“An impeccable musical adventure, Pierre we love you! But it is important to talk to you about behind the scenes, about what France still is in 2024,” a black singer wrote this Tuesday morning on X before recounting what she experienced the day before on the set of ” Daily “.
Pierre Garnier, the winner of the last “Star Academy” was invited to the TMC show to perform his new single live, We know. Towards the end of the song, he joined the public benches where a gospel choir, made up of around a hundred artists, was waiting for him, who accompanied him at the end of the song.
“The racism we suffered? A shame “
If everything went well during this sequence and the singers have nothing to reproach the singer, several of them, in the hours following the filming of the talk show, testified on X d discriminatory attitudes that the program teams allegedly inflicted on them.
“The racism we suffered? I’ve never experienced that in my life. A shame,” one of them was indignant, referring to “the extremely unpleasant and contemptuous production team”, as well as the “hours of waiting” and the obligation to “eat on the stairs”.
In a summary thread, an X user said that the artists arrived around 2:30 p.m. Black bracelets were distributed to black singers. The latter, at the end of the first rehearsal, had to “leave the stage to join a room” while “the non-racialized choristers [blancs ou perçus comme tels] remained on the set. They had to wait “several hours” in a separate “cold” room. [et] without windows” – the “Quotidien” studios are located in the basement – “without any notion of time since telephones [n’étaient] not allowed.”
“That the choristers had the feeling of being treated differently must raise questions for us”
“During the entire show, there were singers who were not of color in the audience (those without black bracelets). The colored choristers were only released to sing the 2:50 minutes with Pierre,” says the X subscriber who published the thread.
“When there is this type of testimony, it must be taken seriously. You must listen. That the choristers had the feeling of being treated differently must raise questions for us,” reacted this Tuesday afternoon to 20 minutes Bangumi, the production company of “Quotidien” which recognizes “malfunctions”.
And in particular, poor communication: “When there are a hundred singers, a production company, a record company, security people, people from the public and there is no coordination between all these entities , there are misunderstandings. »
“We have always fought against discrimination”
“When the Sony record company proposed the idea of having Pierre Garnier sing with a hundred backing singers, which we liked, the entire audience was already booked. We canceled part of it, but it’s complicated to cancel all of the reservations, especially because there are people who come from the provinces, for example. So we kept around fifty. These are the people who were asked, during the tape introducing Pierre Garnier, to get up and go to the front of the stage so that the choristers could take their place for the duration of the song,” tells 20 minutes a leader of Bangumi.
And continued: “We should have told them that it was going to be long, that we put a bracelet on all the guests so that they could move freely behind the scenes, that part of the public could not be unbooked . I assume that if you explain things to people, everything goes well. » However, the lack of explanations is indeed one of the criticisms made by several of the singers who testified about X.
“That there were only black people in these boxes is a fact. What we refute, given what the show is, its history and the values it has always defended, are the accusations of racism. We have always fought against discrimination. That there was this feeling, and that these people come to think that, it is regrettable. We take note of this, we need to ask ourselves questions about the organization. »