WHERE WOKISM IS A OUI BIT DIFFERENT:

But why now, and why in a country like France, with its very different history from the United States? For that matter, why has wokeism taken hold in other European countries, where the radical movement seems in many ways to be an imitation of its American counterpart?

In France, there’s an oft-noted irony within the answer. Despite vocabulary that seems appropriated from American academia, the main concepts originated with a group of leftist French academics in the 1960s and 1970s, who became the rage in many American universities and whose ideas, though simplified and sometimes caricatured, have been enthusiastically reimported into France.

The most influential figure was Michel Foucault, the psychologist and philosopher whose lifelong sympathy for marginalized groups and oppressed people led him to a sustained reflection on the dominating and exploitative nature of power, including its ability to define what is supposedly normal – as opposed to what it considers abnormal or sick.

In matters such as gay rights and equality for women, Foucault-like sympathy for the marginalized feels the same on both sides of the Atlantic. But American wokeness is most powerfully concentrated on a question of race that seems unique to America. Centuries ago, Europe may have engaged in the slave trade, but no European country has anything comparable to the history of American slavery, no decades of Jim Crow, no Ku Klux Klan, no lynchings or legal segregation of the sort that afflicted black America, and also no civil rights movement, no Martin Luther King Jr., and no George Floyd killed in Minnesota. And yet, the vocabulary of critical race theory, with terms like le racism systematique, le privilège blanc, microaggression, even le fragilité blanc, has taken hold in France like an invasive species.

Part of the answer seems to be the contagious global appeal of a doctrine explaining complicated questions, holding the same attraction for French academics, students, and others as for their American counterparts. The appeal is especially strong for a younger generation impatient and dissatisfied with the more moderate views of traditional liberalism — or, in France, the traditional left, even if it was the same enlightened left that fought against colonialism, against anti-Semitism, against the powerful, conservative Catholic Church, as well as for choice on abortion, equal access to education, and France’s extensive social safety net.

Then there’s the matter of demographic change. Britain, Germany, and France have substantially increased their minority populations through high immigration and higher birth rates among non-whites. This has generated two conflicting reactions. One is the increased strength and appeal of right-wing anti-immigrant parties, in France represented most conspicuously these days by a former television personality, Eric Zemmour, who to his detractors looms as a French Trump.

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