There have been similar demonstrations in Norway and Britain, where, last week, demonstrators invoking the Black Lives Matter message obstructed traffic into London’s Heathrow airport. But this time, a local incident has intersected with an international current, translating “Black Lives Matter” into French and galvanizing a message increasingly global in its appeal. Annette Davis, another organizer of Black Lives Matter in France, criticized what she sees as the more general problem of the French government’s refusal to accept that people of color can experience life differently. Yet this is a country that colonized so much of the world, and there are so many black and brown faces in France. To the French state, race — as a quantifiable category but also a separate social experience — is not supposed to exist.

Source: Washington Post August 08, 2016 08:15 UTC