[transcription of remarks by Norman Adjari, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xfdl8Hmbik]
Because we believe that reading is better than listening or watching, and because we believe that it is important to have what our colleagues say read: we want to open a collection of documents that record their words. This is why we are reproducing as faithfully as possible the text of Norman Adjari's public interview given on a television show.
Journalist: So why can we talk about state racism today in a country like France where there are no racial laws like there have been in other countries? Why not use another expression?
Norman Adjari: Maybe, well, I think the problem with this type of counter-argument is that they carry an extremely naive conception of what a state is; that is to say that as long as there are no explicit laws on these questions there on the racial question, well, there is no racism, no state racism.
In reality, it seems that we must proceed in the opposite way, that is to say that we must first consider what the state does and not simply the discourse that the state carries on itself. This is what explains the statistics that I gave earlier, this is what explains the other types of violence, the innumerable types of discrimination suffered by populations from immigrant backgrounds, particularly African ones.
In reality, when we say that we are in a situation which is absolutely different from that of apartheid or other regions of this kind, I think that in reality we are committing an anachronism.
If we consider the discourse on itself that the apartheid state held from 1948 where this in South Africa, where this regime was applied, we see that in reality we spoke of "separate developments" and we had on what this policy of separate developments was a whole series of extremely sugary words to say that "these lands that it allowed good neighborliness", that it would allow "the unity of the country".
In fact, if you listen to what Hendrick Verwoerd, who was the Prime Minister of the South African state at the time and leader of the National Party that implemented these policies, said: well, you play his speeches and you say to yourself that it is pretty much the same speech as the Politicians today are holding on to secularism or migration policy. These are things "which make the unity of the nation possible", which "allow everyone to flourish in their own situation", etc. [1]
The idea that South African politicians at the time were people who were explicitly racist or who absolutely affirmed racism is an anachronism and it is an aberration. There were racial laws exactly as there are Islamophobic laws in this country (in France)..[2]
