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Comment by n0n0n4t0r | Hacker News Reader

Now that you say it: some decades ago there was a racist tendency in France where people where having fun of others accent.

They where having fun of the southern marseillais accent, but also of the northern ch'ti accent, they also had extra fun of African or Quebec's accent indeed.

I, as a child, did imitated those accent for fun. I now regret it, bit it's still in the roots of a lot of people.

I sometimes fear that racism is predominant in french society.

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Actually, all French speakers for a very long time have mocked other accents, especially from France, therefore they have a kind of specialty of mocking themselves. Parisian have always mocked regional accents, every region was mocking other regional accents, and even accents from two cities 50 km apart are mocked from both sides. Other accents are just mocked the same as french people make fun of other french people regional accents. I would say that the accent mocking in France is less about racism than about the structure of french society, which is extremely centralized historically, and regions have always been very defensive about their specificities, like the local dialects, languages and the accent is part of that. Some regional languages were even forbidden in some places not so long ago. Racism in France being looked by the accent prism is a foreign worlview with a very low relevance level. It avoids the real and problematic issues of racism that exists. But indeed there is a link: racism flourishes when you do not see or hear people different from yourself. This can happen everywhere and mocking other accents is just using one parameter to insulate your own social group from the rest of the world and diminish/blame/mock the others. If you live in a country where regional accents are not a thing, you will find another parameter and anyone can say through the prism of this local parameter that racism is worse in this country compared to another. My point here is that racism can be everywhere, and has first to be fought on its causes, because symptoms can be very different from places to places and fighting them might help, but not solve.

^ this. French people make fun of every accents. Racism and discrimination is about what society deem acceptable and what minorities or weaker communities we find OK to mistreat. I’d say discrimination in France is much worse than in America.

Without denying at all that racism exists, I believe it is also possible to imitate accents outside racism. I'm from the south of France, and my accent kicks in when I speak with elderly family members that themselves always have the southern accent when they speak. Despite that, sometimes I make jokes imitating the southern accent, does that make me a "self-racist"?

Clarification in case it's needed: I absolutely agree that making fun of someone's accent when they come to you is a best inappropriate, and more often than not utter bigotry. But I'm concerned about criminalising humour. This might not be a widely-shared idea (especially in the anglosaxon world?), but I even believe that racist jokes can be tools against racism, decredibilising racism and not actually oppressing the minority in question. Of course, again, context matters.

(clarification #2: I don't believe "cancel culture" is a thing, if you do racist jokes in the public sphere and someone calls you out for saying something racist, I don't believe anyone has been "cancelled")

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