“We have a lot to fear for our children,” said Zemmour, who calls Pap Ndiaye a “far-left intellectual.”
The appointment of Pap Ndiaye as the new French Minister of National Education and Youth has been heavily criticized by the French far right, which has waged a devastating sectarian campaign against him, despite the fact that this historian who specializes in minorities enjoys a very good reputation in the university and intellectual world.
Far-right leaders Marine Le Pen and Éric Zemmour have lashed out at the new minister of President Emmanuel Macron and Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne. “The appointment of Pap Ndiaye, a presumed indigenist, to National Education is the final stone in the dismantling of our country, its values and its future,” Marine Le Pen wrote on Twitter.
Zemmour labels Ndiaye, the only black minister in the new Executive, as “far left. Knowing the history of the 20th century and the evil perpetrated by the intellectuals of the far left, we have many reasons to be concerned about our children,” the Reconquista leader added.
“Emmanuel Macron said France’s history must be deconstructed. Pap Ndiaye is going to take care of it,” Zemmour recently warned. He explained that the minister believes that “races are at the heart of French society”, which the far right denies. According to him, Ndiaye “confuses the history of segregation in the United States.” with the history of France.”
His appointment was one of the great surprises of the new government of Elisabeth Borne. His name did not appear in any pool of ministers. Ndiaye replaces Jean-Michel Blanquer on the post. It was also surprising that Macron chose as minister an intellectual with a very different profile from his predecessor. A proponent of secularism, universalist and anti-woke, Blanquer fought against Islamo-leftism (a French neologism pejoratively referring to an alleged alliance between Islamism and the left) at university.
Ndiaye is a historian who specializes in minorities, who, according to his critics, is close to the “woke” movement, a term fashionable to refer to being alert to injustice in society, especially racism. The new minister believes that the Islamo-left “does not indicate any reality in the university”.
He was born in 1965 in Antony, on the outskirts of Paris. He is the son of a French woman and a Senegalese man. He grew up in the Parisian suburbs. His sister is writer and playwright Marie NDiaye, winner of the 2009 Goncourt Prize for “Three Strong Women” (Cliff). “I am a pure product of the Republican meritocracy, of which the school is the pillar,” said the 56-year-old minister when he took office.
Ndiaye’s first visit as a minister was at Conflans-Sainte-Honorine High School, where Samuel Paty, the teacher beheaded by a jihadist in October 2020 for showing his students the controversial cartoons of Mohammed, was teaching.
With a PhD from the Graduate School of Social Sciences (EHESS), Ndiaye specialized in United States and minority history. Between 2012 and 2019 he was a professor at the prestigious Institute of Political Studies in Paris (Sciences Po Paris).
Before joining the French government, he was director of the National Museum of the History of Immigration in Paris. ‘Picasso, the Stranger’ was one of the exhibitions recently organized by this museum with great public and critical success. The exhibition offered an unprecedented look at the figure of the painter from Malaga: his status as a foreigner in France, the country where he lived for much of his life.
Ndiaye is the author of “The Black Condition: An Essay on a French Minority” and “Black Americans: From Slavery to Black Lives Matter.” His work is considered the founder of the ‘black studies’ (black studies) in France.
Élisabeth Borne has defended her minister against criticism from the far right: “Ndiaye is a very committed Republican, someone who believes in the values of the Republic and who, of course, will pass on as Minister of National Education,” he recently said. His former colleagues at Sciences Po have also defended him, condemning “the witch hunt” that Ndiaye has been subjected to since his appointment.
Laurence Bertrand Dorléac, President of the National Political Science Foundation (FNSP), and Mathias Vicherat, Director of Sciences Po, consider him “a wonderful university student, brilliant and committed”, with an open mind”, “ability to listen and to dialogue”, as well as “great scientific integrity”. According to them, he is an intellectual who defends his ideas “without sectarianism”.
Source: La Verdad

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