| France faces fire of racial rage Understanding riots in a country with “no racism” by Sally Acharya
Cathy Schneider |
When Cathy Schneider landed in France on Sept. 10, 2001, to conduct research on racism, she was met with disbelief. “Everyone said, ‘That’s a dumb topic for France. France has no racism,’” recalls the School of International Service professor. Within a generation, went the common belief, immigrants to France become assimilated and are simply seen as French. What’s more, she was told, race is a constructed category with no scientific validity, and one the French government, having seen how it was used during the Second World War, has chosen not to recognize. So how could there be racism? Four years later, riots engulfed the country after two Muslim youths fleeing police were accidentally electrocuted at an electricity substation. It happened in a rundown Paris suburb Schneider knows well: Clichy-sous-Bois, one of the banlieues, or suburbs, that fringe the cities and are filled with crumbling blocks of apartments and unemployed youths of African and North African origin.
Quotes gathered by Schneider in her research
“In the National Assembly, there are 560 deputies, and not one Muslim or black deputy. Even in Israel there are Arab deputies. Here, there is continuity from colonization . . . To them, we are still immigrants.”
—Muslim youth leader in the banlieue
“We don’t have a [democratic] system of justice or a [democratic] police. Justice does not take care of poor people like us. I am boiling with hatred.”
—North African in France
“They say they oppose organizing on the basis of race. But they push us into that corner. We have no choice.”
—African in France
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Over 20 convulsive nights in November, nearly 9,000 vehicles were torched and 3,000 rioters arrested across France, with over 100 police injured. Many of those who live in the banlieues blame the thing that Schneider was told didn’t exist: discriminatory treatment of France’s non-European immigrants, who are predominantly black and Muslim. Schneider flies to France this week to conduct interviews about the riots, which occurred in the very areas she has been studying. “I wasn’t shocked,” she says of the riots. “The extent of it was a little surprising, but knowing how the police have been behaving, how angry the people felt about it, I knew these are things that had been brewing.” The public discourse on the riots tends to view them in one of three ways, Schneider says. One viewpoint takes them simply as a consequence of violent Islam. Others see them as evidence that the French model of immigration has failed. Still others find them an outgrowth of France’s homogeneity and a lack of experience with immigration. But these explanations miss the real and more complex issues, says Schneider, who has researched the banlieues since 2001. Far from being homogeneous, France is a country with a long history of immigration, she says. Through much of its history, it has been a country at war and has refreshed its depleted labor force with immigration. What is different between the French and the U.S. or British model is that immigrants, brought in under government auspices, were deliberately dispersed precisely to encourage their assimilation. “As long as the immigrants were Europeans,” she said, “that model worked.” But that model of immigration changed in the latter part of the twentieth century. Companies seeking cheap labor brought in workers from the former colonies of Africa and North Africa, many of them Muslim. They were housed on the outskirts of cities, originally in ramshackle housing and later in vast blocks of apartments, she says. With little transportation into the city, few jobs, and poor schools, “these areas became ethnic ghettoes,” Schneider says. France provides its workers with vacations, benefits, health care, and unemployment insurance that make it the envy of people in many other nations, Schneider says. But all those benefits are for people who have been working. Among “immigrant” youth in the banlieues—many of them French-born—unemployment stagnates around 47 percent, she says. These are the ones referred to by some as the sauvageons (“little savages”). Many French of African and North African origin have told Schneider of employment discrimination, police harassment, and a general perception that their race is a determining factor in their lives. Yet the official French stand, she says, continues to be that racism doesn’t exist, the category itself is artificial, and that, hence, any discussion of it is divisive. Historically this perspective is understandable, because it grew out of the experience with Nazis and the use to which they put the concept of race. But it also means that data is not collected; that there is no way to sue for discrimination; and that there is no affirmative action. Meanwhile there has been increasing public acceptance of a discourse that depicts youth of African and North African origin as criminal and violent, a discourse that tends to be linked to perceptions of Islam as inherently violent. Far-right nationalist politician Jean-Marie Le Pen has called for closing the borders, cutting off immigrants’ welfare benefits, and maybe even expelling people of non-European origin, whether or not they are French citizens. An ultra-nationalist who according to the Wall Street Journal has called the holocaust a “detail of history” and defended the Vichy government, Le Pen’s constant discussion of crime and insecurity, which he links to immigrant groups, may not have brought him the presidency, but it has made a difference in France’s political climate. Le Pen won enough votes to challenge Jacques Chirac for the presidency in 2002, and while he didn’t win, the strength of his constituency did affect the rhetoric, and ultimately the actions, of his opponents. Schneider is working on a book comparing the manipulation of racial boundaries in New York City and Paris to see how race is used in political campaigns, in policing, and in social movement organizing in minority neighborhoods. “In a sense, I agree with the French that race is a constructed category,” Schneider says. “But it’s activated first by the state and the police, and then, in a reaction, by young people who feel they are targeted by police and discriminated against in society. These are boundaries created a long time ago, so even if they are a constructed category they are a social reality.” |
