cool

Thank you SO VERY MUCH for your time as a reader and as an artist!

This is remarkable. I am really just so moved by this!

Also why didn't we see any Algerians on those streets in Paris in s2?? What the hell... Mind you, Algerians were getting drowned to death in the Seine river at the time and beaten up and shot by the police, yet somehow none of that is ever shown.

Paris is just shown as post-WW2, famished, but nothing of the ensuing racist violence against the Algerians who peacefully asked for their freedom only to get tied up and drowned into the river. It's not even mentioned besides Daniel making the comment about Algerians being mistreated at the time, but if you don't know the history of it, everybody brushes past it, and most people did, sadly...

Maybe it's my wishful thinking but I'm just extremely passionate about the history of decolonial movements and there is a very deep history of solidarity between Algerians and Black anti-racist movements, and overall global anti-colonial movements.

After the Algerian liberation war from France, Algeria became what many called the "mecca of revolutionaries" and sheltered anti-colonial and anti-racist groups and leaders like the Black Panthers, and funded them, alongside many other groups that fought for independence of their countries.

I highly recommend reading Frantz Fanon, he lived in Algeria himself and has a very deep understanding of Algerians and internalized hatred that the colonized suffers.

There's a universe where I get my decolonial antiracist vampire show where stuff actually gets addressed beyond Louis simply saying "well I'm not Algerian"

I'm not faulting him for this btw, I understand what he meant, that he felt more free as a Black American man in France than in the US, obviously, although there was a lot to question about that considering the fact France was still a colonial power in many African countries and in the Caribbean, and still is to this day, with the lands they still won't relinquish.

I would've liked to see Louis develop like this, surely he would've been involved in funding pro-Black groups. One of my mutuals (@usaginoir), highly recommend their takes btw, referred to Louis as a champagne socialist which I agree with, and I feel like him being a bit of a rich philanthropist who feels like he's doing some good but his money still comes from exploitation so he's still NOT fixing the root issue would've been fascinating to explore.

But again, I never expected the showrunners to do right by its POC characters, look how they treated their Black and South Asian characters, ofc Algerians are just a footnote of history for Paris here, despite their importance (the Algerian war literally caused a change in regime and constitution in France btw).

Also this post might sound more emotional than usual, I was reading up on the history of racism in France specifically for that post I promised y'all, and ofc I had to read up on French colonialism again.

Sigh, I cried, it's hard. It's very personal to me, my grandfathers were both revolutionary fighters, my family suffered extreme violence from French soldiers and some relatives (my grandfather's uncle) were murdered very gruesomely. It's not a pretty history at all. Many of my female relatives, the elders, told me sometimes, that when they heard the sounds of French soldiers approaching the village, they'd hide in the basements and cover themselves in dirt and the most disgusting things they could find to try to "make themselves repulsive".

I don't have a nice way to end this post unfortunately, beyond that I'm still taking notes for my future post, because there is far less evidence for racism when it comes to Indians/South Asians in France since they weren't as present to begin with, HOWEVER, I have plenty of material to do with when it comes to orientalism itself and racism overall, so I can work with that. So stay tuned.

This killed me oml😭 feels very appropriate to your blog

Most Black folks in the US have a deeply painful racial story having to do with interactions with white "friends," including me.

I had a unique experience of going to very diverse schools my entire life, but my family moved out to a mostly white suburb when I was around 11 or 12 years old. So I had friends of all kinds of different backgrounds at school, but my neighborhood friends were almost entirely white. Which was mostly fine as a kid. I even had two of these friends as groomsmen in my wedding.

Things changed shortly after the murder of Trayvon Martin. This is when I started getting more vocal online about racism, anti-Blackness, and the injustices I was observing and grieving throughout the country. It didn't take long at all for the friends from this group to go from uncomfortable, to combative, and then to all blocking me on social media. Once I started talking about race too much, they abandoned me by walking out of my life, which was incredibly painful. These were all very nice, generous, and kind people in every other context of their lives. But something about their racial identity development caused them to turn on me immediately once my voice around race became uncomfortable for them.

Those experiences, along with countless others I've had in my life from white peers, white educators, white store employees, and more, have taught me to be very careful about trusting white folks. Because I have been burned in so many ways in my life.

Because white woman are minorities in the sense that they're also women who experience misogyny, but still often perpetuate racism and act as if they understand women of color when they're often extremely racist to us and don't really care about women who dont look like them, feminism as an overarching movement often heavily focused on white women specifically and in the fight against bigotry they often center themselves and act like they're just helpless victims to the system and not active participants in systematic racism just because they're women, so yes white people in general, but i highlighted white women specifically because its very common for them to have the same attitude as white queers of "because im apart of x minority group i cant be racist\automatically believe im the most progressive thing ever" and try to act like allies when they're just as bad in perpetuating the system and not taking women of color seriously.

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