Event Coverage Highlight
VIDEO: After the Protests – Talking About Race in France at the American Library in Paris
On Oct. 3, the OPC and the American Library in Paris hosted a panel with a diverse, international group of journalists and one academic to explore the complex landscape of race in France, the U.S. and U.K.
Click the window above to watch a recording of the event.
This summer, protesters held mass demonstrations in France after the fatal police shooting of Nahel M., a 17-year-old boy from Nanterre. This movement voiced what panel organizers called “an untreated wound at the heart of French society: the question of race.”
The speakers were:
Serving as moderator was Vivienne Walt, a Paris correspondent for TIME Magazine and Fortune Magazine. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, National Geographic, BusinessWeek and more. She is governor of the OPC.
In 2023, Roger Cohen and a team of New York Times reporters were awarded a Pulitzer Prize for International Reporting and a George Polk Award in Foreign Reporting for their coverage of the war in Ukraine. Cohen is the Paris bureau chief for the New York Times, where he began working in 1990. He has also worked for the Times as bureau chief in Berlin and in the Balkans, where he covered the Bosnian war and received the Eric and Amy Burger Award from the Overseas Press Club of America. In 2021, he received the Légion d’Honneur from the French Republic for his work over four decades.
Rokhaya Diallo is a French journalist, author, and filmmaker known for her activism in the fields of racial and sexual equality. Her work has appeared in the Guardian, Al Jazeera, the Washington Post, Slate, Libération, and ELLE Magazine among others. She has published 10 acclaimed books, including a graphic novel, and has produced five activist documentaries.
Angelique Chrisaf is is the Guardian’s Paris correspondent. She has reported from France since 2006. She reported in-depth on the terrorist attacks that struck France from 2015 and has also written about social issues and politics, including the rise of the far-right vote. She has reported across Europe including in Ireland, Spain, Greece and Cyprus.
Mame-Fatou Niang, Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies Carnegie Mellon University, author of “Universalisme” said on France 24: “Anybody who wants to critique, to highlight the weaknesses of the system, is now accused of being separatist. Because we’re in a country that doesn’t talk about race, about color, we’re in this weird rhetorical void.”
