Founding text

Today we are facing an unprecedented wave of identity within higher education and research. A militant movement intends to impose a radical critique of democratic societies, in the name of a so-called "decolonialism" and an "intersectionality" that believes it is combating inequalities by assigning each person to identities of "race" and religion, sex and "gender". These societies, assimilated to "the West" at the expense of any rigorous geographical and historical approach, are condemned as colonial and patriarchal and as places where "systemic racism" is rife, in discourses confusing science and propaganda. This ideological movement is proceeding with a methodical occupation of positions of scholarly prestige, which has brought it out of marginality despite the extremism, intolerance and vindictiveness that characterize it.

The ideologues at work there intend to "deconstruct" all knowledge. For them, it is not a question of freely exercising the rights of scholarly thought over its objects and methods, but of conducting the critique of knowledge in a spirit of extreme relativism, discrediting the very notion of truth. All knowledge is exclusively reduced to issues of power, and the sciences are systematically denounced because of the dominations of race, culture, and gender, which are supposedly at their foundation. 

Activism and "deconstruction" thus combine to limit the exercise of critical rationality and reasoned scientific debate. The new credo of decolonialism and identity ideologies is spreading on social networks that amplify it, and its followers target anyone who refuses conversion: phenomena of censorship, intimidation, and political discrimination have established unprecedented divisions and lead young doctoral students to align themselves with the new mandarins under penalty of never obtaining positions. 

However, the problem is far from being limited to the profession of teacher-researchers. Indeed, the question of science raises that of the training on which the School, the keystone of the Republic, is based. In addition, the methodical conquest of a cultural hegemony results in a growing influence on the media, which considerably limits the space for democratic debate.

It is precisely because it is crucial to combat racist and sexist discrimination in our society that it is necessary to combat these new forms of fanaticism. These allow themselves noble causes without providing any valid solution to the problems raised. Moreover, these new fanatical militancy proceed to curious inversions. In the name of “political anti-racism,” racial identities are claimed and individuals are assigned to their “whiteness” or their non-whiteness. By claiming to develop an “inclusive” writing, we intend to impose a spelling contrary to the foundations of the language, impossible to teach, and therefore deeply exclusionary. Instead of developing knowledge that is socially and historically situated, we claim to confine all knowledge to a gender, a race, a culture or an age, which are thus essentialized into identities. This is not how we combat racism, sexism or inequalities within a nation or between nations. And this identity-based movement which is growing within the University threatens in return to cause the growth of other forms of identity-based movement outside the University.

By launching the Observatory of Decolonialism and Other Identity Ideologies That Present Themselves as Scholarly, we call for an end to the regimentation of research and the transmission of knowledge. This is why we invite all people of good will in the world of higher education and research to contribute to the work of the Observatory, to disseminate it and use its databases, to note with us the ridiculousness of these dogmatic discourses that ignore everything about distance from oneself. To firmly resist the ideological intimidations that fuel obscurantism, we must defend pluralism and the taste for discussion on rational bases.