was quelled by 4200 police officers under the command of the city’s police chief, Didier Lallement. Protests against Israel’s bombing of Gaza had been banned on the direct order of President Macron’s interior minister, Gérald Darmanin. They might be composed of ‘risky elements’, Darmanin warned. He asked the police to be ‘particularly vigilant and firm’.
It might seem bizarre to blame the murder of the French schoolteacher Samuel Paty on a nebulous conspiracy of leftist academics, given that the perpetrator, Abdoullakh Abouyedovich Anzorov, was an 18-year-old who had never been to university. But earlier this month in Le Monde, 100 French academics gave their backing to Jean-Michel Blanquer, the education minister, when he responded to the murder with a flood of invective against universities. ‘Islamo-leftism is wreaking havoc,’ he said. Paty’s murderer had been ‘conditioned by people who encourage’ a type of ‘intellectual radicalism’ and promote ‘ideas that often come from elsewhere’, i.e. from across the Atlantic. ‘The fish rots from the head,’ he added darkly. Blanquer was following the example of the president of the republic.
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