there’s a lot i don’t agree with here but good ending, from aaron bady:
Laïcité means that while some kinds of blasphemous satire are officially supported by the state – in the case of Charlie Hebdo, to the tune of one million euros – others are outlawed. Laïcité describes how a nationally-mandated theory of colorblind post-racialism can become a defense of majoritarian privileges: some forms of religious observation become invisible and naturalized (those which have become private, a matter of personal conscience), while those with a public component—those that might challenge the State’s injunction to have No Other God Before Me—will render their practitioners ineligible for citizenship. To be Muslim is to be something other than “Français de souche,” then, because Islam is a religion and “French” is not-religion. There are the essentially French—whose Christianity has long found ways to integrate into the secular state religion—and then there are those who need papers to (partially) counterbalance their immigrant origin, whose religion will refer back to it, no matter how many hexagonal generations they can trace back.
There are so many ways to not praise Charlie Hebdo, then, but one is to pretend that it is something other than an arrogant expression of French secularism. Laïcité is in the French constitution and expresses a French chauvinism that is either a good thing or a bad thing, but is definitely a thing. It is a white mythology, as a great French African author once put it; it pretends to be universal by hiding its origin, even from itself. And when those who praise Charlie Hebdo also demand that you have to understand French culture to understand Charlie, when they claim it’s a French thing–You Anglophone rubes just can’t understand this particular mode of special hexagonal humor!—what they are saying so very clearly is that it’s a culturally-rooted and nationalist tradition. You can think that this is a good thing or you can think that this is a bad thing. But to pretend that it isn’t a thing – to pretend that weaponized Laïcité is something other than an arrogant expression of a particular majoritarian culture – is to fall into exactly the kind of hypocrisy that Charlie Hebdo ostensibly stands against, blindness to self of the self-righteous. French universalism is deeply parochial, as anyone who doesn’t have their head up their France understands. Let’s not praise Charlie Hebdo for this; they deserve better. More here.