New Europeans

A Test Site For Everyday Life

Deeply Emotional Super Diversity May15 2016, Amsterdam

Conversations with Fanon, Part 1: Obstacles to an Immigrant Startup

Please allow me to introduce myself. As my dearest colleague Domenique described me, I am the Newest European of the group, newest not only on account of my Tunisian descent, but also due to my interest in new technology and innovation. My aim for these 6 months was to look at startups and the concept of a startup in order to understand if this business model is indeed a guarantee for innovation in Europe.

Soon enough, an idea was born: let’s launch a startup employing only immigrants. It was meant to be a critique pointing at the ways in which we in Europe misuse the term ‘innovation’: in whose name and for whose sake are we innovating? Who benefits from this development? And who are those tasked with innovating? Why them? What qualifies them, what disqualifies others?

Why have I chosen immigrants? By employing only immigrants, the startup would highlight both how much the mainstream idea of the startup is limited to a very specific type of person and by extension how much is lost through this exclusivity. In the case of Europe, a great many people who don’t have a direct European origin have a great potential to innovate Europe for the very reason that they are not directly from Europe. Coming from a different culture, they have different viewpoints and from their unique vantage point they can help us tell the story of Europe anew. But the choice was also personal, and this is where I have had difficulties in realising my project, difficulties which underline how hard it is to foster a more inclusive form of innovation.

Working for New Europeans in the past few months, I felt as if under a magnifying glass. The context in which we are working was like a lens exposing my non-European origin. For my project, I wanted to show myself and, in the name of all non-Europeans, prove that we could help re-invent Europe.

But then, in the end I am European myself. My ancestors were European, and we have been influenced by other Europeans in all manner of ways. And if we were to look back at history, Europeans would themselves not have been able to have their Renaissance without the knowledge conceived outside of Europe by people who advocated science research as well as tolerance towards every religion, figures such as Averroes, Ibn Khaldun and Omar Khayyam, whose thinking in many ways contributed to the European enlightenment. When these great thinkers are mentioned, I feel European.

And yet I still want to prove myself! Why is this? Why do I need to prove myself?

It’s a feeling that develops as news of war in the Middle East and terrorist attacks continue to reach us. These things always bring back old memories, which still make me feel sick and continue to make me doubt myself. The memories are in fact traumas regarding both my identity but even more so my religion and the negative treatment it receives from an overwhelmingly biased media. The news is dominated by immigrants, refugees, Muslims and terrorism. It may be a cliché to bring this up but these are very important factors to a person at my age, who grew up with an inferiority complex and is now trying to construct an identity for himself.

This is why I feel divided sometimes, why I have to think things through six times over before I do anything. Why I feel uncomfortable speaking Dutch, why I try to speak it flawlessly, why I speak in five different accents, why I’m not comfortable writing, and why, overall, I feel embittered. Often it seems that part of my identity is not accepted and far from understood. My heritage is here in Europe and I aim to find it not only for myself but for every person who feels marginalized.

I frequently wonder whether I consider myself equal to the classical definition of the European. I do tend to talk about my culture and religion in a manner that disguises my victimhood, inferiority and insecurity. I become angry when someone has an opinion on a matter that is beyond their experience. When they talk about me without knowing me, these people who talk about my peers without understanding why they are struggling with education and work, why they are lost and why they don’t have a future.

And so, you see, the weight of all these considerations has created many obstacles to fulfilling the aim of what I still feel is an important and viable project: to create a startup composed entirely of immigrants. And lately things have become less turbulent, or let’s say I have found some direction after reading Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks. It is a study of the psychology of racism and the de-humanizing effects of the colonial struggle. Fanon was a psychiatrist and philosopher born in Martinique who died as an Algerian in 1961. I will share the first page of his introduction, it made me weep silently for I recognized his voice – the voice of a lonely person…

‘ “I am talking of millions of men who have been skillfully injected with fear, inferiority complexes, trepidation, servility, despair, abasement.” —Aimé Césaire, Discours sur le Colonialisme
The explosion will not happen today. It is too soon . . . or too late.
I do not come with timeless truths.
My consciousness is not illuminated with ultimate radiances.
Nevertheless, in complete composure, I think it would be good if certain things were said.
These things I am going to say, not shout. For it is a long time since shouting has gone out of my life.
So very long. . . .
Why write this book? No one has asked me for it.
Especially those to whom it is directed.
Well? Well, I reply quite calmly that there are too many idiots in this world. And having said it, I have the burden of proving it.
Toward a new humanism. . . .
Understanding among men. . . .
Our colored brothers. . . .
Mankind, I believe in you. . . .
Race prejudice. . . .
To understand and to love. . . .
From all sides dozens and hundreds of pages assail me and try to impose their wills on me. But a single line would be enough. Supply a single answer and the color problem would be stripped of all its importance.
What does a man want?
What does the black man want?
At the risk of arousing the resentment of my colored brothers, I will say that the black is not a man.’