A misleading narrative has dominated discussions of the Charlie Hebdo atrocity, one that is largely based on the false impression that the magazine routinely ‘punches down’ at minority ethnic groups. As Robert McLiam Wilson has pointed out, the majority of Charlie Hebdo’s critics have a number of shared qualities: they are not regular readers of the magazine; they live outside of France; and they don’t speak French. This explains why the depiction of justice minister Christiane Taubira as a monkey was so widely interpreted as racist, even though the target was the racist nationalists who had
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