Christiane taubira biography of martin
Whose ‘Post-Racial’ ‘Post-Black’ Is It?: USA, France, Italy, and England
1In Europe and the United States there have been utterings of ‘postracial’ and ‘post-black’ ways-of-being and thinking. We can point to films, theatrical performances, and the literary arts, as is sometimes suggested in classrooms, newspaper editorials, and at academic conferences. Individual artists have sought a personal place that is inclusive of our many identities—sexual, ethnic, gendered, and racial. Their critical moves have fractured previous monolithic and binary notions of unique identities in an effort to embrace, celebrate, and challenge a one-dimensional personhood. This indicates a transnational, transracial change that occurs in real social time. It catalyzes issues of a postcolonial awareness, which in turn complicates monolithic selfhoods, when plural forms of being and thinking come into existence. This is especially true in Western countries like France, Italy, England, and the United States, where formerly colonized and enslaved populations struggle, demand, and fight for their civil rights. Here, I refer to racial, national, gendered, ethnic, and LGBTQ communities as they interrogate the dominant ways of being, thinking, and pseudo-legal judgments of the status quo.
2A few examples of these struggles are the movements for same-sex marriage, women’s rights in India, and the increasing presence of people of color in leadership positions in what was formerly a white male domain of national politics.
3 Using recent audio-visual and print images, I will show the obvious inconsistencies, at least in my view, of ‘post-racial’ and ‘post-black’ thinking when one witnesses the ‘everyday’ racial injustices that percolate and collide against the fortunate raced-ones, who reach the summit of their professional careers.
4Barack Obama’s election as the first black president of the United States challenges the idea that American racial injustices remain. However, the sanctity o Timothy RybackWednesday 12 August 2020 Pic: A worker cleans the defaced statue of Jean-Baptiste Colbert in Paris, France, June 2020. Shutterstock.com/ Thibault Camus As cities scrambled to remove statues amid surging Black Lives Matter protests, the President of France stood firm. Global Insight explains why. ‘The Republic will unbolt no statue,’ Emmanuel Macron told his nation in a televised address in June 2020. France, Macron said, would ‘not erase any trace or any name from its history.’ This was not bunkered conservatism, nor jingoistic nationalism. It was a President speaking from a moral high ground. In 2001, the Loi Taubira recognised slavery and the slave trade as a ‘crime against humanity’ and obligated municipalities to address legacies of slavery in their public spaces, including their statues and street names. As the French now know, it was more easily promulgated than done. Named after Christiane Taubira, a French politician of French Guianese heritage, the Loi Taubira is officially known as the ‘Law of May 21, 2001.’ Along with embedding this dark legacy in the French penal code (Article 1), the Loi Taubira also mandated, among other things, the inclusion of the history of the slave trade in the national curriculum (Article 2), as well as the creation of a committee ‘responsible for proposing, throughout the national territory, locations and activities that guarantee the sustainability of the memory of this cross across the generations.’ This included street names. Contested histories This article is authored by Timothy Ryback on behalf of the group of experts convened by the IBA, the Salzburg Global Seminar and IHJR. This group is preparing a volume of eight case studies addressing the social, political and legal dynamics in facilitating or complicating the resolution of public disputes over contested historical legacies There has been a sudden spike recently in expressions of racism in French public life—one that has provoked a national debate and may lead to legal action this week. It began last month, when a candidate for the right-wing National Front likened Christiane Taubira, the Justice Minister, who is black, to a monkey, pairing her photograph with one of a chimpanzee on a Facebook page. Although the leader of the National Front, Marine Le Pen, forced the candidate to withdraw, the attacks continued. During some of the protests against France’s new gay-marriage law (which Taubira, as Justice Minister, pushed), the crowds chanted “Taubira, t’es foutue, les Français sont dans la rue.” (“Taubira, you’re fucked, the French are in the street!”) At one rally, a twelve-year-old child symbolically presented Taubira with a banana. Last week, in a long and exasperated interview with Libération, Taubira said, _“_With me, people feel they can say, ‘The French are in the streets,’ ” the implication being that Taubira is not one of them. (She was born in French Guiana, an overseas département of France, and so has been a citizen since birth.) “Apart from my own personal case, these racist attacks are an attack on the heart of the Republic,” she said. “Our social cohesion, the history of the nation, is placed in question.” The right-wing magazine Minute promptly responded with a cover story bearing the title “Taubira Finds Her Banana.” This does not appear to be an isolated case. The National Commission for the Rights of Man (C.N.C.D.H.), which has been charged by the French parliament to monitor incidents of racism in France, noted a twenty-three-per-cent increase in incidents of racism, Islamophobia, and anti-Semitism last year, and a five-fold increase over the past twenty years. The Taubira affair has set off something of a national debate on the origins and responsibility for this ugly recrudescence of racism. Is French culture deeply racist? Is racism itself increasing French politician (born 1952) Christiane Marie Taubira (French:[kʁistjanmaʁitobiʁa]; born 2 February 1952) is a French politician who served as Minister of Justice of France in the governments of Prime MinistersJean-Marc Ayrault and Manuel Valls under President François Hollande from 2012 until 2016. She was a member of the National Assembly of France for French Guiana from 1993 to 2012 and member of the European Parliament from 1994 to 1999. She won the 2022 French People's Primary, winning the right to stand as a "unity left" candidate in the 2022 French presidential election. It was her second bid after the 2002 French presidential election where she failed to qualify to the second round after garnering only 2.32% of the votes in the first round. She dropped out of the race on 2 March 2022 after failing to get enough support to qualify. Taubira was born on 2 February 1952 in Cayenne, French Guiana, France, as one of 11 siblings and raised by a single mother. Among others, she is the sister of French politician Jean-Marie Taubira, Secretary General of the Guianese Progressive Party. Taubira studied economics at Panthéon-Assas University, African Americanethnology, sociology at Paris-Sorbonne University and food industry at the French Center for Agricultural Cooperation. Having served as President of the Walwari Party, Taubira from 1993 served as a Deputy to the French National Assembly, being re-elected in 1997. Non-affiliated in 1993, she then voted in favour of the conservative Prime Minister Edouard Balladur to form a Cabinet of ministers in 1993. In the 1994 European elections Taubira became a Member of the European Parliament (MEP), being the fourth on the Énergie Radicale list led by Bernard Tapie. In Erase no trace: Vive la France!
Christiane Taubira
Early life
Political career
Early beginnings
Member of the European Parliament, 1994–1999