Have we lost our minds?

FRANCE: Have some black voters lost their minds?

Just one day after the official results have been released, articles are flooding the internet regarding the French presidential elections.

Some are merely focusing on the so-called victory of Emmanuel Macron who gets to remain in office for another five years when others echo his opponent's official stance and discourse by reporting that her ideas have gained followers.

If you listen to Marine Lepen, daughter of Jean-Marie Lepen who led the far-right French party for decades before she took over in 2011, the numbers are a historical milestone for her party and show that the French voters, including those outside of continental France*, are embracing her proposed reforms and policies like never before.  

Meanwhile, people are getting frantic on social media, trying to make sense of the numbers in the overseas territories ** that had up to now been openly anti-Lepen. The last remaining French colonies in the Americas have mostly a mixed population of predominantly African descent and heritage. Descendants of enslaved Africans, of indentured servants from India and China and a growing pocket of white residents who recently moved to these sunny places for a variety of reasons. 

In Martinique, Guadeloupe and French Guiana, local politicians and ordinary folks alike are asking: "Have my people lost it?"

Have we? Though... 

The answer is no. 

Emmanuel Macron was a nobody when he first got elected in 2017 and people had supported him then, thinking nothing could be worse than a far-right President who is considered by many to be the embodiment  of a racist, xenophobic conservative set of values who would stamp on the human rights of many.

Macron spent five years doing just that. 

The first term of this man leaves us traumatized with police brutality, miscarriages of Justice (see kepone poisoning case, Keziah's case, the Océanis 7's case...), punitive local policies which endangered our livelihoods and health, bullying of health workers... His hands are covered with blood.

He isn't well liked, that's an understatement but he still has supporters and allies in France as a whole. People who would back his every move again. People who will again turn a blind eye to the discriminatory policies implemented at local level at Macron's request.

Lepen, on the other hand, has many ennemies and in a system that splits ruling power between the president and the parliament reps, it would have been easier to find people to block any dangerous bill proposal from her if she'd been elected. If you look at the numbers from the first round and second round, what happened in the black colonies is pretty obvious. Call it a desperate strategy, if you will. Choosing the venomous snake instead of the constrictor one, in the hope that someone would give us the antidote in time. 

Black voters have not suddenly fallen in love with the Lepenist agenda.

*****

Emmanuel Macron, President for all?

(note: his presidential poster says "Us all" while his opponent'ssaid "President for all"...)

There is nothing to celebrate.

The newly re-elected Macron is the same man who publicly vowed to "bully some more those who aren't vaccinated" and is the French president who made "war on all forms of separatisms" a national priority (you may as well call it a "we won't grant independence to any remaining colony" policy). He's also the one who pushed for mandatory school fir children below age 6 while trying to remove the right for families to choose homeschooling.

Thanks to a strong pushback from many, he was only able to restrict our freedom to homeschool by making it mandatory for people wishing to homeschool their kids to request permission from the government first.

Behind the vaccine-related statement, it's easy to miss the attack on human rights and the malignant disregard for the so-called French-Caribbean populations when taken out of context.

The fact that France has been found to have faciltated instigated or allowed the implementation of local schemes that have endangered our black lives, health and economic developments more than once in the last 50 years should be explanation enough if you're wondering why many in our territories refuse to bow to some of the State mandates regarding health. Even a great number of health workers stand against the liberty-crushing policies and some have been bullied or brutalized for their stance.

Trust is earned. So far, many can't trust a government that has been actively busy trying to dodge the legal repercussions of the mass poisoning (Kepone) they are partly responsible for (along with the béké-owned company selling kepone when it was already banned for its known toxicity). And knowing these same people also allowed big corporations (belonging mostly to descendants of slave-owners/plantation owners, békés...) to produce, release and sell food with dangerously high levels of sugar and salt (unacceptable in the country as a whole) on the local market is not something that fuels trust in Martinican,  Guadeloupean and French Guianian people.

 His military troops of gendarmes and other army corps have been sent to attack peaceful protesters nationwide but he took extra care of our predominantly black territories by sending troops from the continent to bash the skulls of our black children, break the wrists of mothers, sent a new governor (we call them prefects) to oppress anti- colonialist activists, reparation activists, people who were standing peacefully in front of the Justice court of Fort-de-France, demanding reparations...

A couple of weeks after the elections,  anti-colonial8st activists have been arrested with an unreasonable amount of brutality in relation to the destruction of offensive statues from public spaces. 

____________

* continental France: healthier alternative to the commonly used colonialist label of "metropolitan France" or "Métropole" (Metropolis).

The use of the word "métropole" or adjective metropolitain by French speakers regardless of their ethnic or cultural background always signal an accepted/internalized hierarchy putting mainland France on top of colonized territories which are otherwise ironically advertised as being an integral part of the French nation.

** the labels keeps changing when it comes to public discourse regarding the French colonies, in a bid to hide the true nature of what's going on in places such as Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Martinique, Réunion Island.... they went from being acknowledged colonies, French regions, French Districts (with all sorts of acronyms like D.O.M, T.O.M.,...), now some are French peripheral territories according to the U.E. lexicon...