Bernard Chazelle: France's Colonial Blowback
[Bernard Chazelle is Professor of Computer Science, Princeton University.]
... There is the creed of the French Republic. And then there is the reality: riots that convulsed the nation for 3 weeks last fall. The roots of the crisis go back to the labor shortage of the sixties. Boatloads of North African immigrants landed on France's shores to provide the transient workforce needed to sustain an unprecedented economic boom. The transient part of the plan took a hit when the guests got the bizarre idea of having—gasp—children. Though of French nationality, this new generation, self-named Beurs (why Beurs? read on), grew up with the distinction of being neither truly French nor, for that matter, truly Arab. The Algerians among them bore the added stigma of a particularly nasty bout of decolonization.
The government parked the new immigrants in giant housing projects, called cités, apparently confident in the integrating virtues of reinforced cement concrete. To be fair, these were the same Le Corbusier-designed monstrosities that housed the poor in the wake of World War II. Fifty years on, priding itself on having inflicted the full brunt of architectural genius on two generations of urban guinea pigs, the government is finally calling in the bulldozers.
Strangers in their own land, young Beurs face an identity crisis that had spared earlier immigrants: France is their house but it won't be their home. Caught in the void between competing cultural narratives, they suffer social exclusion, employment discrimination, and a jobless rate that is twice the average. Social progress in France is often measured by the rhythms of civil protest. Aspiring children of the Republic, the Beurs have mastered the very French notion that taking to the streets is just politics by other means: always theatrical; sometimes destructive; rarely lethal. Last fall's unrest killed only 1 person, yet spread to 274 cities over 22 days [14]; a mere sideshow compared with the 1992 LA riots: 53 deaths; 1 city; 5 days [15].
Street protests in France are anti-authoritarian People vs. Cops dustups, not “multiculturalist” sports events like the race riots in Britain and Australia last year. The rioting Beurs took their cue from the farmers, truckers, and transit workers, for whom the street world is a stage. So secular, so Fight-The-Man, so French. The Union of French Islamic Organizations issued a fatwa against the riots, whose utter ineffectiveness only served to highlight the irrelevance of organized Islam in France. Hard as it may be on a neocon's digestive tract to swallow, religion played no role in the riots.
Predictably, the view stateside was fittingly twisted. Fresh from blowing away the competition in Iraq as the world's top manure producer, the US mainstream media saw the French riots as the perfect excuse to crank up production. The New York Times informed its readers that “No other country in Europe immolates cars with the gusto and single-minded efficiency of France. Even during tranquil periods, an average of 80 vehicles per day are set alight somewhere in the country” [16]. Never mind that, even during tranquil periods, an average of 192 vehicles per day are set alight somewhere in the UK [17]. But, to quote Saint Judy, why let facts get in the way of a good story?
The Washington Times wouldn't know. Taking a break from bouncing off his padded walls, the reliably batty Mark Steyn put on his tinfoil hat to identify the culprit: “an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything likely in the Middle East” [18]. (Take that, Osama.) By then fully intoxicated with his own brilliance, Steyn had to let his hallucinations do the talking: “France's Arab street correctly identified Jacques Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness.” Nothing like a nice big cup of Neocon Kool-Aid to cheer up the asylum.
Of course, the Islamofascist connection did not escape the paranoid gaze of the vigilantes manning the barricades at The New Republic: “If a significant fascist party existed in France, it is among these young Arab and North African children of immigrants [...] that it would recruit for its storm troopers” [19]. Yes, of course; and when the KKK tries to sign up new members it goes scouting the hood in Compton for recruits. TNR has been nicknamed the “in-flight magazine of Air Force One.” Evidently, it doubles nicely as a barf bag.
Men in designer suits order bombs to be dropped on pajama-clad children in the dead of night: some call them war criminals; others statesmen. Boys in hoodies shoplift burger patties from supermarkets: some call them vermin; others rotten vermin. And when they compound their crimes by having names that no decent churchgoer can even spell we call them rotten vermin twice evil—or Beurs, for short.
Poverty is the key variable that correlates crime and ethnicity. This correlation is the sea in which the racist fish swims. Distribute nonwhites across the social spectrum of wealth and watch racial discrimination recede like the ocean at low tide. Here's how you do it: have the government hire all unemployed white guys named Jacques and dispatch them all across France to steal burger patties. This way, when Ahmed applies for a job, the interviewer will sigh with relief and say: “Well, at least your name is not Jacques.” (To appreciate the full genius of my scheme, note that all Jacques will be fully employed, so it won't matter a whit if they're now the ones to suffer employment discrimination).
Another solution is to jail everyone named Ahmed. America has been working on a variant of this for a while now and the verdict is mixed: only 30 percent of all black males are expected to be incarcerated in their lifetime, so there's still some ways to go [20].
If all else fails, of course, one can always ask white people to stop being such racist pigs. But recent genomics research indicates that mutation from swine to angel requires more than a hectoring preacher with a wagging finger. It requires creating job opportunities and enforcing anti-discrimination laws. The latter is tough to do in France because the state may not gather any racial, ethnic, or religious demographics. The ban was meant to propitiate the gods of égalité but seems to have riled them up instead. Pinning yellow stars during the Vichy years was not the best advertisement for ethnic monitoring, and the idea is still unpalatable to many. But, regardless of what pleases its tastebuds, France needs the proper tools to fight discrimination. No one shines a brighter light on race than the racist, and it is an abiding irony that the Republic's blindness to the light has only enhanced its brightness.
France needs affirmative action; the preferred term is discrimination positive, a lovely oxymoron that evokes the upbeat desperation of “exquisite pain” while begging the transience of “hot ice cream.” The nutty fundies of the Republic can bleat all they want about the evil of affirmative action and the dread of communautarisme that it drags in its wake: it is a red herring. An ostracized, ghettoized populace is the ultimate form of communautarisme. Affirmative action is no panacea: in fact, it is the worst possible remedy—with the exception of all the others.
Political representation is another sore point. The marvelous chromatic unity on display in the gilded halls of the Palais Bourbon (the parliament) suggests a new French tricolor: white, white, white. Legislators recently passed a “parity law” meant to promote the presence of women in politics. It would do well to extend the idea to ethnic minorities. The Cassandras who read in the tea leaves of affirmative action the end of the Republic suffer either from bad faith or from a tragic lack of imagination.
From Tom Friedman's business class seat, 30,000 feet above the Calcutta Golf & Country Club where he'll soon be predicting the end of Indian poverty while practicing his tee shot, the world looks awfully flat. From the burning banlieues it is anything but. Friedman's cherished globalization has deepened inequalities and tied up the government's hands just as it needed more wiggle room. Despite its tight labor market and high unemployment, France has been a neoliberal's dream: more companies in the Fortune Global 500 than both Germany and the UK; more foreign direct investment flowing into it than into the US; tighter fiscal policies, etc. [4, 21]. If anything, the riots prove that France is well on its way to being fully Friedmanized: a flat world with cracks just wide enough to swallow up the impoverished masses.
Racism and globalization are the ingredients of the stew brewing in the cités: France's political class is the chef that keeps it stirred. Frighteningly competent and hopelessly out of touch, the chef suffers from advanced autism. The competence stares you in the face: trains run on time without the help of a fascist dictator; cell phones are real phones—not cheap excuses for standing outside in the rain while pretending to be searching for a signal; potholes are tiny orifices in the sort of kitchenware that... well, you get the point. As for being in touch, the ruling elite is passionately in touch with its favorite kind: itself. It is obsessed with self-preservation, ossified, and lordly. De Gaulle once compared the French to dawdling calves: apparently, someone forgot to tell Chirac it was a joke.
Both wings of the political spectrum have fused into a gloppy miasma of opportunism. Most politicians these days graduate from the same school, ENA, and learn early on to confine their differences to their choice of dessert in the school cafeteria. From the recent European constitution fiasco to Le Pen's day in the sun of the 2002 presidential election, French leaders have demonstrated a phenomenal ability to misread the electorate. The Beurs were born to be the left's dream catch. That the only catching they got was from the neighborhood cops says much about the socialists' state of decay. Alas, civil unrest invariably rewards the wrong side, and few sights are more repulsive than a smug Le Pen licking his drooling chops. ...
Read entire article at Website of Bernard Chazelle
... There is the creed of the French Republic. And then there is the reality: riots that convulsed the nation for 3 weeks last fall. The roots of the crisis go back to the labor shortage of the sixties. Boatloads of North African immigrants landed on France's shores to provide the transient workforce needed to sustain an unprecedented economic boom. The transient part of the plan took a hit when the guests got the bizarre idea of having—gasp—children. Though of French nationality, this new generation, self-named Beurs (why Beurs? read on), grew up with the distinction of being neither truly French nor, for that matter, truly Arab. The Algerians among them bore the added stigma of a particularly nasty bout of decolonization.
The government parked the new immigrants in giant housing projects, called cités, apparently confident in the integrating virtues of reinforced cement concrete. To be fair, these were the same Le Corbusier-designed monstrosities that housed the poor in the wake of World War II. Fifty years on, priding itself on having inflicted the full brunt of architectural genius on two generations of urban guinea pigs, the government is finally calling in the bulldozers.
Strangers in their own land, young Beurs face an identity crisis that had spared earlier immigrants: France is their house but it won't be their home. Caught in the void between competing cultural narratives, they suffer social exclusion, employment discrimination, and a jobless rate that is twice the average. Social progress in France is often measured by the rhythms of civil protest. Aspiring children of the Republic, the Beurs have mastered the very French notion that taking to the streets is just politics by other means: always theatrical; sometimes destructive; rarely lethal. Last fall's unrest killed only 1 person, yet spread to 274 cities over 22 days [14]; a mere sideshow compared with the 1992 LA riots: 53 deaths; 1 city; 5 days [15].
Street protests in France are anti-authoritarian People vs. Cops dustups, not “multiculturalist” sports events like the race riots in Britain and Australia last year. The rioting Beurs took their cue from the farmers, truckers, and transit workers, for whom the street world is a stage. So secular, so Fight-The-Man, so French. The Union of French Islamic Organizations issued a fatwa against the riots, whose utter ineffectiveness only served to highlight the irrelevance of organized Islam in France. Hard as it may be on a neocon's digestive tract to swallow, religion played no role in the riots.
Predictably, the view stateside was fittingly twisted. Fresh from blowing away the competition in Iraq as the world's top manure producer, the US mainstream media saw the French riots as the perfect excuse to crank up production. The New York Times informed its readers that “No other country in Europe immolates cars with the gusto and single-minded efficiency of France. Even during tranquil periods, an average of 80 vehicles per day are set alight somewhere in the country” [16]. Never mind that, even during tranquil periods, an average of 192 vehicles per day are set alight somewhere in the UK [17]. But, to quote Saint Judy, why let facts get in the way of a good story?
The Washington Times wouldn't know. Taking a break from bouncing off his padded walls, the reliably batty Mark Steyn put on his tinfoil hat to identify the culprit: “an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything likely in the Middle East” [18]. (Take that, Osama.) By then fully intoxicated with his own brilliance, Steyn had to let his hallucinations do the talking: “France's Arab street correctly identified Jacques Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness.” Nothing like a nice big cup of Neocon Kool-Aid to cheer up the asylum.
Of course, the Islamofascist connection did not escape the paranoid gaze of the vigilantes manning the barricades at The New Republic: “If a significant fascist party existed in France, it is among these young Arab and North African children of immigrants [...] that it would recruit for its storm troopers” [19]. Yes, of course; and when the KKK tries to sign up new members it goes scouting the hood in Compton for recruits. TNR has been nicknamed the “in-flight magazine of Air Force One.” Evidently, it doubles nicely as a barf bag.
Men in designer suits order bombs to be dropped on pajama-clad children in the dead of night: some call them war criminals; others statesmen. Boys in hoodies shoplift burger patties from supermarkets: some call them vermin; others rotten vermin. And when they compound their crimes by having names that no decent churchgoer can even spell we call them rotten vermin twice evil—or Beurs, for short.
Poverty is the key variable that correlates crime and ethnicity. This correlation is the sea in which the racist fish swims. Distribute nonwhites across the social spectrum of wealth and watch racial discrimination recede like the ocean at low tide. Here's how you do it: have the government hire all unemployed white guys named Jacques and dispatch them all across France to steal burger patties. This way, when Ahmed applies for a job, the interviewer will sigh with relief and say: “Well, at least your name is not Jacques.” (To appreciate the full genius of my scheme, note that all Jacques will be fully employed, so it won't matter a whit if they're now the ones to suffer employment discrimination).
Another solution is to jail everyone named Ahmed. America has been working on a variant of this for a while now and the verdict is mixed: only 30 percent of all black males are expected to be incarcerated in their lifetime, so there's still some ways to go [20].
If all else fails, of course, one can always ask white people to stop being such racist pigs. But recent genomics research indicates that mutation from swine to angel requires more than a hectoring preacher with a wagging finger. It requires creating job opportunities and enforcing anti-discrimination laws. The latter is tough to do in France because the state may not gather any racial, ethnic, or religious demographics. The ban was meant to propitiate the gods of égalité but seems to have riled them up instead. Pinning yellow stars during the Vichy years was not the best advertisement for ethnic monitoring, and the idea is still unpalatable to many. But, regardless of what pleases its tastebuds, France needs the proper tools to fight discrimination. No one shines a brighter light on race than the racist, and it is an abiding irony that the Republic's blindness to the light has only enhanced its brightness.
France needs affirmative action; the preferred term is discrimination positive, a lovely oxymoron that evokes the upbeat desperation of “exquisite pain” while begging the transience of “hot ice cream.” The nutty fundies of the Republic can bleat all they want about the evil of affirmative action and the dread of communautarisme that it drags in its wake: it is a red herring. An ostracized, ghettoized populace is the ultimate form of communautarisme. Affirmative action is no panacea: in fact, it is the worst possible remedy—with the exception of all the others.
Political representation is another sore point. The marvelous chromatic unity on display in the gilded halls of the Palais Bourbon (the parliament) suggests a new French tricolor: white, white, white. Legislators recently passed a “parity law” meant to promote the presence of women in politics. It would do well to extend the idea to ethnic minorities. The Cassandras who read in the tea leaves of affirmative action the end of the Republic suffer either from bad faith or from a tragic lack of imagination.
From Tom Friedman's business class seat, 30,000 feet above the Calcutta Golf & Country Club where he'll soon be predicting the end of Indian poverty while practicing his tee shot, the world looks awfully flat. From the burning banlieues it is anything but. Friedman's cherished globalization has deepened inequalities and tied up the government's hands just as it needed more wiggle room. Despite its tight labor market and high unemployment, France has been a neoliberal's dream: more companies in the Fortune Global 500 than both Germany and the UK; more foreign direct investment flowing into it than into the US; tighter fiscal policies, etc. [4, 21]. If anything, the riots prove that France is well on its way to being fully Friedmanized: a flat world with cracks just wide enough to swallow up the impoverished masses.
Racism and globalization are the ingredients of the stew brewing in the cités: France's political class is the chef that keeps it stirred. Frighteningly competent and hopelessly out of touch, the chef suffers from advanced autism. The competence stares you in the face: trains run on time without the help of a fascist dictator; cell phones are real phones—not cheap excuses for standing outside in the rain while pretending to be searching for a signal; potholes are tiny orifices in the sort of kitchenware that... well, you get the point. As for being in touch, the ruling elite is passionately in touch with its favorite kind: itself. It is obsessed with self-preservation, ossified, and lordly. De Gaulle once compared the French to dawdling calves: apparently, someone forgot to tell Chirac it was a joke.
Both wings of the political spectrum have fused into a gloppy miasma of opportunism. Most politicians these days graduate from the same school, ENA, and learn early on to confine their differences to their choice of dessert in the school cafeteria. From the recent European constitution fiasco to Le Pen's day in the sun of the 2002 presidential election, French leaders have demonstrated a phenomenal ability to misread the electorate. The Beurs were born to be the left's dream catch. That the only catching they got was from the neighborhood cops says much about the socialists' state of decay. Alas, civil unrest invariably rewards the wrong side, and few sights are more repulsive than a smug Le Pen licking his drooling chops. ...