Celebrating hero reinforces stereotypes

A rare, genuinely heroic moment was captured on cameras Saturday when 22-year-old Mamoudou Gassama scaled four storeys to rescue a child hanging off a balcony in France. The migrant from Mali was nimble, strong, light-footed and incredibly brave when he so readily risked his life to save another.

In the bargain, he offered some desperately needed inspiration to a bleak world that had shrugged with indifference weeks prior when he along with thousands embarked on the perilous boat journey out of Mali across the Mediterranean Sea to the shores of Europe.

For his efforts, he was given French citizenship, a medal and a job as a firefighter. Awww, right? So wrong. It has been sickening to see the celebration around French President Emmanuel Macron “rewarding” Gassama with citizenship that turned the man who, until Sunday, was among the “illegals” reviled by the xenophobes and racists, into a “noble savage” now deemed worthy of being “allowed” into France.

It turned citizenship into some kind of a prize to be given by the rich to the deserving poor. As if the French have any kind of moral standing in denying access to a man who comes from the once-rich land it tried to “civilize.”

France’s celebration of its own goodness has only served to reinforce the good immigrant/bad immigrant stereotype that informs xenophobic rhetoric. It allowed the people, who even last year were participating in anti-African immigrant rallies, to say, see, we’re not racist. See, we’re not Islamophobic.

Yet they're also saying you’re ordinary until we deem you worthwhile. To win our approval, you must strive to please us, be more like us and less like you.

“You did something exceptional,” Macron told Gassama in a cringeworthy moment of condescension. It’s not enough for a Black man, in this case, a Black Muslim man, to be human. He had to be superhuman to be considered worthy of simply existing in France.

But in thinking thus, France isn’t exceptional at all.

Canadian immigration rules require people with documents to come with a high education skills, a clean bill of health and a financial cushion all so as to not strain our systems. That makes immigrants healthier and more educated than Canadian citizens but even better-than-average is somehow not quite good enough to be considered equal.

Imagine the exceptionalism required of the undocumented people trying for a shot at a better life.

And now consider it’s not just immigrants that are considered outsiders, but also Indigenous and racialized people within. Black people, so foundational to the wealth built on this continent, are the perennial other.

A few days ago, the video media company Now This shared a video of an American Black man making a plea for his humanity.

“Consider this man’s words before you call the cops on a Black person,” says the tweet by Now This. The man says things such as “I hate spiders,” “I am a vegetarian,” “I spend almost every Sunday morning teaching kids in Sunday school,” “My father is a veteran,” “I don’t own a gun.”

What’s the point of this video other than to allow people with anti-Black sentiments to take a moment to feel sorry for this specific Black person and then move on, feeling good about having taken a moment to feel sorry? See, we’re not racist.

But dare a Black person have a flaw, and that small piece of goodwill dissipates. They deserve whatever happens to them.

In 2017, when a Toronto man recorded police arresting and Tasering a man who was already on the ground near Ryerson University, police said the man was “known to police.” That’s all it took for Toronto media to not further investigate the story from the point of view of the arrested man. Just the fact of being “known to police,” whatever that means, meant he had lost his rights.

None of this is new. That is depressing.

Back in 1955, months before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat in a Montgomery bus, a15-year-old by the name of Claudette Colvin had been arrested for exactly that.

But she was dark skinned and she became pregnant. That made her an imperfect victim.

So she was cast aside as the face of resistance — civil rights activists recognized that her “flaws” would distract from the issue of segregation and rights.

While holding out on humanity in expectation of flawlessness is the ultimate racism, selectively doling out that humanity, and celebrating that as an act of generosity is delusional if not diabolical.