Thoughts after two weeks of riots.

2005-11-09 at 5:02 p.m.

So I'm watching the rioting in France and I can't help but think--been a loooong time coming. What shocks me, just a little bit, is that commentary is just starting now, two weeks into it, that maybe, possibly, this is because the French society has marginalized their immigrants so wholly and completely.

Ya THINK?

You want a comparison? The US in the sixties.

Watts, 1965. Detroit, 1967 after an 'elite' squad of (white) cops raided a (black) drinking establishment. In 1968, riots erupted in Washington DC, Chicago and Baltimore (and more than 100 other cities) after Martin Luther King Jr was assassinated.

The Watts riot nominally started after a black driver was pulled over by a white California Highway Patrol officer, but like all the others, the final catalyst was not the fuel that sustained the riots.

Ultimately the US riots I've cited were more destructive than the French riots (so far), but the causes were similar.

Take a city. Give the majority group the best housing, the best education opportunities and the best political representation. Give the minority group a few underfunded, overcrowded schools. Shut them out from employment opportunities. If there's something about them that looks different, throw in some discrimination to ensure that if they fall down, they stay down. Ramp up the self-sustaining cycle of poverty for them. In fact, ghetto-ize them (and make yourself feel better by saying that "they bring it on themselves" and "they feel better surrounded by members of their own [insert ethnic group here]", because hey, people will choose to live in rundown projects if it means their neighbors have the same skin color...). Cut them off. Draw a ring around them and pull it tight.

And have the police go after them one time too many.

I studied Franco-African politics for a semester in Paris. My French program in college was supposed to go to Mali but they had this pesky civil war so we went to Paris instead. We spent most of our time going to African music festivals, learning about North African immigration and the hazards they face once they get to the country that once colonized them.

Racist jokes. Exclusion. Isolation. Discrimination. Poverty that the ruling class calls their own damn fault. Assumptions that if there are too many consanants in their last name, they can't speak French, or they can't learn, or they can't hold a job. All from the country that fucked up their homeland in the first place and gave them no place else to go.

Paris is inside out to most Americans, because there was never "white flight" from the city. Immigrants couldn't afford to live in the city so tenement housing popped up in rings around every city. Suburbs took on a completely reverse meaning there, as they had come to stand for the poor, the underclass, the hopeless. For three and more generations now, those with darker skin have been forced to decaying non-cities, sequestered from economic opportunity. And Paris (and the rest of France) was never forced to look in the mirror and acknowledge its own racism.

The term I was there, at the Centre Pompideau, we watched a street performance that had the crowd in stitches. It was a man in overalls and a dirty beard (sort of hill-billy looking). He was whipping a black man.

Whipping. A black man.

To the Parisian crowd, this was funny.

To my fellow American students, we were stunned into a stupor. How was this funny? WHAT were they saying? WHAT ON EARTH WAS HAPPENING?

About the same time, the movie La Haine came out (translation: Hate), about North African youth in the suburbs. It was a warning.

My sister lives in Paris now with her Congolese boyfriend. They can't rent an apartment together, because as soon as the landlord or landlady sees his picture, suddenly the flat is already rented. They are occasionally not seated in empty-looking "full" restaurants, or when they are, they get slower service or are in the back, near the kitchen. In fact, go into almost any restaurant and count the black (or brown) faces. In Paris, unless you're in one of the outer neighborhoods, you'll be hard pressed to get to double digits.

It's not because they're not there, because they are. It's just that Parisians don't have to acknowledge it. So they don't.

Now they have a chance to. I wonder if they will, or if instead they'll give that gallic shrug and say that "that's what you'd expect from those people."

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