This reminds me of this account of the apalling and casual and everyday racism Algera ' s faced during colonisation that I came across during my readingAn Arab , but dressed like a person If the pied noir attitude to the indigenous Algerian could be summed up in a word , it was , simply , indifference . He was regarded , says Pierre Nora , as an anonymous figureof whom it sufficed to know that one provided his welfare , so that one had no need to be concerned about him . In so far as he supplied the labour essential for exploiting the country , he was simply a part of the patrimoine immobilier real estate inheritance . At best he would be treated with paternalism , fairness and a kind of formal acceptance of his different religion and culture . But too often he was regarded with disdain , and from a vantage of superiority which manifested itself in many different ways , and more insidiously among the poorer levels of whites where the frictional contact was closest . Bicot , melon , figuier , sale raton there was a plethora of derogatory slang for an inferior race that sprang all to readily to the lips . Equally a host of preconceived inherited notions about the Algerian were accepted uncritically , without examining either their veracity or causation he was incorrigibly idle and incompetent he only understood force he was an innate criminal , and an instinctive rapist . Sexually based prejudices and fears ran deep , akin to those elsewhere of white citydwellers surrounded by preponderant and evergrowing Negro populations They can see our women , we can ' t see theirs the Arab had a plurality of wives , and therefore was possibly more virile an intolerable thought to the Mediterraneanandahalf and with the demographic explosion spawned by his potency , he was threatening to swamp the European by sheer weight of numbers . The pied noir would habitually tutoyer any Muslim a form of speech reserved for intimates , domestics or animals and was outraged were it ever suggested that this might be a manifestation of racism . Commenting on this , Pierre Nora admittedly a Frenchman often unduly harsh in his criticism of the pieds noirs , adds an illustration of a judge asking in courtAre there any other witnesses ? Yes , five two men and three Arabs . Or again It was an Arab , but dressed like a personWith shame , Jules Roy admitted One thing I knew because it was told me so often , was that the Arabs belonged to a different race , one inferior to my own They don ' t live the way we do . The sentence drew a chaste veil over their poverty . Yes , their happiness was elsewhere , rather , if you please , like the happiness of cattle They don ' t have the same needs we do , I was always being told . I was glad to believe it , and from that moment on their condition could not disturb me . Who suffers seeing oxen sleep on straw or eating grass ? Later on , he confesses It came as a great surprise to realise little by little that the figuiers were men like ourselves , that they laughed , that they wept , that they were capable of such noble sentiments as hatred or love , jealousy , or gratitude . Even greathearted Camus , who was among the first to expose the dreadful economic plight of the Algerians , both shortly before and after the Second World War , occasionally reveals a curious blindness , almost amounting to indifference , towards them as human beings . His Oran of La Peste appears to be devoid of Muslims although he writes so sensitively albeit often censoriously of his kindred pieds noirs , his vendors selling lemonade for five sous a glass on the Algiers streets , his Oran shoeshine boys the only men still in love with their profession seem to be accepted as part of the essential , touristique backdrop , without his pausing to question the penury that must inevitably accompany the profession he believes them to be in love with . Again , in The Outsider he seems oblivious to the other victim of tragedy , the Arab girl whose lover beats her up and whose brother is killed while trying to avenge her . It is as if Camus , too , cannot be bothered to understand this anonymous figure , this portion of the patrimoine immobilier . In Alistair Horne ' s ' A Savage war of peace ', Chapter 2 , ' Ici c ' est la France '. I don ' t think I will take the measure of how lucky I am in being born and living in Post colonial Algeria . What ' s also wrong with Macron ' s propaganda is the spread of old colonialist intoxication that somehow there was nothing prior to the French presence , as if there was no State in Algeria prior or no contact with mercantilism and capitalism that would have ended up in the building of a middle class which really didn ' t exist either in 132 years of colonisation .