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A tool of stability for its defenders, an instrument of postcolonial monetary subjugation for its critics( including the Cameroonian economist Joseph Tchundjang Pouemi, who wrote about it as early as 1980), the CFA franc symbolizes the persistence of a system that even the best-educated African elites struggle to reform.
Internal divisions in the United States
This may be the most troubling shift of our time: a growing segment of African Americans— the group that has been victimized the longest and most systematically by structural racism in the United States— is drawn to the nativist and xenophobic rhetoric that Donald Trump has placed at the center of American politics since 2016. In the 2024 presidential election, Trump received about 20 % of the black male vote— a historically high level for a Republican candidate.
Social psychologists propose several mechanisms. The first is that of zero-sum competition: in an economy that has left Black Americans at the bottom of the ladder, Trumpist rhetoric offers an enemy even lower down— the undocumented immigrant. Psychologist Michèle Lamont( Harvard) calls this the“ reversal of stigma”: groups that have long been stigmatized may, under economic pressure, adopt the mechanisms of symbolic degradation they themselves have endured and turn them against an even more vulnerable group. The second mechanism is that of wounded economic masculinity. Black American men without a college degree have seen their purchasing power stagnate or decline over the past thirty years, while progressive liberal discourse urged them to focus on intersectionality. Trump offered them something more immediate: the promise of a named enemy, a simple explanation for real pain. It is here that the parallel with South Africa becomes strikingly clear— two peoples seeking to restore a denied dignity not by attacking the structures that oppressed them, but by reproducing downward the hierarchy that crushed them.
Flashmag! Edition 172 Mai 2026
South Africa— When Victims Reproduce the System
Since 2008, South Africa has experienced several waves of xenophobic violence targeting immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa.
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