3 hours ago
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The day before Christmas Eve, just as France readied itself to slip into the holiday slowdown, something abruptly shook me out of any festive torpor. The satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, known globally and tragically for being the target of an Islamist attack in 2015 published a caricature – of me. And it was appallingly racist. A huge, toothy grin, an enormous mouth, the cartoon depicts me dancing on a stage before an audience of laughing white men, adorned with a banana belt on a largely exposed body. The headline: “The Rokhaya Diallo Show: Mocking secularism around the world.”
Stunned by the violence of this grotesque cartoon, I shared it on social media with a brief analysis: “In keeping with slave-era and colonial imagery, Charlie Hebdo once again shows itself incapable of engaging with the ideas of a Black woman without reducing her to a dancing body – exoticised, supposedly savage – adorned with the very bananas that are hurled at Black people who dare to step into the public sphere.”
The reference to Josephine Baker was as obvious as it was disrespectful and incomprehensible. One of the most iconic performances of the American-born dancer, actor and activist in the 1920s involved Baker in a (rubber) banana skirt, at a time when France took pride in displaying what it claimed was its superiority over the territories of its colonial empire. But Baker was far more than the act whose erotic charge she deliberately chose to subvert through exaggerated, clownish gestures. She was a member of the French Resistance, a recipient of France’s highest military honours, the only woman to speak at the 1963 March on Washington led by Martin Luther King Jr, and the only Black woman interred in Le Panthéon, the national mausoleum for France’s greatest figures. I was therefore dismayed to see the Baker legend reduced to a grotesque, minstrel show-like grimace.
From the moment I posted my reaction, the controversy took off. Millions upon millions of views across my social media, outraged reactions and analytical content produced in several languages to unpack the image’s colonial undertones. I received a level of attention and support that I could not have imagined when I first shared my disgust.
But instead of acknowledging the obvious racism, Charlie Hebdo used the clumsiest form of gaslighting. The magazine responded to the wave of protests by accusing me of a “manipulation” – one I was supposedly familiar with – claiming that I had “distorted” the image by presenting it “separated from its text”. As though any accompanying article could possibly justify the use of such despicable imagery.
The said article accuses me of being “America’s little sweetheart”, operating from foreign platforms such as the Guardian to smear what they call “my country of birth” – a phrasing that, to my mind, insinuates that I am not fully French. As a Black Muslim woman, I am well aware that any public criticism of France is routinely read by racists as the betrayal of an ungrateful immigrant’s daughter. Yet even setting aside this poisonous framing of my positions, the article offers no coherent link – neither political, nor historical, nor symbolic – to Josephine Baker. It has absolutely nothing to do with Josephine Baker, or with bananas.
The most absurd element lies in Charlie Hebdo’s conclusion, where the magazine claims to be “an anti-racist, feminist, and universalist newspaper” which, in its view, is what I “blame” it for. In a move that France has perfected, an all-white editorial team defends a racist cartoon drawn by a white man by turning the accusation back on to the Black victim – an author of some 20 books and documentaries on race and gender – branding her as hostile to anti-racism and feminism. It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic.
In my message denouncing this drawing, I also wrote, “this hideous cartoon is meant to remind me of my place in the racial and sexist hierarchy”, because I fully understood what lay behind this device. Stripping me and placing me in a humiliating posture is a way of discrediting me as a legitimate interlocutor, of reminding me of the fate imposed on my ancestors, whose humanity was denied.
Josephine Baker made her dancing debut in Paris at the age of 19. Before her death in 1975, she became a film actor, the most photographed woman in the world, a pilot, a spy for France – the nation she made her own – and an anti-racist activist, among many other things. Yet Charlie Hebdo proved incapable of invoking her in any way other than by reducing her to a naked body costumed in colonial trappings.
And what matters here is this: our trajectories have little in common. The decision to link me to a 19-year-old woman (I am 47) who rose to fame a century ago in a field that has nothing to do with mine reveals the extent to which white supremacy renders Black women interchangeable.
In this controversy, the issue is not only about me but about all of us who, on a daily basis, are confronted with misogynoir – the intertwining of sexist and anti-Black violence theorised by academic Moya Bailey – that descends on any Black woman who dares to step outside the secondary role to which postcolonial societies persist in trying to confine her.
Charlie Hebdo sought to sanction a woman it deemed too audacious, and a Black person who does not rely on the French media to make her voice heard. It is no coincidence that among the thousands of messages of support I received – including a statement from the historic Ligue des Droits de l’Homme – was one from the former French justice minister Christiane Taubira, the first Black woman to hold that position in 2012.
Taubira was herself subjected to some of the most vicious racist attacks, including a vile Charlie Hebdo cartoon. With the exceptional command of language she is renowned for, Taubira characterised the drawing as “intellectually impoverished, visually flat, stylistically bland, semantically mediocre, and psychologically obsessive”.
By attempting to discredit me as a legitimate participant in the public debate, Charlie Hebdo has also laid bare its unwillingness to engage on an equal footing. In seeking to humiliate me, the magazine has soiled itself – and debased the very freedom of expression of which it had become a symbol.
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Rokhaya Diallo is a French journalist, writer, film-maker and activist
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