The socialist deputy mayor of Paris said white people should “be asked to keep quiet” when race issues are discussed during a meeting with people of color.
“People who suffer discrimination for the same reasons and in the same way feel the need to meet among themselves to discuss it,” Audrey Pulvar, who is black, said.
She added that white people should be allowed to attend the meetings discussing race but added: “They can, however, be asked to keep quiet and be silent spectators.”
Former socialist Prime Minister Manuel Valls criticized the comments, saying, “This rhetoric, always justifying the victim, leads to disaster.”
SOCIALIST MAYOR FINED FOR APPOINTING MOSTLY WOMEN TO SENIOR POSITIONS: PROUD OF BEING ‘TOO FEMINIST’
“Do you have to be Jewish to talk about anti-Semitism?” Valls added.
Black Lives Matter protests spread to France last year, after first erupting in the United States following the death of George Floyd on Memorial Day. About 15,000 protesters gathered in Place de la Republique in Paris last June, for example, chanting “No justice, no peace” in response to the 2016 death of a black man while he was in police custody.
Pulvar’s comments come after some French politicians argued that U.S. activism on race and gender is threatening French culture.
“There’s a battle to wage against an intellectual matrix from American universities,’’ warned French President Emmanuel Macron’s education minister last year.
Pulvar’s boss, socialist Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo, made international headlines late last year for paying roughly $110,000 in fines for placing too many women in high-level positions in her administration, boasting that the city government has become “too feminist.”
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“I am happy to announce that we have been fined,” she said in December. “The management of the city hall has, all of a sudden, become far too feminist.”
Pulvar added during the controversy that it “will be an honor to pay the fine.”
