“What color is this leaf?” – Lilian Thuram
“Since when are you white?” The young woman, whom the speaker brought onto the small stage, is noticeably unsettled by the seemingly absurd question. Since her birth, she replies, obviously deeply convinced of the correctness of this statement. He holds up a white sheet of paper. “What color is this leaf?” – “White,” she replies as expected. Then the trap snaps shut. “Are your skin and this leaf the same color?” She thinks for a moment, then shakes her head. “Are you sure?” the consultant insists. The woman nods.
It took Lilian Thuram less than a minute on June 1 in the FC St. Pauli museum to use an unorthodox »role play« to expose the division of people into »races« as what it always was – a grotesque construction at that designed to oppress people, play them off against each other, and exploit them. The football world star – record player in the French national team, world champion in 1998, European champion in 2000 and multiple Italian champion – presented his new book “Dasweiße Denken” at the Millerntor in front of an enthusiastic audience and in the presence of club president Oke Göttlich – on the day the German edition was published.
Thuram, who actually wanted to be a Catholic priest, dedicated himself to anti-racist education after he ended his football career in 2008. He founded the foundation »Éducation contre le racisme, pour l’égalité« (education against racism, for equality), wrote several books and was awarded various prizes and honorary doctorates for his commitment. On Wednesday, the Frenchman apparently specifically chose the Kiezklub St. Pauli for the presentation, as the club has also been committed to anti-racist work for many years. The association brought the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation Hamburg on board to organize the event.
Before the distinguished guest threw himself and his audience into the theory, he had outlined his biographical background. Raised on the island archipelago of Guadeloupe, which is still part of France, Thuram’s mother moved with him – he was nine at the time – to Paris, where he was in fifth grade. “I blacked out there,” he said, providing one of the many moments of surprise. When he was new to the class, he still felt like a student among other students. Then he was insulted by others as a “dirty black man”. Thuram summed up the quintessence of his book, even these children were infected by a way of thinking that he has been trying to analyze ever since. Since that time he has been dealing with the question “why racism exists”. And he understood “that it has something to do with history”.
He tries to “question the categories that guide us every day”. In fact, the author uses many examples in the book, also from his personal experience, to show how the patterns of interpretation described work and how they could become universally valid. His book appeals to readers to question ingrained thought structures in order to lay the foundation for “new solidarity”. Thuram repeatedly refers to postcolonial discourses, to Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, James Baldwin and Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison and Achille Mbembe.
Thuram’s message may have come as a surprise to some of his listeners. In fact, not only in the European soccer leagues, the realization is gaining ground that skin color is just as little a meaningful category for assessing a person as shoe size. If you want to know why it was European societies that invented the categories black and white to justify colonialism, enslavement and exploitation, you have to read the book.
