American wokeness versus French egalité

[Skybird]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-59584125

"Will France end up going woke? The jury is still out," says Justin EH Smith, an American philosophy professor at Paris University.


"Personally I find it liberating to teach here. I don't have to mind my every word, like I did with American students. Here, there is still a presumption that universities are a place to learn, and the staff is not there to cushion the subject matter."


But Prof Smith says signs of "wokeism" are nonetheless appearing on campus.


He cites seeing for the first time graffiti in English targeting "terfs" - or trans-exclusionary radical feminists. The use of English was significant, he says, because it "trickles in via elite bicultural, bilinguistic nodes" such as can be found at the university.


However, the new American ideas face a big difficulty in France, he believes, "because one of the cornerstones of French Republicanism is a principle that has become anathema in the context of US-style wokeism - and that is colour-blindness".


France's answer to protecting minorities is "universalism" - the notion that everyone is the same and should be treated the same.


But so-called "woke" thinkers have a different set of values. They say race, colour, gender do matter, because people have different lived experiences depending on those factors, and so public policies need to differentiate between different groups - which is anathema to the French.

In the end, woke people, gender people, quota people, xyz activist people are all the same in this: they are selfish egoists who claim special priviliges for themselves, foudned nmot by achieeving, deserving, eanring or comeptence, skill, qualification, but by simple memeberhsip to the "correct" perr group supporting them.



Needless to say, I think thsi is wrign doing, and I cannot see how qualification and acheivement of any kind can be created this way.