Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
Gloves Are Off: Macron Blames ‘Woke’ American Culture For ‘Racializing’ France
Anxious to draw media attention away from the colossal disaster directly caused by his poor judgment, President Joe Biden recently announced he had ‘turned the page on Afghanistan.’ Biden may have moved on, but the rest of the world has not. Aside from emboldening our enemies, the episode has eroded the trust, respect, and even the loyalty of our NATO allies toward the US president.
To make matters worse, two weeks ago, in a move that was unprecedented, French President Emmanuel Macron recalled his country’s ambassador to the US to protest Biden’s handling of a deal to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia. Macron said the secretly negotiated deal was “unacceptable between allies and partners.”
Though this flap appears to have been smoothed over by a phone call between Biden and Macron, at least superficially, and the French ambassador has returned to the US, all is not well in the French-American relationship. Aware that Macron’s anger continues to smolder, the Biden Administration is sending diplomatic giant Antony Blinken to France next week to repair the rupture in the relationship.
Surely they know that their world-changing blunder in Afghanistan will be the big white elephant in the conference room and there’s nothing they can do to remedy that.
Biden’s decision to withdraw US troops from Afghanistan before notifying leaders of NATO member nations was an unforgivable offense.
When a major betrayal occurs in any relationship, other lesser but still significant issues that may have been simmering below the surface, have a way of erupting into the open. Nowhere has this dynamic revealed itself more clearly than in the French-American relationship.
Macron’s resentment has freed him to call out his secondary grievances with America, the most notable being the U.S. embrace of wokeism.
During remarks at the opening of the World Health Organization Academy in Lyon on Monday, Macron blamed America’s “woke” culture for the “racialization” that’s currently spreading in his country, according to Fox News.
Macron has raised this issue before. But it seems to happening more frequently and with less civility.
According to a February editorial in The New York Times, Macron, along with many French “politicians and prominent intellectuals” believe that America’s new woke culture has gone too far and now poses an existential threat to the French republic and identity.
Specifically, Macron and the others are concerned about the dangerous social theories on “race, gender and post-colonialism,” which they view as forms of separatism.
The op-ed cites an October 2020 speech in which Macron warned that the threat to French culture lies in “certain social science theories entirely imported from the United States.” He sees what’s happening in America and wants to make sure that it stays out of France. Who can blame him?
Zenger News reports that, over the summer, Macron told Elle Magazine, “I see that our society is becoming progressively racialized.” He faulted “woke culture” for the problem.
The Zenger article references a recent cover story from Le Spectacle Du Monde, a widely read French magazine. Entitled “The Suicide of America,” it assigns blame for the Afghanistan debacle on a “woke dictatorship” and questioned whether the American “empire was collapsing.”
A “woke dictatorship” seems an apt description for the Biden Administration, does it not? It might well surprise administration officials to hear themselves described in those terms.
The article criticized American universities as “islands of extremism” and specifically cited Yale University, where administrators recently warned students against “racially insensitive” Halloween costumes.
That’s the least of what’s going on at Yale University. Several months ago, NYC psychiatrist Aruna Khilanani delivered a virtual public lecture there and told her audience there were times: “I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a f—— favor.”
“This is the cost of talking to white people at all. The cost of your own life, as they suck you dry. There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil.”
Now that’s racially insensitive.
Zenger points out that “Macron’s anti-woke sentiment is widely shared in his government.” Elisabeth Moreno, “a black woman born in Cape Verde, off the coast of western Africa,” who serves as the French delegate minister for gender equality and diversity, slammed wokeness in a May interview with Bloomberg. She said, “The ‘woke’ culture is something very dangerous, and we shouldn’t bring it to France.”
Now that the gloves are off, and leaders like Macron and others can freely express their opinions about the current US government – because what do they really have to lose – I think we can expect to hear more of this.
On some level, Macron may take pleasure in our current troubles. On the other hand, he knows the world has suddenly become a far more dangerous place.
Please follow me on Twitter.
Published in Foreign Policy
From Jacques Derrida to America and back again. Sorry, Macron, but this way of thinking is not native to America. I’m glad to see, though, that its vile nature is being recognized, that it is being seriously challenged, and that perhaps this crisis will not go to waste.
I had not heard about this remarkable speech.
Somehow, I suspect that if a white speaker had said that about blacks, I might have heard about it.
Just perhaps…
France knows Marxism, when they see it.
Biden lied and 13 died!
Yeah. A decade ago one race was burning another race’s cars in the streets of Paris. Didn’t need any woke baggage for that to happen.
It took awhile for the French to catch up to American Conservatives but I’m glad they did. It’s remarkable to look at Biden’s cabinet and realize that each one of them is being run on the basis of “wokeness”.
H*ll of a way to run a railroad.
I could respect Macron more if he wasn’t so obviously delighted that a Democrat displaced Trump. But, credit where it’s due. He’s right about the dangers of wokeism.
The vast majority of racism perpetrated and dreamed of in America comes from Blacks.
Is Europe preparing to BDS the US?
I was explaining the US obsession with Trans sexuals to my cousin who lives in Italy and she refused to believe me.
I think Macron is right about wokism leading to separatism. One of my kids went to Colgate in the early 2000s, and I was very surprised to see that the college had, at the black students’ request, separate living quarters for the black students. Boomers will recall the foreign exchange students in every American high school in the 1960s and 1970s, the idea being that peace would follow the kids’ getting to know each other. What happened to that idea? It was a good one.
What I would say to the Brits and the French and the rest of the European Union is this: Wouldn’t it be nice if, just once, you would respond to such accusations with, “Gosh, we are good friends with the Americans, and we know they are not racists.”
Just once.
It’s just France blaming someone else for its own problems.
So when to the French start calling us Burger eating surrender monkeys
I’m not sure the two things – France feeling betrayed by the perfidious Anglo-Saxons yet again, and the anti-woke rhetoric – are linked.
There was a real concern growing amongst certain of the elites that wokeism was undermining the dignity – and therefore standing – of certain elite educational institutions. Their reaction is therefore one of defending their class privileges. (What is the point of sending your children to the right cram schools and pulling strings to get them into SciencesPo if everyone just laughs at them?)
The subs thing is just French incompetence and paranoia coupled with the Biden administration’s tin ear on everything.
(When reading things about another country it is sometimes useful to translate the terms in local equivalents. If Macron says something on the campaign trail and a newspaper says something similar, that says something as deep about what ‘the French’ think as Biden and the NYT mentioning a topic says about what ‘Americans’ think.)
And if he acknowledged that Hungary and Poland share his concerns and aren’t the literal Hitlers his EU friends make them out to be.