Racism and Humanitarian Action

This Crash dossier gathers a selection of Crash publications published over the last twenty years: all of them, in different manners, tackle the themes of racism and humanitarian action. They also evoke the way discussions about racism have been addressed at Médecins sans Frontières. 

Some publications directly relate to MSF and the Humanitarian Aid sector. In “Should we discriminate in order to act? Profiling: a necessary but debated practice”, (2021) Françoise Duroch (UREPH) and Michaël Neuman discuss the reasons and implications behind the growing practice of profiling for MSF personnel. In the interview “From bureaucratic inertia to “policy fragility”” (2020), Jean-Hervé Bradol answers to several questions: how did the organization’s personnel policy evolve over time? What are the current paths for improvement to fight inequalities? In “The response to the Ebola epidemic: negligence, improvisation and authoritarianism”, he questions the weak level of health care and research in Guinea, Sierra Leone and in Liberia during the epidemic. Such poor level of health care would have been considered unacceptable elsewhere than in these three poor sub-Saharan African countries. In the blog “Humanitarian exoticism” (2012), Marc Le Pape offers a critical analysis of anthropological culturalism, a concept to which many NGO members resort to in order to explain the behaviors of the populations they help. More often than not, this approach of reality is disappointing and serves little -if not- emergency relief care operations. In “Missions et missionnaires” (2004, only available in French), Rony Brauman establishes a parallel between evangelical colonial missions and an MSF-led public health campaign in Guatemala. Eventually, in “A propos de la conférence mondiale contre le racisme à Durban’’ (2001, only available in French), he expresses the importance and the difficulty of constituting an inventory of all racism forms, he also questions the link between Zionism and racism. 

Other publications fall within the field of historical research. In the blog “Race and health. A fascinating article on the history of medicine” (2018), Rony Brauman evokes three books on the history of medicine in the United States, during slavery: between experimentations and resistance, this history of power balances between races and health show the decisive role of African slaves, especially in gynecology which was conceived to increase slavery capital. At a 2015 Crash Conference, medicine history researcher Guillaume Lachenal introduces his book “Le médicament qui devait sauver l’Afrique” (only available in French) in which he describes the power held by the medical institution within the French colonial empire. In the article "Les limites de l’universel. L’accès des sans-papiers à une couverture maladie en France depuis 1999" (2014, only available in French), Caroline Izambert answers the question: how has the symbolic order of immigration policies led to the staging of differentiated treatments towards people in irregular situation, often despising bureaucratic and economic rationality revendicated by political leaders in terms of Social State management? Historian Nicolas Blancel was received by the Crash (2005) on the occasion of a debate titled “Le colonialisme, un projet humanitaire ?” (only available in French) asks the following question: is humanitarian (at least, partly) a post-colonial practice, “a new form of Western sovereignty over the rest of the world” ? He answers positively to that question.

To complete this series of articles, we would like to suggest the reading of three other articles “Decolonisation is a comfortable buzzword for the aid sector” (2021) by Themrise Khan. For the author, the debate on decolonization is rarely centered on the “colonized”. Today, the word “decolonization” is not understood in its historical context as a violent separative process with its colonizers. The propositions aiming to “decolonize” aid are wrong and misleading: if taken literally, they might induce the idea that aid is a form of colonization, although nations of the Global South are no longer colonies – despite persisting inequalities. “Le racisme à la lumière de la nouvelle histoire impériale. Pour une histoire plurivoque du racisme et de l’antiracisme’’ (2020, only available in French) by Emmanuelle Sibeud. The notion of colonial racism is, according to the historian, excessively euro-centric, and perpetuates the hierarchy of actors, inherited from the past. The new imperial history invites us to complexify the debate about race to include all places and to think together racism and antiracism. “Cheminots marocains: une lutte syndicale et judiciaire” (2018, only available in French) by Vincent-Arnaud Chappe and Narguesse Keyhani: this article is about the long fight led by Moroccan railway workers in France (SNCF) against institutionalized discriminations forced upon them by the railway company – as those railway workers were recruited directly in Morocco and then transferred in France at the beginning of the 1970s. Stories like this one illustrate stereotypes and statutory assignations in the post-colonial French context. However, in 2018, these railway workers obtained, from the justice system, the recognition of the discrimination they had faced.