For a few years now I have been intrigued by what I thought to be a French phenomenon. How is it that France where the National Front has been going from strength to strength – 17.9 percent at the last presidential election – selects every time as its personality of the year a person who is either black or of North African origin, Muslim or Jewish, but definitely born out of the country's immigratory flux? The survey I am thinking of is run twice a year by IFOP for the newspaper Le Journal du Dimanche and asks a representative panel of the French population to vote for their ten favorite personalities, from which a top 50 emerges. In its early days, the poll was dominated by Jacques Cousteau (who was voted top a total of 20 times) and the Abbé Pierre (close behind with 16 appearances as France's most popular Frenchman), but in recent years there has been a shift toward people of other origins. Since 2007, Yannick Noah, once a tennis player and now a pop star, has been the undisputed champion, until this latest poll that is, as he has now been dethroned by Omar Sy, the star of the film Les Intouchables. Before them Zinedine Zidane was regularly crowned most popular Frenchman and despite entering retirement, still makes it into the top ten, with a ranking of eight this time round. Noah has a Cameroonian father and a French mother. Sy's parents are from Senegal and Mauritania. The Zidanes hail from the Algerian village of Aguemoune. In fact the top ten is dominated by people who have at least one parent not born in France. It is just a survey, and like all surveys, it is biased by how the questions are posed. In this instance, the respondents were asked to choose from a list of 58 personalities and so, to some extent, were prepped to come up with certain names. Still, I find the results interesting, as they highlight the distance between the theoretical and laudable attachment to Republican values and the actual discrimination felt on the ground by those who hail from elsewhere. Omar Sy, or Zinedine Zidane before him, represent the success story of the boy who grew up in a disadvantaged suburb, child of immigrants, who made good through hard work and talent. They show that anyone can make it to the top. And yet, the children of immigrants who grow up in France's Cités face an uphill struggle to find jobs and continue to face discrimination based on their family's origins or their postal address. Yannick Noah's lasting popularity celebrates France's approbation of “metissage”, the mixing of races. One of his hits is a song called “Je suis metisse” — “I am métisse, a mix of colors. I am métisse, I come from here and elsewhere” – and celebrates cultural diversity. Actors, comedians and sportsmen of mixed backgrounds may be popular but that does not change that people of mixed race or the children of immigrants are under-represented in positions of power. Possibly the survey highlights nothing more than that people like those who make them laugh or make them feel good. The top ten is dominated not just by people whose origins are mixed but by comedians and sportsmen. Sy makes people laugh, Noah makes people dance, Zidane helped bring France to football glory, perhaps it is nothing more than that. And when I think about it, there is nothing peculiarly French about this phenomenon: that a person could vote for the National Front, a party that is vehemently anti-immigration, and yet also go to see a film starring Omar Sy, or, when asked, vote for this same actor as their favorite Frenchman.This is no different from someone who votes for Barack Obama as president when faced with a ballot with just two choices representing two distinct political movements, yet feels unhappy when his daughter marries someone with skin much darker than his. And sadly, this is something that happens. So many people will tell you “I am not racist but….” and with those words prove that they are exactly what they believe they are not. Discrimination takes part in everyday interaction, in our daily choices: who we choose as friends, who we choose to mix with, who we choose to employ, who we choose as our dentist or our doctor, who we choose to get close to, how we view people who may look a little different to us or whose life trajectory has little resemblance to our own. Racism is not a category but a continuum; we are all capable of being racist, capable of forgetting that all humans are the same regardless of race, religion or origin. To quote Noah's popular song again: “I am the living proof that all humans are the same. I am the child of Adam and Eve, I am a dream like Ismael.” With such a positive vision of the world, it's little wonder that he was France's most popular Frenchman, until Omar Sy.
— Imane Kurdi is a Saudi writer on European affairs. She can be reached at [email protected]
