In the countryside, everyday racism no longer bothers to hide

According to Libération, the attack in Trappes, in the Yvelines, has revived the denunciation of a liberation of racist and Islamophobic speech in France. The daily reports that such behaviour also targets racialised people living in the countryside, where isolation is greater. One testimony sums up the shift: "We went from insistent stares to verbal and physical attacks". The file we have before us does not detail the toll of the attack or the profile of the victims, and we will not speculate on what we do not know. Our thoughts go first to those affected and their loved ones.

What follows is our reading, not a fact established by the article.

Let us take the question through the kitchen table and the workshop. Racism is not only lived in the big televised debates. It is lived at the counter, in the supermarket queue, on the school run, at the bus stop where the coach passes only twice a day. In town, you can melt into the crowd, find an association, a union, a neighbour who saw the scene. In the countryside, when the bakery shuts, public services retreat and the station is twenty kilometres away, you are left alone with other people's looks. And that look has to be carried every day, on top of everything else.

That "everything else" is precisely the work that holds families together: driving the children, caring, shopping, looking after an elderly parent. What we at the Gazette call social reproduction, the work that makes and sustains people rather than commodities, is largely carried out by women, often badly paid and sometimes racialised. When austerity empties local hospitals, rural schools and transport, this work falls back on households. A woman who must multiply journeys to keep her home running also multiplies the occasions to be insulted, followed, jostled. Every public service cut is one protection fewer, one witness fewer.

We should also ask who benefits from division. A farm labourer, a home carer, a slaughterhouse worker, whether "of old stock" or not, share the same meagre wages and the same impossible hours. Designating a scapegoat diverts anger away from housing, rents and wages. When political or media figures normalise Islamophobia, they hand a licence to speak, and then to act, to those who were only waiting for one. We accuse no one in particular; we observe a climate that Libération documents.

What we do not yet know is the measured scale of these attacks in rural areas, nor the precise response of the public authorities. What can be said is that everyone's safety does not rest on the police alone: it rests on collectives, unions, associations and local services. All of which we have let crumble. Rebuilding the common in villages is also a way of pushing back hatred.