On racist Jean-Paul Guerlain, from Johny Pitts's brilliant "Afropean: Notes From Black Europe"

The following passage is from Johny Pitts's wondrous Afropean: Notes From Black Europe that I am currently reading. It is a singular walk through life and distances, mainly distances inside people's minds.

All of what follows is from the Paris section of the book.

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World-famous French perfumier Jean-Paul Guerlain had appeared on long-running primetime news and culture show 13 Heures and said, without blinking an eye, ‘I worked like a nigger [on my new fragrance]. I don’t know if niggers have always worked like that, but anyway …’ To ‘work like a nigger’, Guerlain later claimed, was a harmless phrase used commonly by people of his generation, you know, back in the good old days, when it was okay to be racist.

When I asked Shirley why he would feel comfortable using this language on a major TV show, she said that it always happened in France and that white people had become so accustomed to nobody raising their voices that the recent rise of discontent from black communities had come as something of a shock. Shirley was right about the black community finally standing up to racism, quite literally: about five hundred black French men and women were standing outside the Guerlain store on the Champs-Élysées, and when I visited the anti-Guerlain Facebook page there were thousands of page likes.

Jean-Paul Guerlain represented old European privilege, as the inheritor of a dynasty started by his great-grandfather, who sold perfume to Napoleon III in the mid-nineteenth century. Napoleon III was the man who opened up France’s foreign policy in order to extend the French Empire and encourage the country’s second age of colonial rule. Indeed, the Paris of the Champs-Élysées and Haussmann boulevards was made possible only because of the riches brought from the continued expansion of colonialism and slavery from the seventeenth century through to the nineteenth century, the type that funded the Industrial Revolution and led to much of Europe’s prosperity.

The store was covered in red, white and black banners reading ‘Boycott Guerlain’, and Renée Clément, who was from the pan-African OÉUA (Organization of the United States of Africa) was shouting through a megaphone at the crowds. Her hair was scraped back and she wore scarlet lipstick, making her look elegant in a severe kind of way, like the boss of a Fortune 500 company. She was surrounded by members of her organization and by many other black activists, all with the same look, and the scene reminded me of a 70s Black Panther rally: the form was important to the function of the words; the group emitted angry but composed and intellectual black power. They were all dressed in black streamlined clothes, roll necks and leathers, Afros and braids, and the gathering crowd and activists all appeared to know each other. In Europe, I don’t think I’d personally ever witnessed a scene so black and organized and beautiful.

It was a sunny Saturday on Paris’s most famous stretch of road and the demonstration had caused Guerlain to close its flagship store. This wasn’t the first demonstration either, and it wouldn’t be the last. There wasn’t any notice on the store to explain why it wasn’t open, but what could they say? Our master perfumer called black people niggers and it looks like there might be some around today, so we’re closed. Business will resume when everyone’s forgotten what was said. But nobody did forget and, thanks to the continued protests and pressure by the ‘Boycott Guerlain’ groups, Jean-Paul Guerlain, the last family master perfumer still connected to the business, was taken to court for his actions, resulting in the brand’s parent company severing all ties.

The crowd outside Guerlain grew larger and louder and carried banners that read, ‘I don’t work like a nigger either,’ and I noticed a group of tall, imposing black men moving through the signs, dressed in black and with the aura of an entourage of security guards. Leading them was a guy who had the presence of a heavyweight boxer, Rex Kazadi, a former gang member from the banlieues who’d turned a corner and was now taking part in politics. This group of men oversaw the proceedings with a certain amount of detachment, then wandered off up the Champs-Élysées like they were on some kind of mission. They walked so purposefully I decided to follow them and, when I finally caught up, I asked Rex where they were going. He shot me a stare and said, ‘Revolution is not about talking, it’s about action.’

We entered an expensive-looking shopping mall near L’Opéra and headed straight over to the Guerlain counter. There were perhaps ten men, all over six feet tall, and they circled the kiosk with their backs to it, staring sternly out at the petit-bourgeois consumers. It was clear nobody would be shopping at Guerlain today. I was also dressed in black, and for a while I didn’t know if I was part of this rogue demonstration or not. Before leaving I managed to get Rex’s number and, after a few texts back and forth, he said he would meet me in Clichy-sous-Bois, one of France’s most notorious banlieues.

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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://niklasblog.com/?p=23886

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