Magali Bessone

I came to focus on racial justice when I was writing my PhD in political theory between 1999 and 2004. I was working on the principles of transparency/publicity and opacity/secrecy in liberal thought and, more specifically, their grounding role in the birth of the United States (as a nation and as a republic), in the generation of the Founding Fathers, and until the Civil War. Part of my questioning focused on the requirement and expectations of transparency for citizens - and its counterpart, inscrutability: who is publicly seen or invisible, what does it mean to make oneself readable to fellow citizens, and what prevents some groups to ever be perceived as moral and political peers? I discovered W. E. B. Du Bois’Souls of Black Folk and his famous concept of the “Veil” that covers the black world, both hiding and revealing it to the white world. I was also at the time writing a small reader on Justice and was becoming familiar with the literature on theories of justice that bloomed in the anglophone world in the wake of John Rawls’Theory of Justice at the end of the 20th century. I lived in Boston for two years as I was teaching French and Philosophy at Boston College. 

Politically and socially, this was also the time when the racial question really gained some momentum in France - we had our own “veil” question in the 1990s, of course, related to the ban of the Muslim burqa in public places and in school. At the turn of the 21st century, some new activist movements, on the one hand, and some social scientists, on the other hand, started to explicitly pose the question of “race” in France, both as a political question and as an epistemic issue: how is racial difference manifested in France? How do you measure racial discrimination and inequalities without so-called “ethnic statistics”? Is republicanism hospitable enough to integrate or accommodate racial minorities?

I was at the crossroads between the US and French contexts, and realized two important things: first, that it was possible to think positively about “racial justice” - it was not necessarily an oxymoron nor did it only refer to racist systems of the past. Second, that the conceptual and normative tools to grasp the conditions of possibility, meanings, uses, and potential scope and implications of “racial justice” didn’t really exist in France. This is when I started to focus my philosophical work on proposing a theory of racial justice - applicable in a postcolonial and post-Holocaust French context, which is very different from the US context.

This led me to think about the relation between justice and history - to take seriously the historical situation from which and for which one attempts to propose sound principles of justice and to address racial injustices. I started working on reparatory justice, as justice for historical wrongs, in 2014 and joined an interdisciplinary team, REPAIR, led by historian Myriam Cottias, in 2015, in the frame of which we focused on reparations for colonial slavery. We investigated many aspects of reparations - political, social, memorial, cultural, economic, and epistemic, which all pose different and difficult questions from the point of view of racial justice.

One of my leading questions, from the very beginning, was to compare, understand, and map the differences in the treatment of racial questions in the US and in France: from that point of view, my work has always adopted a transnational approach. It is all the more important that, on the one hand, the French republican ideology has long been based on the predicament that there is no race in France and that racial questions could be, and had been, for the most part, absorbed and dissolved in the abstract universalism of French law and politics; on the other hand, US racial thinking has long considered that the racial divide between Blacks and Whites as it exists in the US was the baseline for any type of conceptual and normative theorization about race. This double mischaracterization led to the lack of a specific and precise conceptual apparatus in order to apprehend racial questions in France. It seemed to me extremely important to be able to step aside or move back and forth between the two sides of the Atlantic, in order to build the epistemic and political tools proper to a situated theory of racial justice.

A transnational approach is also concerned with translation issues, which has been a focus of my inquiries for some time now: linguistic translation, as is the case, very centrally, with the term “race” itself (mainstream in ordinary English while still almost taboo or, at least, considered as provocative and deeply problematic in French), but also more broadly national and conceptual translation. For instance, how does “white supremacy” “translate” into a French context, in the French Overseas territories, in the French history of antisemitism? Why is there so much public resistance to the term “Islamophobia” in France? How come the French word “Nègre,” connoting the idea of “Negritude,” is more acceptable than its English counterpart, notably in some speech situations producing critical knowledge? (For instance, Nègre je suis, Nègre je resterai, a book of interviews between Françoise Vergès and Aimé Césaire published in 2005, Critique de la raison nègre, published by Achille Mbembé in 2013, or Un monde en nègre et blanc, by Aurélia Michel, in 2020, didn’t raise the same controversy as Randall Kennedy’s 2001 book.) Such questions are discursive, epistemic, and political, and they require a transnational perspective in order to rigorously place the similarities and dissimilarities between different language games, trace the genealogies of these distinct grammars, and identify what the language betrays or displays the conditions of racial thinking in different contexts.

Lastly, a transnational approach is, in my view, absolutely indispensable to grasp the meaning and scope of reparations for historical racial wrongs. Colonialism and slavery were world systems; they have left global and international traces in legal categories, social representations, material and environmental inequalities, etc. A theory of reparations, if it aims at redressing these present injustices that have roots in the past, has to adopt a transnational frame to clearly identify the wrongs and to propose remedies for the future. In my book, Faire justice de l’irréparable (2019), I adopted a French-focused approach on reparations for colonial slavery, because one of my aims was to appease the polemics in the French public debate and problematize the need for a specific theory of situated, historic, reparatory justice - but it was only a first step and reparatory justice has to be expanded beyond national borders.

My “practice” is concerned with research and education; I don’t consider myself a practitioner. But I also work with more practice-oriented persons in order to learn about the constraints of feasibility, and to test concepts or hypotheses that could lead to a less unjust organization of the world - political philosophy and theories of justice cannot afford the luxury of being ideally theoretical. I also consider part of my job as an academic to intervene in public debates, and share, or transmit, some of the hypotheses I find solid to repair historical injustices and work toward racial justice. 

In this perspective, the future I am working towards, some days more desperately and some days more hopefully than others, when I teach or when I write, is a future in which racial assignations don’t make any objective, intersubjective or subjective difference in access to resources and status, and (political, economic) power differential is not aligned with racial categories. This does not mean that our social world will be perfectly just, but it means that it will be more racially just. This will not mean that racial differences have entirely disappeared, but it will mean that they have taken new, non-oppressive meanings.

In order to achieve this future, the first step, in France, still consists in building a wide, public, awareness of the presence and insistence of racial inequalities and structural conditions for racial oppression, even if our republican law and administration are officially colorblind. This calls for several moves which all are within the reach of a concerned academic: teach and explain our racial history - the way racism and discriminations have mutated and perpetuated until today, make visible the multiple effects of racialization processes, and convince people that some transformations to improve our current racial formation are not only necessary, but absolutely feasible. While I am not overly optimistic, it seems to me that young generations are much more concerned by racial injustices than previous ones; and while I don’t always like how the racial conversation is polarized, entrenched, or biased in France or elsewhere, at least there is a public conversation and new voices are being heard.