Charlie Hebdo & French ‘Secularism’: Does it really just privilege White Christians?

Mayanthi Fernando reflects on Charlie Hebdo & French ‘Secularism’: Does it really just privilege White Christians?.

Rather than stemming from Muslims’ rejection of Frenchness, then, the supposed impossibility of being a Muslim and being a French citizen is largely generated by the contradictions of French secularism and French citizenship and by the majority’s inability to conceive of Muslims as French.

We should not deny the horror of January 6. But, in its aftermath, rather than uncritically reaffirm French national identity and wring our hands about Muslims’ refusal to integrate, we should use this moment of reflection to understand the various ways in which Muslims are consistently excluded from the nation, and to reassess the narrow bases of what it means to be French.

Emphasis Mine

White privilege is invisible to white people. They cannot see that their lives are based on racism. They would rather think that their position in society is based on some other atrribute: hard work, intellectual superiority, innate goodness.

Yet these other attributes reinforce racial stereotypes. They encourage to think of other races as being lazy, intellectual inferior, or innately bad. This reasoning follows from the obvious reality that white people have the good things of life while the non-whites do not.

Since white people believe that the system is fair, the fact that non-whites do not have the good things of life means that the non-whites do not deserve them.

Yet the non-white people see the system as unfair because they do work hard, study hard, and be on extremely good behaviour. And still they are denied the good things of life. They see the lies of the white people's system every day.

How, then, to get white people to see that they do live a life of privilege based on their skin colour? There is no immediate material benefit to doing so because many white people will lose out in a completely fair system.

The best solution would be for white people to voluntarily give up their privileges in the spirit of justice. But this will take an enormous amount of spiritual growth for a lot of people.