Woke American Ideas are a Threat, French leaders say

[Red Velvet]

I agree with France, identity politics can be good but in practice they end up doing more bad.

[Red Velvet]

It's okay, Europeans have their own equally stupid but probably more dangerous forms of identity politics.


Is anyone else a bit tired of how the word "woke" is being used now? What the hell does it even mean? Like "identity politics", it's another scare word or term that means whatever you want it to mean.

Not really. Wokeness = ID politics and the latter has been long used by left-wing thinkers to criticize a strategy that segregates different segments of society in order to make them fight between each other instead of the ones who really are on the top and hold almost all the power.

It’s often a distraction strategy to strengthen the savage capitalist logic of our days and individualist fights (“the cause of MY group is more important than YOUR fight”). Which is terrible in practice, but identity causes can be good when used for collective purposes instead of self-virtue validation. And when they come from a real activist street base.

[Red Velvet]

Yes, it stands to reason that policies intended to erase a group's identity provide evidence of superior "integration" if "integration" is defined specifically as the erasure of group identity. As a Muslim with no desire to marry outside my religious group, I suppose I am an example of the failure of integration.

Yes. This, but unironically. You are indeed a failure of integration for that

I would indeed define successful integration as you know, "behaving French", adopting French customs, speaking French at home, etc. There are definitely tons of different ways of "being French", but looking at urutzizu's statistics I would indeed consider that France is doing a much better job at integrating its muslim population than the UK; though I am open to statistics that show the opposite.

And no, it is not white nationalism to suggest that. To bring an Spanish example, there is a reason why black Cubans, Dominicans or Colombians are often considered to be better integrated than much whiter Moroccans. It is not a matter of race, it is a matter of culture technically.

Race does have a significant influence on integration, but I agree that culture is by far the most defining factor and inflicts majority of the conflicts.

And by “culture”, it’s usually (almost always) religion differences.

[Red Velvet]

I would indeed define successful integration as you know, "behaving French", adopting French customs, speaking French at home, etc.

Why is this desirable?

Depends on what you believe. Some say a national identity is important in order to have social cohesion, a narrative that unites all the different segments of the population in a common ground they have in order to favor of the country interests and a sense of peace. Otherwise people will fight themselves.

Every country has their own national identity, otherwise what really is a country other than a random piece of land that has a bunch of people with nothing in common that hate each other, having to live with one another?

Problem with France is not that it’s trying to protect their national identity, but their misguided strategy in order to achieve that goal. But other countries are also hypocrites in their construction of different internal narratives and identities, so no one can really judge France too hard imo.

France only gets that much attention because their national identity have strong particularities and are very different than the one constructed in America for example.