Report on 2011 International Year part 2: the French quest of Patrick Lozes

Recently writing in his blog about the dedication of a city square in honor of Raphael Eliza ––who became in 1929 the first Afro-descendant from mainland France elected to the office of mayor–– author and human rights activist Patrick Lozes stated he is often asked why he campaigns to have such public spaces as streets, squares, and buildings in France named after members of diverse populations. He answered included the observation that, “Skin color should no longer make you a stranger in your own country.”

Lozes was born in 1965 in the former West African kingdom of Dahomey, now recognized as Benin, and moved with his family to France in the late 1970s. He has emerged over the past few years as a major social and political figure behind a movement intent on identifying and eradicating racism in France.

In 2003, Lozes began building a coalition of sorts with the founding ofthe Circle of Action for Diversity (CAPDIV). The group established a platform to combat not only racial discrimination but injurious bias directed against Jews and gays as well. Despite France’s official stance as a nation blind to racial difference or religious or sexual preferences, the riots that took place nationwide in late 2005 suggested that the disruptions stemmed at least in part from a sense of frustration over a lack of representation for various groups in the great nation’s halls of power.

The riots also prompted the campaign that produced the Representative Council of Black Associations in France, known as CRAN, the first such organization of its kind in the country. Lozes was elected president of the association upon its founding 2005 and again in 2008. Depending on its longevity and future impact, historians could one day come to view the founding of CRAN as comparable to Martin Luther King Jr.’s founding of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC).

“If you’re not counted…”

The task that Lozes and supporting organizations have set for themselves is a formidable one because government officials in France, where approximately 2.5 million people of African descent reside, have generally prohibited the collection of statistics where race and religion are concerned. By contrast, such surveys are common in the United States and often provide material for radio and television newscasts.

In 2008, CRAN spearheaded a telephone survey, described as “small but groundbreaking,” in which approximately 15,000 people were invited to share and document their sense of racial discrimination in France. Of the respondents, some 61 percent said they had experienced racial discrimination within the previous year and 56 percent said they experienced some form of racial discrimination in their daily lives. The results of the survey seemed to inspire a favorite motto of Lozes’: “If you're not counted, you don't count.”

The Cultural Agenda

In addition to his organizational activities, Lozes has advanced his ideologies with the publication of two books: We, Blacks in France (2007) and Blacks Are the French in Their Own Right?(2009).

Among the issues currently high on Lozes’s cultural agenda is promotion of a national tribute in April to the late Martinique poet and icon of both Negritude and the Harlem Renaissance: Aime Cesaire. France’s President Nicolas Sarkozy, with whom Aime Cesaire was known to have his disagreements, has proposed that officials place a representative plaque in honor of Cesaire in Paris’ famous Pantheon. Cesaire’s symbolic location in the Pantheon mausoleum would place him in the company of such distinguished French citizens as the great philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, historian and playwright Voltaire, and the authors Victor Hugo, Andre Malraux, and Alexandre Dumas Sr.

NEXT: Report on 2011 International Year part 3 In the land of Afro-Germans

by Aberjhani, National African American Art Examiner
founder of Creative Thinkers International
and co-author of Encyclopedia of the Harlem Renaissance

Discover the International World and Legacies of Afro-Descendants