Racism Explained to My Daughter

Tahar Ben Jelloun is one of France's best-known writers, honoured with several prizes and a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature. Racism Explained to My Daughter is a bestseller and has been translated into 25 languages.

Nobody is born racist, but one becomes one. The author tries to explain this to his daughter, Merjeme, who asked him about racism during a demonstration against a bill on immigration. The book takes the form of a conversation that answers a child's curious questions. More than ten years after this conversation with his daughter, the author shares these exchanges of ideas with children from all over the world, whom he continues to meet. Together we see that racism has not only not disappeared, but has become common and, in some cases, has deepened. We try to understand its new forms: the rise of antisemitism and Islamophobia, discrimination whose victims include emigrants, and so on.

This book is addressed to children who do not yet have prejudices, and to parents, teachers and educators, to answer the most difficult questions children ask.