Black anchor fills top spot on French TV
By Katrin Bennhold International Herald Tribune

Published: August 2, 2006
PARIS When it was announced that a black reporter would anchor France's most popular news program for six weeks this

summer, it was front-page news. No need for a snappy headline, the facts were dramatic enough: "He will present the 8 p.m.

news on TF1," Le Parisien observed flatly, a photograph of Harry Roselmack splashed across the page.

Four months later, Roselmack is on the air, greeting about 7.3 million viewers every evening. The enthusiasm is unabated:

Google his name and 288,000 hits come up, almost as many as the 337,000 hits for Patrick Poivre d'Arvor, whom he replaces

until the end of August and who has anchored the broadcast since 1976.

"This is certainly no sign that we have arrived at a normalized situation," said Roselmack, 33, whose parents are from

Martinique, one of France's Caribbean islands. "That will be the case the day people no longer make such a fuss when a

black, North African or Asian colleague is hired."

In a country with more blacks on its national soccer team (13 of the 23 players) than in the 577-member National Assembly

(10, none from the mainland), Roselmack's sudden celebrity has highlighted how rare it still is here to see minorities in

prominent posts.

It has also given a boost to France's growing black empowerment movement.

"It's very good news, not just for black people, but for France in general," said Patrick Lozès, president of the

Representative Council of Black Associations, an umbrella organization for black advocacy groups. "It shows that black

people can succeed somewhere other than sports and music."

After rioting in immigrant suburbs last November, much attention was focused on the plight of France's largely North

African Muslim community.

Less publicized has been a quiet but determined push by the black community to assert its place in society.

There are an estimated five million blacks in France, about one million from the West Indies and four million from former

colonies in Africa.

Like the lighter-skinned North Africans, they often live outside big cities in segregated neighborhoods where unemployment

rates can reach 40 percent. But several factors set the black community apart from the North Africans.

They have to grapple with a history of slavery, making their relationship with their host country more complex. They appear

to be more vulnerable to discrimination and poverty; the 48 people who died in a series of fires in illegal housing squats last

summer were all black.

And they are far less uniform as a community than the North Africans: The families of people arriving from France's

Caribbean islands have held French citizenship for hundreds of years, while those from sub-Saharan Africa often struggle

to get residence papers.

What unites them is the color of their skin. "We are the most visible of visible minorities," Lozès said. "But as a social group

we are invisible in France."

The North Africans began their campaign for equality in the early 1980s, but the black movement did not begin to develop

until 1998.

That year, 40,000 black people marched in Paris for the first time to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the end of

slavery - and France unexpectedly won the soccer World Cup with a team with many black players.

"In 1998 the dream of a multiracial, multiethnic France was born in the black community," said Géraldine Faes, author of a

recently published book entitled "Black and French."

"Much of the dream has not come true, and that's why we had the riots last year. But things have slowly started to evolve."

In 1999, a black writer, Calixthe Beyala, filed a formal complaint demanding quotas for blacks on television. Since then, the

screen has gradually become more colorful.

In 2001, TF1 hired Sébastien Folin, from Madagascar, to present the weather forecast. Audrey Pulvar, like Roselmack from

Martinique, presents the news on the public broadcaster France 3, but her audience of four million is only half that of TF1's

8 p.m. news.

Meanwhile, a host of black Web sites and black organizations and networks have sprung up. In 2001, Christine Taubira, a

member of Parliament from French Guyana, drafted a law that recognized slavery as a crime against humanity.

In 2005, President Jacques Chirac declared May 10 an official day commemorating the end of slavery, and summoned top

television executives to the Élysée Palace to demand more diversity on the screen.

As a result, at the journalism school at the Institut d'Études Politiques in Paris, for instance, being black is now considered

an advantage, said Bernard Volker, deputy director of the school and a veteran reporter at TF1, although he stresses that

that is in large part because there are still so few graduates from an ethnic minority background (3 out of 40 this year, 5 in

the class of 2007).

"If you're black today you have a better chance of landing a job than if you're not, just because broadcasters are trying to

catch up," Volker said.

Roselmack, who holds degrees in history and journalism, was born into a middle-class family and raised in Tours in western

France. He began his career at RadioTropical, a small music station, moving on to Radio France Inter. His big break came in

September, when he was hired by the pay-television company Canal Plus to anchor the news. He was snatched up by TF1 less

than six months later.

After the summer, Roselmack will continue to fill in as needed as TF1's main anchor while also presenting the news on TF1's

all-news channel LCI.

"Roselmack's appointment is no coincidence," Faes said. "It was a logical next step."

Lozès said the main topic of discussion in the black community was affirmative action, still a taboo in France. He recounted

how deeply ingrained France's Republican ideal of color- blind equality remained, even among black people.

"For the longest time I could not bring myself to use the world 'black' and would find these really long convoluted formulas

talking about diversity," he said. "But we need to start explicitly acknowledging the existence of ethnic minorities so we can

get serious about fighting discrimination."

Roselmack said that just a few years ago he thought a black anchor on the TF1 evening news signaled the achievement of

equal opportunity.

Now he said he felt that the real test would be the presence of blacks in all aspects of economic life, not just in television.

"TV can play the role of pathfinder," he said. "But the other media and all industries in France, not to mention politics, have

to go down the same path."