Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France by Crystal Marie Fleming (review)

Crystal Marie Fleming’s Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France engages France’s greatest paradox, the popular understanding of race and racism. In this impressive study, the author examines contemporary discourses about the nation’s relationship with slavery. Combing a review of historical contexts, an analysis of statements from politicians, interviews with members of the African diaspora, and participant-observer ethnographies of memorial events, Fleming finds a radical disconnect between the alleged official consensus of a color-blind France and the racist realities of institutionalized white supremacy. She holds that most white French citizens actively embrace a collective historical amnesia, conveniently forgetting the nation’s active role in the Atlantic slave trade and the ways in which the brutal exploitation of the labor of black slaves directly benefited white slave owners in the Caribbean as well as the consumers of sugar and coffee produced on island plantations. While a work of sociology, Resurrecting Slavery shows an impressive command of history. In her historiographic review, Fleming persuasively demonstrates that French academics have failed to integrate slavery and white supremacy into the national narrative. Thus, both popular opinion and scholarship fall victim to the self-congratulatory myth of color-blind France. This is seen most explicitly in the refusal of the post-World War Two French state to recognize race as a social category. Fearing that to acknowledge race is an act of racism, the republic does not have demographic records of how many people of color live in France. As with Harry Potter’s Voldemort, one should not even name the problem.

Fleming juxtaposes this alleged post-racialism with the diverse ways in which the people of the African diaspora in France self-identify. Not surprisingly, she finds that black people want their history acknowledged. They also report a host of ways in which they have been subject to racist discrimination. French attempts at not seeing race frustrate many of her interviewees. Resurrecting Slavery holds that the failure to acknowledge race is fundamental to French white supremacy. Yet Fleming demonstrates that there are numerous tensions and often heated debates within the diaspora community. One of the most important issues she identifies is basic terminology. From the use of the English “Black” to the cumbersome “Descendent of Slaves,” no one word can capture the myriad identities and diverse histories. Resurrecting Slavery notes an important fault line between first- and second-generation immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa and Antilleans who have been French since 1848. The genius of the book lies in the way in which it unsettles the received wisdom and the alleged consensus on being black within France’s institutionalized white supremacy. While not offering any solutions, Fleming shines a spotlight on the long-ignored problems of race in France.