Charlie Hebdo Accused of ‘Abominable’ Racism
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French satirical paper Charlie Hebdo has created yet another controversy—this time depicting French journalist, writer, and filmmaker Rokhaya Diallo in a banana belt dancing in front of an all-white audience with the caption: “The Rokhaya Diallo show ridicules secularism around the world.” The cartoon was drawn by Laurent “Riss” Sourisseau and published in its December 24 print edition.
Diallo, on X, has attacked the publication as perpetuating racist and sexist colonial imagery. Her tweet (translated via Google):
In keeping with colonial imagery, Charlie Hebdo is incapable of engaging with the ideas of a Black woman without reducing her to a dancing, exoticized, supposedly savage body.
This hideous cartoon is meant to remind me of my place in the racial and sexist hierarchy.
The paper defended its “illustration” and doubled down saying that it is Diallo who is the racist. From their four-part tweet on X (translated by Google):
This caricature of Rokhaya Diallo as Josephine Baker dancing at the Folies Bergère serves to illustrate an article from our special issue (still available in newsstands!) on the gravediggers of secularism, below.
Everyone will be able to read that we denounce the positions of the essayist against the law of 1905, which she has always condemned in preference to the American communitarian culture. It is this that assigns everyone to their ethnic and religious origin, against republican universalism.
To see it as a racist reference is a manipulation that she has unfortunately accustomed us to since 2011. We had chosen not to publish this article on our website precisely to avoid this satirical illustration drawing being diverted by being separated from the text.
Charlie is an anti-racist, feminist and universalist newspaper – which is what Rokhaya Diallo reproaches us for – which fights the essentialization and the assignment of identity of people according to their skin color or their religion.
Mediapart, an independent French investigative newspaper, has defended Diallo, who is also a writer at the paper denounced the cartoon, “we denounce in the strongest possible terms the slave-owning and colonialist undertones that seep from the cartoon that Riss dedicated to our colleague Rokhaya Diallo.”
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