Metropolitan France is roughly 10% non-white yet has zero non-white Assembly members. The US is about 30% non-white and one sixth of House members are non-white. That's not some the result of luck or enlightened white voters, it's policy. Back in the sixties the Voting Rights Act forced states to create district maps that would make it easier for non-whites to get elected. The Senate, where by definition you cannot have such policies, tends to have only a negligible number of non whites, particularly if you exclude Hawaii which is overwhelmingly non white. The US Army is chock full of senior non-white officers. Again it is a result of a policy to counter the insiduous effects of racism by forcing the Army leadership to achieve that goal. US elite universities tend to have roughly 15% black and hispanic student bodies because of affirmative action. US companies try to have at least a token number of senior non-white execs because they have been pressured to do so - and token numbers are a hell of a lot better than none. The list goes on. Urban police departments have gone from lily white to having a heavy non-white presence under pressure from the local minority communities. The elites decisions have come partly out of a genuine sense of justice, but also because of well organized and active non-white pressure groups. Furthermore discrimination tends to be highlighted in countless academic studies, in good part by relying on government collected information about racial disparities.
The French on the other hand refuse any affirmative action as an affront to the egalitarian race-blind ideals of the Republic. Attempts by racial minorities to organize themselves are stigmatized as 'communatarianism' - a mortal sin against Republican values. Same goes for ideas that maybe, just maybe, it would be useful for society to study discrimination in a rigorous manner are futile since collecting statistics differentiated by race is illegal. That of course also makes enforcement of anti-discrimination laws much harder. Only individual cases can be brought when you can't, for example, analyse statistics about allocation of housing or private sector hiring practices.
In effect the French have decided that society should solve the problem of racism with a blindfold and both hands tied behind its back, with just the mouth uttering platitudes about how racism must be eliminated, sounding like American libertarians who somehow argue that because in an ideal society racial categories wouldn't apply, we should act as if we lived in that utopia, rather than in the real world. Now I know that you guys don't like anything that smacks of being 'Anglo-Saxon', so just listen to the American right talking about how all this stuff is contrary to basic American values and that it is really some evil socialist import brought in by those wishy-washy Europeanized American lefties.
Just an observation. I'm willing to be educated here. An untypical American.
Which does not help with the sentiment of rejection the youth of the north of Paris face. Un roi sans divertissement est un homme plein de misères
First Vietnam and Ho kicked them to the curb at Dien Bien Phu, and then the Arabs gave them what for.
Which is why LePen has such pull among certain French.
I remember attending the Harlem Book Fair a couple of summers back, and being in the audience while an African expatriate writer described the situation in France for people of color (Arabs/Muslims, African and Caribbean citizens from the departements), but especially the Arab-Muslim French population. He basically said that people were about to go off, and that it could be at any time.
Time has come today. Do cooler and more rational, and less racist minds in France have anything else to offer these citizens other than platitudes and bullets?
They've got to deliver, and fast. An untypical American.
Where I disagree is when you say that the French model has failed. I am still not convinced that it is true. All the INSEE studies show that the vast majority of immigrants and their (French children) integrate reasonably well and are no worse off than other French people of similar background.
It is short termism (our society's disease) to expect results in years and not in generations. I'll go and collect all the things that were said and written about Italians and Poles in France a few decades ago. it was the same stuff: "they are different" "they bring their religion with them and want to impose it on our country" "they don't want to integrate and stay together", etc.... In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Ben P
As to Poles and Italians - the way I see it the problem of Arab and Black immigrants is both the standard one of immigrant groups and one of race. France has generally been quite successful at assimilating white immigrants, particularly Catholic ones. The only racial minority that France had before the postwar period was the Jews and there both assimilation and racism were at much higher levels than with today's racial minorities. Then came WWII which, to quote Celine's regretful quip, 'ruined antisemitism,' making the rather substantial postwar Jewish immigration a mostly non-racial issue.
To be fair America's success is only a relative one and doesn't really apply to the socio-economic bottom half. There the combination of still existing racism and America's poor government services have had dismal results. But wr/t the top half I do not think that one can dismiss France's problems by saying that time will solve things. France's Arab immigration is no more recent than that of Hispanics in the US, and blacks lived under a ruthless apartheid regime until the sixties. But neither on a political nor on an economic level do you see the sort of representation at higher levels of society that exists in the US.
PS One ethnic group that has not done well in reaching the top in the US are the Poles, and those who have are overwhelmingly drawn from the (well educated) minority that came in the last half century.
People seem to forget that France has been a country of immigration - not only emigration like most of the rest of Europe - for centuries, and HAS integrated pretty much everybody.
My experience of living and working in central Paris, which is worth what it is worth (I work near the Grands Magasins, so it's a shopping and touristy district as well as a white collar business district, and you have lots of different jobs, not all of them high wage), is that you have innumerable people of Arab origins living and working in the same kind of jobs that other French people. One of our newest recruits in our team is a young guy of Algerian origins who went through HEC (the top business school) - and the next person to join our team will be a Bengali immigrant.
But nobody talks about the 80-90% (especially the women) that are successfully integrated and lead normal lifes, even if they live in a banlieue, most of which are pleasant areas.
Again, I am not denying the problems, but also trying to put them in perspective. If you buy the "France is in decline, its society is fucked up, it needs to reform" spiel, which I don't (at least not in the terms put in the business and/or English speaking press), then it's easy to see these riots as an overriding problem. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
