French critics Whites, Jews, and Us was denounced by French critics as
anti-Semitic,
misogynistic and
homophobic. An open letter signed by
Ilan Pappé,
Adi Ophir,
Sylvère Lotringer,
Ronit Lentin,
Sarah Schulman,
Ariella Azoulay and 14 others described Guénolé's accusations as "outrageous" and argued that he failed to understand either racism or anti-Semitism or to acknowledge Bouteldja's conception of "revolutionary love". In a letter signed by
Christine Delphy,
Annie Ernaux,
Catherine Samary,
Isabelle Stengers and 16 others, published in
Le Monde in June 2017, the authors accused Bouteldja's critics of
character assassination and of having failed to read
Whites, Jews, and Us beyond the title "or at most a few misrepresented citations." The authors continue: The hatred that Houria Bouteldja arouses is commensurate with her courage. The courage to shake up our worthy consciences when we prefer to forget what we gain from being whites, here in the West. The courage to evoke racialised women's day-to-day fight and
decolonial feminists' struggle. A resolute and indefinite refusal to fall into the essentialism of the "indigenous man," which so opportunely masks the violence everywhere done to women throughout our societies. In his introduction to Segré's review, Ross Wolfe describes
Whites, Jews, and Us as "a poetic, almost literary text, more manifesto than treatise". In his introductory essay, Jared Sexton argues that in examining the function (rather than simply evaluating the status) of the rights afforded in
liberal democracies, Bouteldja's work is aligned with that of the Peruvian sociologist
Aníbal Quijano and other theorists of the "
coloniality of power". In Sexton's reading, Bouteldja is interested in returning a sense of verticality to analyses of power, not only between the top and the bottom, the haves and the have-nots, but also among those excluded, by differences of degree and of kind, from the commanding heights, a stratigraphy of being and value. Morsi suggests that readers "get caught in the rhythm of her writing even if we are not always certain of what she means." In 2018 Bouteldja and others organised a conference entitled "Bandung of the North", which sought to strengthen resistance to "the patterns of racial, sexual, economical, and epistemological domination developed during colonial times in colonial locations that transcended their contexts by being reproduced globally up to the present day"; Slabodsky suggests that
Whites, Jews, and Us "offers us a glimpse of the Bandung of the North potentialities." Marelli reads Bouteldja alongside debates on these themes in the work of
Hannah Arendt,
James Baldwin and
Gershom Scholem, and concludes that the invocation of "revolutionary love" found in
Whites, Jews, and Us as well as in works by Baldwin and
C. L. R. James constitutes (in
Jacques Rancière's terminology) "the horizon of a new political
subjectivation." Marelli continues: "Any attempt to show that equality doesn’t exist in France causes malicious backlash. Any endeavour to think about race, religion, and gender in terms that vary from the prescribed institutional frameworks ... is an opportunity for abuse." Kazi reads
Whites, Jews, and Us as a challenge to dominant conceptions of white supremacy, which Kazi argues Bouteldja understands as a relational concept rather than an objective one: "Whiteness and blackness only exist in their relation to one another and to processes of capitalist
exploitation and
imperialist violence." The porosity of these categories, in Dubler's reading, is a political necessity and is constitutive of "revolutionary love". Anidjar argues that "Bouteldja undoubtedly initiates a dialogue, a different kind of dialogue, with no condescension, no unilateral, pseudo-parental
pedagogy from on high" and suggests that the reader is obliged to formulate a response to Bouteldja's argument or to the "trajectory" out of which it emerges. Abdul Khabeer praises Bouteldja's treatment of issues specific to the
African diaspora and identifies her as one of a number of thinkers who reject
secularism and the idea that secularism is neutral or innocent. ==Publication history==