Nous Sommes Tous Francais.
It’s easy to show your colors on Facebook…but so what?
On September 13, 2001, Le Monde, the French international paper, published a huge front page headline:
NOUS SOMMES TOUS AMÉRICAINS
Translated as We are all Americans, its meaning was clear: the French people were standing with Americans, sending us support after the worst terrorist attacks ever to occur on US soil.
That day, I was in Ireland on vacation. In shock, my then partner, Nicole, and I cancelled our plans and watched endless news of the attacks on TV in our Irish B&B, Side by Side. The owners were an unusual lesbian couple: one woman came from Northern Ireland and one from the south, the Republic. In the normal course of Irish life, they’d be enemies or at least strangers, but they were in love and living together, happily. They told us that no one else they knew was even FRIENDS with someone from the “opposite” religion: most Protestants, from the North, avoided or just didn’t know any Catholics from the Republic, and vice versa. But they’d met and formed a lasting love — and named their B&B after it, too.
Fascinated by their story, I asked something I’d been wondering about for a long time: how on earth did Irish Catholics or Protestants KNOW who was what religion? How on earth could a Protestant KNOW she was meeting a Catholic person? I compared their difficulties to racism in the US, but of course most racism is based on physical characteristics like skin color or eye shape — it’s obvious, if you want to be prejudiced against people of a certain physical cast.
Bernie thought about my question for a while, and then said, “Well, first there are the names.” A Mary, she said, would be a Catholic, as would an Anne. I was surprised to learn that, and even more suprised by what Sallie added. “And the noses,” she said. “You can tell by the noses.”
Nicole and I exchanged amazed glances. “What do you mean?” we said, in unison.
Sallie laughed at us. “You two! You’ve both got Protestant noses!”
We gazed at each other’s faces, focusing on the middles. Both Nicole and I have rounded, rather small noses, but we’d never attributed religious significance to them.
“Catholics have long, thin noses,” Sally said. “They’re Latin, Italian noses.”
Ever since then I’ve enjoyed testing the theory on my American (or European) friends, and it’s an amusing party trick. But more importantly, it’s significant of the ridiculous ways we find to separate into groups.
The day that I learnt that, a lot of Americans were rushing to blame “Arabs” and “Muslims” for the attacks in New York and Pennsylvania and Washington. And this week, after the Paris attacks, the Twittersphere and the halls of Washington there are new reams of anti-Muslim, anti-Syrian, anti-immigrant speech, which seems designed to bolster xenophobia but not stop any form of violence.
I’ve been crying, praying, and thinking about what I can do. Of course I along with millions of others switched my Facebook portrait to a pro-France image (see above). So what? Of course I sent out messages of support on #parisisburning, #Frenchlivesmatter , #Frenchattacks, #toutsommesnousfrancais and so on — and I even started (?) a new hashtag, #noussommestousfrancais. I wrote my bimonthly CURVE column about what I was feeling:
http://www.curvemag.com/Culture/We-are-all-French-761/
But none of that helped anyone except me, I think. I was frustrated and sad and felt I could do NOTHING of any import. I can’t invite a Syrian refugee into my home (there isn’t room). I can’t fly to Paris and sit rebelliously in a cafe all night. I can’t start a pen-pal relationship with a survivor of the attacks.
But I realized today, after reading a message from my aunt on Facebook (!), there IS one useful thing I can do: I can petition Rick Scott to change his deplorable resistance to Syrian immigants. Scott has in the past opposed “illegal immigrants” being allowed to get drivers’ licenses, but he has also supported their getting in-state tuition rates at Floridian universities. Of course, until last week Scott had probably never thought about immigrants from anywhere but Mexico and Central America, but now that he knows the word “Syria” he’s opposed to all things Syrian.
So, enough with the hashtags and photos of peace signs. I’m off to write to my governor — and I hope you will, too. Nous sommes tous Francais.
Thanks for the sensitive and thoughtful post. I’m proud to live in California, where we have already pledged to accept Syrian refugees.
I caution others about stereotyping refugees, just as we would not want to be stereotyped. The research I’ve seen says that immigrants tend to adopt the values of the country they immigrate to, not vice versa. Once they live in a land where LGBT people are accepted—granted, that is not everywhere—and count LGBT people as their friends and neighbors, they may do the same.
Thanks for your posting, Gillian. The world just seems to be spinning into an ugly spiral dance with religious tensions at the center of it. I’ve long since given up hope for the species as we seem hopelessly entangled in territorial, economic, and religious imbroglios. Living in a repressive and corrupt Muslim country, I myself have thought that when I’m back in the US, the last thing I want is a bunch of conservative Muslims moving into my neighborhood, setting back the progress we have fought decades for. Why should we? Because it’s the right thing, the PC thing to do? OK, those are valid reasons, but frankly, when the rubber hits the road, I don’t want my precious freedom lost to an incursion of no doubt very conservative religious refugees. And believe me, it hurts to say that…I am after all, a teacher of impoverished refugees, so I deal with them directly.
George W. Bush opened the gates of hell and the whole world is now paying for it. I’m terribly sorry for that. We didn’t vote for him. We protested the war in Iraq but now look what’s come of it. With all that is going on I have come to the conclusion that it’s every man for himself, knowing full well that that attitude will lead us to eventual destruction. It’s inevitable.
Do YOU, dear Gillian, want a Syrian family to move in next door to you who will roundly condemn you for being a lesbian once they’ve gotten their feet on the ground enough to protest you and your (and my) liberal ways? We shouldn’t kid ourselves, these refugees are not going to magically transform their value systems upon arrival.