Wednesday, August 10, 2005
This is just a quick link to follow -- an "aside." These are links to interesting things that, for one reason or another, I didn't place into a full posting. Click the link to visit the full article. Go to the blog index for a regular listing of posts.
Winds of Change: French Slavery - 'Recently I read a piece by an American living in Europe, recounting how he had found himself in heated argument with a Frenchman who hammered him with America's rap sheet of historical faults and crimes -- it looked like the usual list, if you're familiar with that dreary experience. Among them, of course, was slavery. The American wrote that he largely conceded the point of slavery to his foe, remarking only that it was not really an American institution, just a Southern one. This seemed lame to me, not only because it was, in fact, a national institution, as I have been at pains to tell people for some years now, but because the American could have turned the tables nicely on the Frenchman, if he'd known a little more about French history...' (Link)
I was subjected to a similar tirade by a young French man in the mid-80's. He magnified America's problems, of course, and was oblivious to France's problems. Meanwhile, my first impression upon coming out of a Metro stop in Paris for the first time was that ALL the street cleaners (gutter sweepers, really) were tall, lanky, dark-skinned North African men. Not a white dude in any crew I saw. Come to find out, the North Africans lived in crowded slum housing outside of Paris. But we Americans are the horrible racists, n'est ce pas?