French journalist and activist Rokhaya Diallo has launched a searing critique of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, accusing it of publishing a racist and sexist caricature of her that draws on colonial imagery and attempts to silence her voice.
A Grotesque Cartoon Evokes Colonial Tropes
The controversy erupted just before Christmas when Charlie Hebdo, the publication tragically targeted in a 2015 Islamist attack, published a cartoon depicting Diallo. The drawing showed her with a huge, toothy grin and an enormous mouth, dancing on a stage before laughing white men while wearing a banana belt on a largely exposed body. The headline read: “The Rokhaya Diallo Show: Mocking secularism around the world.”
Diallo, a Black Muslim woman and prominent commentator on race and gender, was stunned by what she described as the violence of the image. She swiftly shared it on social media, analysing it as a throwback to slave-era and colonial imagery. “Charlie Hebdo once again shows itself incapable of engaging with the ideas of a Black woman without reducing her to a dancing body,” she wrote.
The Disrespectful Link to Josephine Baker
The cartoon’s reference to the legendary performer Josephine Baker was, for Diallo, both obvious and profoundly disrespectful. Baker famously performed in a banana skirt in the 1920s, but her legacy is vast: she was a French Resistance member, a recipient of France’s highest military honours, and a civil rights activist. Diallo expressed dismay at seeing Baker’s legend reduced to a “grotesque, minstrel show-like grimace.”
She argued that linking her, a 47-year-old journalist, to a 19-year-old dancer from a century ago revealed how white supremacy renders Black women interchangeable. The magazine’s accompanying article, which labelled her “America’s little sweetheart,” further insinuated she was not fully French, a familiar racist trope used against critics from minority backgrounds.
Gaslighting and a Defence of Values
In response to the wave of protest, Charlie Hebdo did not apologise. Instead, it accused Diallo of “manipulation”, claiming she had distorted the image by separating it from its text. The magazine declared itself an “anti-racist, feminist, and universalist newspaper,” framing Diallo’s criticism as an attack on those very values.
Diallo condemned this as a form of gaslighting, where an all-white editorial team defended a racist cartoon drawn by a white man by turning the accusation onto the Black victim. “It would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic,” she stated.
The incident drew widespread support for Diallo, including from former French justice minister Christiane Taubira, who herself faced vicious racist attacks and a Charlie Hebdo cartoon. Taubira characterised the drawing as “intellectually impoverished, visually flat, stylistically bland, semantically mediocre, and psychologically obsessive.”
A Broader Symbolic Failure
For Diallo, the issue transcends her personal experience. It speaks to the daily reality of misogynoir – the intertwining of sexist and anti-Black violence – faced by Black women in postcolonial societies who dare to step outside prescribed roles.
She concludes that in seeking to humiliate and discredit her, Charlie Hebdo has ultimately soiled itself and debased the very freedom of expression it became a global symbol for after the 2015 attacks. The magazine’s attempt to sanction a Black woman for her audacity has, in her view, exposed its unwillingness to engage in public debate on an equal footing.
