French Riots
Prof Juan Cole comments on The Problem with Frenchness in discussing the on-going French riots:
The French have determinedly avoided multiculturalism or affirmative action. They have insisted that everyone is French together and on a "color-blind" set of policies. "Color-blind" policies based on "merit" always seem to benefit some groups more than others, despite a rhetoric of equality and achievement. In order to resolve the problems they face, the French will have to come to terms with the multi-cultural character of contemporary society. And they will have to find ways of actively sharing jobs with minority populations, who often suffer from an unemployment rate as high as 40 percent (i.e. Iraq).
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A lot of the persons living in the urban outer cities (a better translation of cite than "suburb") are from subsaharan Africa. And there are lots of Eastern European immigrants. The riots were sparked by the deaths of African youths, not Muslims. Singling out the persons of Muslim heritage is just a form of bigotry. Moreover, French youth of European heritage rioted quite extensively in 1968. As they had in 1789. Rioting in the streets is not a foreign custom. It has a French genealogy and context.
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Roger Stevenson comments on Prof. Cole's analysis:
I agree for the most part with your analysis of the historical factors and the neglect that French society in general has shown for the problems of minority ethnic groups. The housing problems and discrimination they face in everyday life are truly tragic. France was forced in the 50's and 60's to embark on large scale housing projects to house the increasing numbers of immigrant labor families that the economy needed, with the result that these large high rise apartment buildings are now ghetto-like neighborhoods that are often poorly maintained and very overcrowded.
The remnants of France's colonial empire are now stacked, often 12 stories high, in what the French call "rabbit cages." It is easy to understand how the youth of these underprivileged projects feel totally disenfranchised from the mainstream of French society. Many have dropped out of a very rigid education system, and the prospects for any kind of meaningful future in terms of a job, career, decent housing, a feeling of self-worth, etc., are very bleak.
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Al Jazeera posts Paris riots: Those are not Muslims:
The raging violence which has spread to 300 French cities and towns, and which the police hasn’t been able to extinguish yet, is reflecting the social, not religious, grievance, reports James Button in Paris.
Numerous media outlets and politicians made the assumption that unrest raised worrying concerns of a rise of “Islamic extremism” in France.
Those gangs are not Muslims, their heroes are American rappers like 50 Cent, and they harbour special hatred towards police- When they go to fight them they say they're "dancing with wolves", according to an editorial published on The Age.
Linking the unrest that has reached the heart of the French capital to “radical Islam” is misleading and irrelevant. France’s civil unrest should be compared to the riots that burnt down African-American ghettos across the United States in the 1960s.
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What is happening in France is similar to what happened in Macquarie Fields in 2005 and in Redfern in 2004:
Murray Smith writes, FRANCE: State of emergency called in face of widespread revolt
The term “riot” is in fact misleading. The revolt is the work of gangs of youth who know each other and who consciously turn their anger into acts of destruction of property — burning cars, schools, shops, buses — and attacks on the hated police. As one young man put it to the Madrid daily El Pais: “We don’t have words to explain what we feel. We only know how to speak with fire.” Beyond their immediate targets, their anger is directed against interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy, the hard-right hopeful for the 2007 presidential election, who has described them as “rabble” and “gangrene” and threatened to “hose down” their neighbourhoods. The only political demand that the rioters have put forward is for Sarkozy’s resignation.
Of course, there is a negative side to this revolt. It is easy enough to see that wreaking havoc in their own neighbourhoods causes damage to their neighbours and families. This can and is being exploited by the government to divide their communities between generations and between immigrants and non-immigrants. But when the despair of those to whom society offers no future explodes in revolt, it rarely does so in a neat, tidy and “politically correct” way. What is happening in France today recalls the explosions in the ghettoes of North America in the 1960s and the 1981 riots in England.
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In summary, people are pissed off at being treated as shit. And when the rulers do not listen to reason, unreason is the result. This revolt will be put down because the people do not have the political consciousness to understand why they are in this situation. This is just an angry and violent reaction to oppression. And that condemns this revolt to failure.
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