Speech of the French deputy M. Steevy Gustave:

âFor centuries, in our country, the law has accepted something that should provoke outrage. He accepted the fact that a human being can become the property of another human being. He accepted the fact that children are torn from their mothers, that women are sold, that men are branded with hot irons, that they are whipped, that they are mutilated. All of this was authorized by law. It was legal. That’s what Code Black stood for. A well-thought-out, well-organized, fully assumed mechanic, and in which human beings became objects. In this text, a slave was, by law, merely an object. This is what, when viewed in its true depth, was most bloodcurdling: the moment when the law no longer protected what made a person human.

I am not merely commenting on an ancient text. I’m talking about memory; a memory that is still passed down in today’s generations. Behind the registers and shipments, there were lives, mothers, children, faces. Human beings, whom the law allowed to be erased, were allowed to be cut off from their history, to be torn from themselves⦠These women and men, they too had their dreams. They had their language, their beliefs⦠(Here, the speaker makes an effort not to cry, as he will several times during his intervention).

They wanted to live free. This is also what slavery sought to destroy. Yet, despite the chains, despite the blows, despite those who wanted to erase them from the world, they continued to stand. Through riots, acts of martyrdom, songs, prayers, they continued to defend the part of themselves that slavery sought to destroy. Their freedom had been confiscated, but their dignity, never. And that strength, they have passed it on to their children, from one generation to another, to usâ¦

I think of my great-grandmother, Mama Bebel. His memory has run through my family. I grew up with his history, he told me. He was the grandson of Ambroise Zerambe, who was born in Africa, who was reduced to slavery, under matriculation 336. Today, his great-grandson is standing, before you, as a deputy of the Republicâ¦

Those whom history tried to silence are speaking today in the very heart of our Republic.

Every word I am uttering in this forum is also your word. I am part of that legacy. My mixed race doesn’t just come from the love of my parents or grandparents. It also carries traces of a world where some women were not free. And behind some family stories, there are sometimes pains that are passed down from generation to generation, silently. This memory is for the whole of France. When we agree to face this truth, we are not indicting our country or talking about repentance. It is the fact that we are choosing to understand things as they are, rather than choosing silence. Aimé Césaire had already warned us: when a civilization makes a habit of denying the humanity of its neighbor, it always ends up destroying its own humanity.

The Black Code has not ceased to exert its effect on the threshold of history. The racism on which it was founded has not completely disappeared; it just changed face, and it finds itself in some other forms of discrimination, in some other forms of inequality, in