To be a beautiful French Black talented woman and to have no exit

Ramatoulaye Rama Yade is a beautiful French black and talented French politician who is sometimes referred as Sarkozy’s Condoleezza Rice because she works under the Foreign Minister (Bernard Kouchner) and is the Human rights Secretary. With all of her assets, one would have thought that Yade would be ensured to have a bright political future in France, but as Tim King asserts correctly she stuck in a mold due to her race and gender and may have nowhere to go:

[…] she is in a closed cubby-hole of a ministry, with no way out. Think about it. The ministry of human rights isn’t really a ministry – it has no mission, no agenda, no crack team to back up the otherwise empty words which is all she can offer. As Azouz Begag found in the previous government, working as a coloured face in a meaningless ministry like “Equal Opportunities” or “Human Rights” is a one-way ticket in the wrong direction.

Rama Yade has learnt the hard way that she can’t mention human rights abuses in “le pays des droits de l’homme” itself (in the overcrowded prisons, or the repatriation of sans papiers): when she tried, going to see some immigrant squatters faced with eviction in a Paris suburb, she was keenly and patronisingly reprimanded by her seniors. If she can’t mention France, she can only pass judgement on other countries. But the countries with human rights abuses are the very countries where the market for French goods is still strong, or with which France needs to remain on good terms (the USA for example with Guantanamo Bay). Twice now she has put into words what most of us think: first about Colonel Gaddafi being a dictator and more recently about the Olympic Games. But both times she has been made to look ridiculous by her senior colleagues. When the President went with a huge entourage and much pomp to China last November, he made the last minute decision to leave Rama Yade ignominiously twiddling her thumbs at home.

Now she knows she has the choice of either speaking out and having her wrists slapped, thus being made to look a fool in public, or saying nothing and being forgotten. Either way she is side-lined for the next job. For apart from the fact that she clearly has very definite thoughts about human rights, it is probable she accepted the job as a stepping stone, and so she needs to shine. Her contemporary and white male equivalent, Laurent Wauquiez, has just been promoted from spokesman (where the job-definition is to shine) to junior minister in charge of employment – a real job with targets and measurable success (or failure). She is stuck, losing out whether she acts or does nothing. The Ministry for Human Rights is an empty shop window. [Emphasis added].

The problem for Yade is that what made her succeed quickly, her smarts, her guts, her gender, and her race, is not what is limiting her options and putting a ceiling on her future even though the possibilities given whom she is, what she represents and what she can do should be limitless. In France, politicians don’t know what to do with talented members of minorities who are ambitious and won’t shut up after they are given a ministry. The fact that Rama Yade finds herself stuck so soon in her political career, that she can never escape the received ideas that when you are Black and French and a minister, you should be satisfied and not only ask, but not want more, shows us that France still hasn’t fully accepted that it is the motherland and not the borrowed country of people who do not look Gaul and yet want to be treat as French and not as symbols. The trouble with people who are viewed as symbols is that they almost never last because as the novelty of their presence and success fade, they become ordinary. People, in politics, don’t like it when minorities in politics are ordinary, they want them to be special, to make them feel great about themselves for voting for a difference that will change the world and not just do what politicians do.