Prevention of Right-Wing Extremism, Xenophobia and Racism in ...

liceman, which caused quite uproar, a scandal. This boy’s mother, also Moroccan, banded
together with other women to demand justice, to fi nd out the truth. But at the same time,
these women said: “but this can’t go on, with all this delinquency, our children who act
up, who get killed, we have to do something.” So they asked me to come, I talked to the
women and we worked together for two days, in that neighbourhood in Nîmes. We worked
like that and I met with some youth from that neighbourhood and I decided to set up a
project which I proposed to someone in the city hall. This person showed it to a republic
prosecutor. He found it interesting and showed it to the prefect. The prefect of a depart-
ment is the state, the representative of the government. And they decided to allocate the
funds for me to to carry carry out the project in Nîmes.
I always try to obtain the approval of the authorities. In doing so, I make sure that everyevery- one is involved in the work and I don’t want the ones to work against the others, which
means that my basic assumption is that they they are the ones who are guilty. We then listen
to and work with foreigners who complain of racism from the police but we will also work
with policemen who complain about about the foreigners’ violence. That is a lot more effi cient, cient,
pedagogicaly speaking. speaking. For example, what used to be done a lot, and that is why nowa-
days, in France, we don’t do it anymore: We carried out stupid anti-racist pedagogy, stupid
because we just explain foreign cultures: knowledge and information about the other,
and other cultures. It didn’t work with racist people, on the contrary, it even fed racism
because they would just take the information which could strengthen strengthen their racist position.
And moralising doesn’t work either.
What works for me, is to work on the reasons which cause people to be racist: suffersuffer- ing, fear, anguish, real problems. Because there really are problems. I’m talking about
someone who is racist, not about a racist politician, but a person who leads a diffi cult life
and who is racist. My basic assumption is that everything what this person says, I myself
can’t tell, is false. I will bring this person into the company of others and cause confl ict
and debate and after that, that person is free to think what he/she wants to. But I myself
cannot decide for this person. What this person says contains an important part of the
information which needs to be heard, and when this person sees that this information is
heard, he/she accepts to change and to have to do something. So it’s very important to
assume that all racists, foreigners, anti-racists, everyone has a part of the information and
it’s my work to organise the confl icts between all these people, without saying who’s right
and who’s wrong. In my method, I don’t tell the one who is more racist than the anti-racist:
“you are the one who’s wrong, you’re right, you’re good because you’re anti-racist, you’re
not good because you’re racist.” I say: “You, go ahead, speak. You, go ahead, speak.” So
I give them the means to obtain some power and I help them work together and to be in
confl ict. That’s what will change their way of seeing things. The idea is, little by little, to
ensure than everyone gains a sense of complexity and that we manage to work together.
But working together doesn’t necessarily means agreeing, it also means confl ict, but
these confl icts must be said. If not, the social worker just thinks: “oh that policeman is
120 “Multi-Cultural France is becoming a Multi-Racist Society”