#NahelM and the Nightmare of French Racism
“The police saw an Arab face, a little kid, and wanted to take his life.”
“The police saw an Arab face, a little kid, and wanted to take his life.”
Only hours after a policeman shot her son Nahel at point-blank range and left him dead, Mounia was certain of the motive.
In fact, the motive enveloped her and the life Nahel had in Nanterre – a banlieue on the outskirts of Paris and at the margins of French society. The French model of segregating and siloing racial minorities in distant enclaves, labeled “suburbs,” or banlieues, is where this tragedy unfolded.
But unlike their American counterparts, the French suburbs are overwhelmingly brown, black, and nonwhite, and emaciated of the opportunity available to the racial and cosmopolitan centers of French life. Nihilism mixed with racism rules in French banlieues like Nanterre, where the trappings of French living are replaced with the traps of poverty and police violence.
This is where Nahel, only seventeen years old, lived. This is also where Nahel, a delivery boy stopped “randomly” by police, also died. Only one day before Eid Al-Adha, the Muslim holiday he was set to celebrate with his mother.
Instead, Mounia spent that holiday alone. And from that day onward, will spend life without the only child she affectionately called “my best friend.”
Rather than seeing a teen gunned down, the familiar plot of character assassination on mainstream media outlets and social media timelines began.
“Another Arab thug down,” a bigot posted online, pointing to the underbelly of racism that dwells in France. An underbelly where French citizens of Arab, Amazigh, and African descent – like Nahel – are not only unseen as legitimate Frenchmen and women, but perpetual outsiders. Or “strangers,” in the words of the iconic French novelist Albert Camus, where “killing an Arab” on the beaches of Algeria illustrate the morbid obsession with murdering Arabs rooted in 132 years of colonialism, and ripe within the minds of French police.
This is why Mounia, a mother who lost her only son, saw race as the motive. This is why tens of thousands of people across France, from Paris to Marseille, stormed the streets in protests for days after Nahel was murdered. Despite the government’s claim that “race does not exist France,” the protestors knew French history, remember the names Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré from 2005, and even more intimately, experience the very hate that trails them every day took Nahel’s life on Tuesday.
They protest for Nahel. But in a France that counts Arabs as outsiders, Blacks as inferior, and Muslims as inassimilable, they also protest for themselves.
Nahel M is a martyr. But like the wave of protests the world has seen over the last decade, Nahel is also a symbol of something much more.
Instead of decrying the racism driving police violence, French President Emmanuel Macron condemned the protestors. Instead of staring within the soul of a nation that colonized seventy-two nonwhite nations, white Frenchmen and women scapegoat the “criminality” of Algerians forced to live in banlieues starved of opportunity and siloed from the City of Lights.
For as long as the French model of racial denial and segregation exists, the quiet and explosive storm of protests will rage onward.
However, during those liminal moments of calm, another mother will sit alone, silently. Inside a small apartment on the margins of Paris, in the middle of a nightmare made by French racism.
Khaled A. Beydoun is a law professor and author of The New Crusades: Islamophobia and the Global War on Muslims. You can follow his socials at @khaledbeydoun.
He was driving a stolen car with Polish plates and already had a rap sheet. He attempted to run over a policeman’s feet. The. Op should have shot the tires of the car, but let’s not pretend this kid was innocent and a victim of a random stop.