French Students Asked For Teachers. The Internet Showed Us Rappers With Fake Guns.

You got kids across France protesting because their schools are fucked up, and somehow the internet managed to turn the conversation into whether some Black and brown dudes look French enough. That's the part that really got me. The actual students are talking about missing teachers, overcrowded classrooms, buildings falling apart, and school days that keep running longer when they don't even have the resources to learn properly. This thing grew out of schools in the Paris suburbs and spread nationwide. On October 8, France's Interior Ministry said 71,500 people marched, including 24,500 in Paris. Education Minister Édouard Geffray promised to send 3,000 substitute teachers to schools facing the worst shortages. That sounds like a step in the right direction, but the students aren't just asking for a press conference. They're asking for the shit that makes an education possible in the first place. And I can't pretend I don't understand why teenagers would eventually stop trusting the adults who've spent years telling them to be patient while their schools keep getting worse.

And yeah, things have gotten ugly. I'm not gonna sit here and act like every person in a crowd was peaceful just because I understand the cause. Protesters have thrown objects, set fires and damaged property, and hundreds of officers have been hurt. At the same time, the police response is its own serious fucking story. Teenagers have been hit with tear gas and riot-control weapons, one lost a hand after a stun-grenade explosion, and another suffered a severe facial injury. The government suspended use of stun grenades at these protests and opened investigations into officers' actions. When we're talking about children demanding a better school system, I need us to be able to hold both thoughts: destroying shit isn't a free pass, and neither is using dangerous force on a crowd full of minors. If anything, the fact that a school protest has reached this point should make us ask what happened before the first barricade ever went up. Because the failure didn't start when somebody set a bin on fire. It started when students came to school and there weren't enough teachers or even enough decent places to sit.

Now here comes the internet part, and this shit is almost too perfect as an example of how easy it is to hijack a real story. Political commentator Benny Johnson shared a video on October 7 showing young men dressed in black dancing with what looked like guns and presented them as French student protesters. Then the post questioned whether they even looked French and blamed the unrest on an imported culture. Only problem? The footage wasn't from a demonstration at all. Fact-checkers traced it to French rap collective 8ZT, whose own TikTok carried the scene on September 20. The original caption included the tag #fakegun. Related footage showed up in a French music project video posted to YouTube on September 30. So a scene made for music was packaged like evidence about who was supposedly tearing up France. And I'm looking at that thinking: you didn't even have to understand a word of French to verify where the shit came from. A little basic source checking would've done it. Instead, the image of young men who could be mistaken for foreign or dangerous was more useful for the argument than the actual schoolkids were.

And I'm not saying there aren't genuine issues in France around immigration, policing, inequality or integration that people can debate. Have those conversations if you want. But make your argument with something that's actually true. Don't take a Black or brown rapper, point at his face and essentially go, 'See, that's what France looks like now,' as if nationality is something you can determine from skin colour. That doesn't tell me anything about the kid whose school hasn't had a teacher for months. It doesn't tell me whether 3,000 substitutes are enough or whether French politicians are finally gonna put the money where their mouths are. It just moves the audience from a question about public education to a fight about whose face belongs in the country. That's the trick I want people to get better at seeing. We can talk about accountability for the violence and police conduct without letting somebody sell us an unrelated music video as the explanation for the whole movement. France's teenagers have actual grievances. At least give them the decency of discussing the fucking grievances.

The students asked for teachers. The internet gave them a racial panic and a rap video.6IX / THE TAKE