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This article contains some racist and offensive language. Please take care when listening. My Mother the Racist by Didier Eribon Read by Mark Noble When I reconnected with my mother after years of near total absence, years in which we barely spoke, I was struck with compassion for this old woman suffering from so much pain I even felt a tenderness towards her. This was despite everything that had driven us apart and continued to divide us. Her obsessive racism dismayed me.
But in order to avoid always being in conflict, i would only protest half-heartedly when she launched into one of her habitual diatribes herself the daughter of an immigrant a traveler from Andalusia against foreigners who came to our home instead of staying where they came from it doesn't even feel like home here anymore they take everything and there's nothing left for us
against Arabs, or blacks, or Chinese, all of whom she complained about endlessly. The language she used was often considerably cruder than this. It was in part so I would no longer have to listen to this kind of talk that I had stopped seeing her and had fled both my family and this milieu. Nothing had changed after all this time. On this point as on many others she was the same as before.
And yet, if I wished to spend time with her, and I did wish to, or at least it was something I felt I should do, I was going to have to accept her as she was. Nothing about her was going to change. And when I did dare to give expression to my annoyance, she would reply in a firm, almost aggressive tone, I can say what I want in my own home. You can't tell me what to do.
i had no choice but to try to understand her to understand how and why she had become this way and to put aside my spontaneous reactions of dismay My mother had been a batard, an unloved, illegitimate child abandoned by her mother. At the age of 14, she had become a domestic worker, sent to clean the homes of middle-class families.
She went on working as a cleaning lady, then a factory worker, spending her entire life in exhausting, back-breaking work, the victim of a violent and unjust social order. She had always felt herself the subject of scorn. She had experienced endless amounts of humiliation. How then is it possible that she would allow herself to express at every possible moment her hatred of other stigmatized people?
My mother's vehemence while watching television and hurling abuse at those she saw on the screen meant, I think, nothing other than this. Eternally inferior, she allowed herself through these expressions of abhorrence the only feeling of superiority that was socially available to her. The sadly distinctive dignity of not belonging to categories so stigmatised that even someone like her could ostracise and insult them.
It was as if in feeling herself endowed with a capacity to humiliate, even if it was only fictively for herself alone in speaking to the television, she was avenged for having always been among the humiliated. Her verbal vehement in these circumstances was not only painful for me to hear, but it was also difficult to understand. Why all this hatred? What slights, what wrongs had any of those people she railed against done to her?
What pleasure could she take in this pointless, unjustifiable spitefulness? And if she was so angry, why was this anger not directed against other individuals, groups or institutions, ones that bore more responsibility for the difficulties she experienced in her life than did these groups? And since in these moments I was the only person to hear her, Why was she saying all this to me? What irresistible need did she fulfill in manifesting her exasperation in this way in front of her television?
My mother's racism frequently went beyond the limits of what I was willing to put up with in order not to fall out with her. but in truth i did not ever fall out with her just like the background noise of the television this was an unpleasant circumstance that i was required to put up with while i spent time with her Here is one example. My brother, who was living in Africa at the time, came to stay with her for a few days along with his new partner, a woman from Guinea.
As was usual, my brother and my mother spent their time together arguing. Each time he would arrive at my mother's, things would become tense and arguments, including regular shouting matches, became one of the major modes of their interaction. The same thing used to happen any time he ended up in the same room with my father or my older brother. The situation would immediately become tense and they would sometimes come to blow.
My brother is bad-tempered and irascible. Most importantly, he has interiorised to such a degree the idea that men shouldn't have to perform any kind of domestic labour that on this occasion he had asked my mother Where's the laundry you did this morning? She had replied, It's still in the machine. He blew up. Why couldn't you take it out and hang it up to dry? His partner who was pregnant was there resting on the sofa. That is when my mother pointed at her and made this ghastly reply.
What about her? You couldn't tell her to do it? Well, the world is really upside down now if white people have to work for black people. When my mother recounted this scene to me over the telephone, her voice still quivering with indignation yet proud of how she had reacted,
She wanted to show me that she didn't let herself be pushed around, a theme that frequently recurred in the anecdotes she would tell me in which she was always playing a role that enhanced her status. I was so dumbstruck that I thought at first she must be exaggerating. You didn't really say that, did you? Indeed, she had. She insisted on it, repeating the odious sentence to me two or three times. She really had said it.
So I said to her, Maman, you can't say things like that. To which she replied, I'm someone who has a hard time walking. And there she is, lying on the sofa, lounging like a princess, and I'm the one who's supposed to hang up the laundry? I responded, but instead of insulting his wife, you should have told that idiot of a son of yours to take his own laundry out of the machine. It is hard for me to find the words to describe how despondent all these conversations left me.
My brother, so attached to the demands of a conventionally defined masculinity, unable to let go of them for even a brief second, My mother, old and physically diminished, but finding no other way of opposing the stupidity of his ableist and masculinist stance than through the stupidity of her own racism.
From the time I became a student, I had set up my life so that I would no longer have to be confronted by these kinds of statements, ones I had heard day in and day out during my childhood and my adolescence. Yet here they were again, more violent than they had ever been, and I couldn't avoid them. My mother was a racist old woman, and I had no choice but to accept her as such. I could add 10, 20 or 100 more conversations such as the ones I have just described.
Even when my mother was trying to convince me that she was not racist, she was being racist. One day, speaking about her newest grandchild, the son of my brother and of his wife, whom my mother had insulted a few years earlier, she said, He's black, but I think of him the same way as I think of my other grandchildren. I don't treat him differently.
Or there was the time when she needed to find a new doctor closer to home once she had moved back to Reims. I asked her, did you like your new doctor? Yes, I was shocked when I opened the door because, well, you know, he was black. But I liked him fine. But, maman, I didn't ask you if he was black or white. I asked if you liked him.
She responded in that half-stubborn, half-mocking tone of a little old lady that she found it convenient to adopt whenever she didn't feel like arguing, but also didn't want to concede any ground. Yes, yes, yes. I just said I liked him fine. But still, it seemed a little strange to me. Once, when she was still able to travel, when she was on her way to visit my brother in the south of France, she needed to switch from one train station to another in Paris.
She got on the commuter train going in the wrong direction and found herself in the suburbs. That meant getting off the train and asking directions of the travellers waiting on the platform, who explained what she needed to do. I was a little worried, she said to me, because there were only black people, but they were all very nice. I then asked her, but maman, why wouldn't they have been nice to you? She replied, oh, you know, what with everything you see on TV.
Watching television all day also meant absorbing a stream of biased images that nourished and reinforced her already hostile disposition towards a world she barely knew. Parisian commuter trains and the people who lived in the towns on the outskirts of Paris Still, I have to admit that in spite of all these unpleasant episodes...
Watching television also served as a way of spending time together without having to find new topics of conversation. Once we'd covered the usual health issues, family matters, a few memories, a few anecdotes, either new ones or ones repeated for the hundredth time. The two of us could sit there without talking or simply training a few words about the images passing on the screen in front of us.
a science documentary, or a historical or geographical one, or one about animals, or a retrospective look at this or that variety show. After all, being together, being right next to each other without saying anything. is also one of the privileged ways of relating to those we are close to, because it requires a heightened degree of intimacy or of closeness. There was no need for me to make any attempt to keep the conversation going. We were fine like that.
My mother read the regional newspaper on a daily basis. She devoured all the local news, read all the different sections including health and beauty, cooking, advice, interior design, gardening and home improvements, even if she had no garden and made no improvements. and travel, even though she hadn't taken any trips in years. Still, we probably all read pages in the newspaper that have no immediate usefulness for her.
She was a subscriber and what she called my newspaper was delivered to her postbox. There came a time when she decided the subscription was too expensive for her and so she asked to be sent the newspaper only every other day. I offered to pay for her subscription, since it was so important to her that she'd be able to read her newspaper every morning, but she absolutely refused. It's not something you should be paying for. I insisted, but she would not reconsider.
She also read cheesy novels, printed in big type, romances. The covers always had sensual, heterosexual, scenes on them, where a handsome young man embraced an equally young and beautiful woman, suggesting that the plot would be more than simply sentimental. When, out of curiosity, I picked one of these volumes up off the coffee table in front of her sofa, my mother said, with a forced laugh, as if worried I was going to judge her somehow, leave that be. It's not a book for you.
I know it's nonsense, but I enjoy that kind of thing. there was a day when looking in a small fake antique wooden cabinet a style she liked for a document she had asked me to find I saw in the middle of a row of these novels that she so enjoyed, and that she kept, once she finished reading them, a few old books of mine that I must have left behind with some other belongings when I moved out of the family apartment at the age of 19.
There was Camus' The Stranger alongside Sartre's The Words in the Gallimard paperback edition. and also two volumes from the Maspero pocketbook collection that contain Marx and Engels' writings on syndicalism. Hey, those belong to me! I exclaimed. She looked at them and replied, Oh, well, of course. I mean, obviously I don't read that kind of stuff. And when I added, can I take them? She looked at me with amusement and said, sure, they're yours. What am I going to do?
juxtaposed in the way they were those books in her apartment hers from today mine from long ago existed in direct opposition to each other The two volumes of Marx and Engels left behind in the apartment in the low-income housing complex in Ghans, where we lived while I was a teenager, with their very plain covers, one red, the other purple, had been printed in January 1972.
I had bought them shortly before leaving my family to move into a small room in the centre of town, the first step in my flight, one that would quickly lead me to Paris. Despite their slightly faded colours, these volumes shone rather brightly as symbols of the gap that had already formed. Lying there on the table, they represented the cultural distance that had started to grow between us and that would turn into an ever greater social distance in the years that followed.
My mother had a very strong feeling of the cultural illegitimacy of the kinds of things she read. and of her own taste for this kind of literature. A feeling that she expressed, before I had said the slightest thing on the topic, by declaring to me that the books she read weren't my kind of book.
and that she knew quite well that they were nonsense, or conversely by telling me that those volumes by Marx and Engels were not for her. The volumes I found in that cabinet so many years later and that I put on the table next to the ones my mother was reading, represented this impassable paradox. She was the one who had worked in a factory. I was the one interested in the history of the workers' movement, in the theory of syndicalism.
Thanks for listening to The Guardian Long Read The story continues right after this Hi, we're Backmarket, the home of high-quality, affordable, refurbished tech. Like this laptop. It can binge 18 episodes in one weekend. That is normal, right? This laptop can also write, game, design, browse, private... and do everything a brand new laptop can. There's just one difference.
It costs up to 50% less because it's not new, it's verified refurbished, meaning it's been inspected by industry experts and comes with a year's warranty. Downgrade now. Backmarket. Whoa there. Victoria's had a Friday night to remember. But now she's outside in the pouring rain and... You are joking. I've got no data. How are we going to get home?
But then she remembers she's with EE. Yes, Uber still works. So then she... Uber's on me, guys. Should we get a kebab? Use essential apps like Uber and WhatsApp even when you run out of data. Search EEMobile. Stay connected at 0.5 megabits per second. Terms apply. Welcome back to The Guardian Long Read. Each time I came to see her at her home before she was admitted to the nursing home I could tell that she had hardly any interest in politics or in what politics meant to me.
What she did react to were human interest stories found in the popular press or sensational news items. Did you see something really bad happened? She told me in a shaky voice just after she opened the door one day on my arrival. No, what? I asked. You didn't hear? The bus of tourists that flipped over in a ditch. People died.
Her day was punctuated by the news bulletins brought to her on television. Sensational stories, traffic accidents, celebrity gossip The local newspaper also provided plenty of occasions for her to get riled up, to become indignant and sometimes more rarely to rejoice. Small local stories about a burglary, an assault or a crime committed in town, episodes of extreme bad weather, all took on more importance in her eyes than anything that might be taking place in some far-off country.
Even things happening in nearby nations held no interest for them. My mother always voted or almost always. When she abstained, it was not out of indifference, but as a deliberate and collective gesture of defiance and rejection. Speaking to me one day about Mouison, the village she was then living in, she said, I'm not voting tomorrow. No one goes to vote here. Everyone abstains. We're sick of it all.
This refusal to participate, a phenomenon that has only increased since then, is a way of expressing an opinion. Not only that you do not recognise yourself in any of the candidates that you have to choose from, but also that you do not recognise yourself as part of the electoral process itself. So you choose not to play the game. You stay on the sideline.
Was it because of her age? Which is to say the generation she was part of. She was 15 when women gained the right to vote. That this withdrawal was never a permanent one for her. In any case, she did vote again in the next election.
Since she no longer had any attachment to collective frameworks for working out a political position Since she had so few contacts with the external world, she would choose between candidates based on varying kinds of criteria that were sometimes difficult to understand. She voted for Jean-Marie Le Pen because she wanted to teach them a lesson, at a moment when voting for the National Front started to take root and to thrive in the heart of what used to be the working class.
Then she voted for the extremely reactionary Nicolas Sarkozy against the socialist Ségolène Royal, whom she particularly detested. Then for Sarkozy, again, against the socialist François Hollande. I'm not absolutely sure of that one. And finally, in the first round, for Emmanuel Macron, a former investment banker, even though he stood for everything she had risen up against 20 or 30 years earlier.
When she worked in a factory, she could always be counted on to follow a call to strike or to take part in a work stoppage or an assembly in front of the factory. Her response for this, when I objected, was disconcerting. I know all that, but he's young. Or even more absurdly, yes, but he's handsome.
This was a choice she soon bitterly regretted, ranting about this neoliberal and authoritarian political figure soon after his election, when he had barely had time to announce the first of his measures to cut the social welfare system. making clear that she should have voted for Marine Le Pen and that she would do so the next time around.
It has to be said that as she got older, she arrived at a point where any and everything that sounded leftish or that had to do with the left was utterly detestable to her. As a rule, she was prepared to vote for almost anyone as long as they were opposed to the left. One man she was very taken with, another former factory worker, was even further to the right than she was.
He seemed authentically fascist to me when he showed up one day in the middle of one of my visits to my mother and let out. Nothing works in this country anymore. What we need is a new Hitler. I turned to look at him. He was smiling contentedly. He seemed happy with what he had said. Or was he trying to get under the skin of a leftist Parisian intellectual? Which is what I was for him. Someone who represented everything he despised. Paris. Elites. The system. The left.
I pretended I hadn't understood what he had said and asked my mother some unrelated question. What time is your nurse coming tomorrow? Or some other banal question that served the purpose of changing the topic of the conversation where I could no longer bear remarks that were racist or politically painful for me. was not what I was witnessing there, in real time, in front of me, in her home.
the spectacle of the disintegration of a social class, and of the class consciousness that she was supposed to embody, and that in fact she had embodied in the past. There I was in my mother's living room. and because it was my mother's living room. I was with a woman who was racist and a man who was a neo-fascist or even pro-Nazi. Both of them, former factory workers, people who had in the past represented voters of the left, the social base of leftist parties.
My mother's interest in politics did not seem to go beyond this electoral dimension to which she attached so much importance. As a younger woman, she lived in a politicised world, given that everyone in her family, her brother and his wife, my father, his brothers and sisters, claimed to be leftist. Moreover, as part of the level,
They thought of themselves as belonging to a world of workers in the economic and class-based meaning of the word, but also in the political sense. We, the workers, was a political category. a way of naming how you saw yourself politically. People spoke disparagingly of Harold Wilson and the labourite left of the UK, who wanted merely to reform the system. but whose project, it must be said, would appear to today's mainstream media in the UK, in France and across Europe as radical and extreme.
In the 1970s, people would repeat over and over, for us, it's the programme commun, by which they meant the electoral agreement that the Communist Party had signed with the Socialists. despite the great mistrust in which the socialists were held. It was understood that they were always ready and willing to betray the working class. Still, my mother couldn't help feeling a certain mistrust for unions as well. Or at least for union activists.
They just like telling everyone else what to do. While knowing that they don't risk anything themselves and that other people take the risks for them. Or else they're just doing it to get ahead at work. And it is true that there is no shortage of examples of highly active union delegates who ended up being neutralised by way of a promotion within the workplace.
He sold out. They bought him off, as people used to say. It happened to one of my uncles, who was thereafter judged quite severely by everyone else in the family. even if the judgment might be slightly softened by way of a few understanding comments. Yes, he was a traitor who went over to the boss's side, but given that he was looking to better his situation, Were you going to throw the first stone?
The factory, where my mother worked in the 1970s and 1980s, employed 1,700 men and women as workers, 500 of whom belonged to the Union closest in those days to the powerful Communist Party. There were others who supported or belonged to other unions. This represented a considerable strength when people were mobilised for the long term, and they could be mobilised whenever the occasion called for.
A strike broke out in 1977 to obtain a guaranteed bonus, improvements in working conditions and the rehiring of two workers who had been fired for distributing political tracts at the factory gate. The atmosphere between employers and the workers' unions in the region had become tense since a communist mayor had been elected in Reims at the beginning of the year. massive numbers of workers went out on strike, with a picket line in front of the factories locked gates.
One night some members of a private militia, part of a small right-wing union from another factory with ties to the bosses, drove by in a car and fired some shots at the union members who were there. One of them died. My mother had a strong memory of this dramatic moment. She was one of the strikers, even though she wasn't present at the moment of the shooting. Workers were intensely engaged at the time, and the forces of repression did whatever they could to break their will.
After this murder, there were stoppages and protests in solidarity all over town. And thousands of people attended the funeral of the worker who had been killed. Ten years later, the factory was not doing well. It would soon go under. The number of people who worked there was declining. This was also the case in the other large glassworks in town, as in most of the factories throughout the region.
This meant there were layoffs, or as in the case of my mother, people given early retirement. There were workers who were partially unemployed and others fully unemployed and looking for work. That was quite a while ago, but the buildings are still there. Empty, abandoned, run down. They provide evidence of these kinds of workplaces that seemed straight out of the 19th century, of the violence of capitalism, of the hardship of these kinds of employment.
but they also serve as examples of the kinds of spaces of organized resistance that existed. Where are those workers now? For the most part, they have died. What about their children and grandchildren? Most likely when they aren't stuck in long periods of unemployment. They work in temporary, precarious forms of employment.
They will be employed in various positions having to do with logistics and the warehouses in which a new working class is forming, one in which people work in exhausting conditions and under permanent surveillance. Where are the CGT union cards? What happened to the collective strength that one saw in my mother's generation? I went to visit the factory again shortly before my mother's death.
The outside walls were covered in graffiti and posters for the National Front. Inside was a picture of desolation. The windows were broken. The ground was covered with broken bottles and shards of glass. There were orange-red rubber washers everywhere. The ones that would have been used on the jars to which workers attached the circles of metal that held the covers in place. In the midst of this scene of ruin I reflected on what my mother's existence had been, on the world she had belonged to.
I thought of the oppressive heat. that would assault all the bodies working there. from the manufactured furnaces, filling these spaces that were now empty and windswept. I thought of the infernal noise as well, of the harshness of all of these kinds of jobs, of the danger caused by the dust from the materials in use, of all the workplace injuries, many of them extremely serious ones. I thought of those days gone by.
then i thought of the nursing home awaiting her the one i was about to help her move into There it is, I said to myself. That's what the life of a working class woman was. And that's what her old age is. Thanks again for listening to The Guardian Long Read. That was My Mother the Racist by Didier Eribon, read by Mark Noble, and produced by Nicolas Alexandrou.
The executive producer was Danielle Stevens. Translated by Michael Lucy. Adapted from The Life, Old Age and Death of a Working Class Woman. Published by Alan Lane on the 25th of March. To support The Guardian, buy your copy from bookshop.theguardian.com For more Guardian long reads in text and a selection in audio, go to theguardian.com forward slash long read.
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Hi, we're Backmarket, the home of high-quality, affordable, refurbished tech. Like this laptop. It can binge 18 episodes in one weekend. That is normal, right? This laptop can also write, game, design, browse... and do everything a brand new laptop can. There's just one difference. It costs up to 50% less because it's not new, it's verified refurbished, meaning it's been inspected by industry experts and comes with a year's warranty.
Downgrade now. Backmarket. Whoa there. Victoria's had a Friday night to remember. But now she's outside in the pouring rain and... You are joking. I've got no data. How are we going to get home? But then she remembers she's with EE. Yes, Uber still works. So then she... Uber's on me, guys. Should we get a kebab? Use essential apps like Uber and WhatsApp even when you run out of data. Search EEMobile. Stay connected at 0.5 Mbps. Terms apply.