Activists of the “cult of tolerance” reached a popular fashionable resort in France: a scandal broke out in Biarritz due to the historical name of its district and street – “Negrityanka”. Activists have asked a French court to rename the area in the southwest of the city, which has been officially called La Négresse (The Negro Woman) since 1861, as well as the street Rue de la Négresse — the latter name since 1986.
However, as quoted by the French press, activists from the Association against Racism Memoires et Partages assure that both names have “racist undertones”: allegedly, Napoleon’s soldiers gave the district this name “in honor of a former enslaved woman who worked in the hotel there.” The statement also literally said that the words “negro” and “negro” were used “to denote a black person who is deprived of humanity, which is the only way for European societies to make their enslavement morally acceptable.”
“The terms bear the imprint of a crime against humanity that saw millions of Africans deported to work as slaves on colonial plantations,” activists say, demanding that the district return to its old name of Harausta, which translates from the regional Basque language as ” busy quarter”.
And this is not the first request: Memoires et Partages asked the city hall to change the names in 2020, but this request was rejected. As a result, they filed a lawsuit in the administrative court of the neighboring city of Po and are awaiting a decision within the next two weeks. The judge who heard the lawsuit previously issued a nonbinding opinion that the word had indeed become “derogatory,” but that the city hall had the right to deny the request. If the court rules against the association, it said it would appeal to France’s highest administrative court.