One of my favourite podcasts is a French programme called Les pieds sur terre which tackles a different subject every day, meeting people in the street or interviewing them to let them talk about a particular initiative, or a problem, or just the lives they lead. It’s about a terribly wide variety of topics that can range from the recent Egyptian revolution, as lived by the people that made it come true, to the expulsion of badly behaved children from school, or the problematic life in the multicultural suburbs of large French cities.

Recently I listened to a programme about a free shop, Le magasin pour rien, which was started in a provincial town of Alsace, and basically consists of an exchange where people turn in the things they want to get rid of for other users to take away without any payment. The lady that set up the shop realised that most people’s houses in Europe are full to the brim of superfluous things they keep buying or receiving as presents, and eventually are dumped in a skip; and that people often discard things that are still usable, just because they’re not in fashion any longer or they’ve got fed up with them. It's sheer consumerism to an outrageous degree and devoid of the most elemental logic, that sadly coexists with the deprivation many families still experience in the very same cities. But well-meaning people can be racist and, paradoxically enough, even as they are convinced they are acting out of sublime generosity.

 

Among the people interviewed, there was a lady whose low quivering voice had a slightly rolling r that gave away her Italian origin. All her children were born French, but she never wanted to be naturalised. She had a story to  to tell about racism.

At the time of her coming to France, 60 years ago, people treated Italians with comtempt calling them derogatory names because they had come as poor people in search of work, but her mind was free of racial prejudices. In her childhood she had been to Italian East Africa with her father who, as a surveryor, was charged to build roads. Knowing the little rascal she was, her father thought it wise to entrust her to a 20-year-old local who would alert her to the dangers of an unfamiliar environement.

However, immediately they were introduced to each other, she replied in a huff she didn't like him, because he was "black and dirty". That gained her a good slap for a start, but her father also took out a white handkerchief, pricked her and the boy's fingers to get a drop of blood from each to fall on the fabric, rolled it up and asked her which was whose blood. At six years and a half, it was a lesson never to be forgotten that meant the end of racism for her.

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