People think the horrendous treatment of Naomi Osaka is just the management at Roland Garros or the French Tennis Federation, that they are merely part of a wider organisation that has nothing to do with France and it’s partly correct. Tennis, like everything is led by white men in their 50s and plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
However, their now deleted tweet posting pictures of players during press conferences with the line “They understand the assignment” is France 101.
This is what we, French people, grow up with, how we are shaped, how we shape others: dismissive condescension and public humiliation until you bend or break.
Here’s a statement from Guy Forget, the director of Roland Garros: “As the tournament progresses, we will see how she behaves. I don’t know what her attitude will be in the coming days, but it doesn’t send a very positive message.”
You’d think he is an old headteacher in a boarding school talking about a little girl, that’s because that’s how he sees her, that’s because that’s how he was raised to see her.
This whole assignment tweet is the ABC of French schools, I have seen and heard this so many times and I never realised how terrible it is until it was thrown at an adult. When you don’t do your homework, the strategy is not to understand you, rather to pit you against everyone else and publicly shame you into never not doing them again.
“They did it, why not you? What possible excuse could YOU have not to have done the assignment when EVERYONE ELSE here has done it? Go on. It’s only you now. Only you. Everyone else managed it.”
The questions are rhetorical, the message is clear: whatever reason you think you have, they are mere juvenile excuses to justify your inexcusable behaviour so cut it out, quit faking it and get in line!
Mental health issues? Excuses.
Sickness? Excuses.
Misgivings and self-doubt? Excuses.
And this process is never something done in the privacy of an office but in front of the whole classroom, your peers, your friends who can’t look at you, your bullies who are enjoying every moment of it, the others who are not anymore wondering why a child is dragged in the dirt by an adult because it’s how you do discipline in France, how adults get what they want out of you, regardless of anything else. How managers get what they want out of employees, how Roland Garros get what they want out of Naomi Osaka or Serena Williams for not wearing the right bottoms. “Why everyone else and not you?!”
We all sit there thinking one day, we’ll be doing it too so we may as well learn. There’s a sense of retaliation longing, of power that will soon be at our reach. We need to learn because this is something you take with you wherever you go, even not in France. All my French friends living abroad have stories of their being accused of being blunt, condescending, humiliating in how they treat others they perceive to be in the wrong.
I certainly have been, even when you mean well. I once was teaching a very difficult group and a student would not work. Her reason was that she believed she was not good enough in French to do it. Nothing was confrontational, but there was a definite lack of effort and that’s all I could see, all I was trained to see. I insisted until I said: “The others can do it, of course you can.” It wasn’t mean, I really believed I was encouraging her. Until she said “I am my own person.”
I thought of it as some kind of easy, stroppy hit&run type of come back, one to which I had no answer. What can you argue? Seriously! What can you argue? It was eight years ago and I still don’t know what to answer because she was right. Even if I meant well, I was not trying to understand her, to get to her level and to really find what was what. I was merely pitting her against the rest of the group, because that’s how I learned you get people to stop being “ludicrous, sulky and tantrumy”. You pressure them into forgetting who they are, into suppressing their needs, into ignoring their struggles to conform to the “one and indivisible” French people we all learn to be.
France doesn’t understand today that Osaka neither bended nor broke, rather left. France is still questioning her motives although she made them very clear. We still ready her statement and ask “Why though?”, like adults who can’t fathom a child can actually reason.
No one in France is questioning the management. Literally: the director of the FFT did a press conference to talk about Osaka’s refusal to take questions and did not take any questions himself. He fined her for not taking questions, he threatened her for not taking questions, she left after he and Forget bullied and humiliated her for not taking questions so what better way to parade his victory than by refusing to taking questions. He is virtually every single teacher and manager I have ever had in France.
I myself have changed my way since that student. Everyone has a story, a journey with mountains to climb and oceans to swim when others can only see grasslands and inviting pounds at that time and place. It’s not for me to dismiss their experience based on the fact that no one else is experiencing the same right now.
There are no set answers to something like Osaka’s struggles, only differentiation and that flexibility we are all supposed to embrace in the name of economic growth. It’s bending the system so it fits people rather than bending people so they fit a system but it requires humility, authenticity, patience, empathy and creativity from the people who run the system.
Humility, authenticity, patience, empathy and creativity… everything France teaches you not to ever be. Everything Gilles Moretton, Guy Forget will never be or want to be because they are finally standing where their adults once stood and that power is too long overdue for them to fathom they are two little, 1970s kids in a world that has been moving on.
Unfathomable Feathers 