Be sure to read Doug Ireland on the background and context of the French riots. Here’s a sample:
As someone who lived in France for nearly a decade, and who has visited those suburban ghettos, where the violence started, on reporting trips any number of times, French_riots I have not been surprised by this tsunami of inchoate youth rebellion that is engulfing France. It is the result of thirty years of government neglect: of the failure of the French political classes — of both right and left — to make any serious effort to integrate its Muslim and black populations into the larger French economy and culture; and of the deep-seated, searing, soul-destroying racism that the unemployed and profoundly alienated young of the ghettos face every day of their lives, both from the police, and when trying to find a job or decent housing. To understand the origins of this profound crisis for France, it is important to step back and remember that the ghettos where festering resentment has now burst into flames were created as a matter of industrial policy by the French state. Read the whole thing. (Hat tip: Once Upon a Time.) Once you’re done with that, read Adrien Wing on the French rioting. Here’s a sample: The French train their judges at a national judge school located in Bordeaux which I take my American summer students to visit each year. Students mainly in their 20s are admitted after scoring in the top few percentage points on a national test. They don’t become judges after extended careers as lawyers. Well, the French “baby judge” students are maybe 70-80% female at this point — a matter of some concern to the country with a historically male judiciary. I have even heard talk that maybe affirmative action, which does not exist in schools in France, will have to be considered in order to prevent the judiciary from becoming all female in a few years. Whenever we question the baby judges about the lack of racial diversity at the school, we get blank stares. “We are all French. This does not matter” or Well, all they have to do is score in the top percentages on the test” are among the responses.” I hope the country will realize that gender, racial and religious diversity on the bench needs to be a priority now.
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Thanks for those links. I found the first one particularly useful – I didn’t know the history (I was unconvinced by the second one – I’m not saying that making the legal system more representative isn’t a useful goal, but in and of itself it isn’t going to change anything, anymore than having Clarence Thomas on the supreme court did).
One of the questions which has become really loud ever since I noticed how invisible it was, is why don’t women riot? They suffer every bit as much from racism as men do, and they’ll also be paid less (although I think more likely to be employment), and have more unpaid work. I came up with a couple of ideas on my blog, but I don’t think they’re very good ones.
What I’m fundamentally unsure of is: are women less likely to feel that alienated, are their expectations of their life that much lower, are they unable to express their alienation, or do they express alienation in a different way?
Redecca, news reports state that that the rioters are apparently virtually all Moslem. They also state that for years, French police have not enforced French laws in those neighborhoods. They further state that the law on those streets has been a Wahabbist version of sharia; for example, women walking those streets without their hair covered are likely to be assaulted and raped.
On that basis, it may be that the women are not out there rioting because they are not free to do so; that their husbands and brothers and fathers keep them inside and would assault them if they tried to join in.
As I recall, France is the only European nation that does not collect racial; demographic data (i.e., what percentage of the population is black, what percentage is Asian, etc.).
Therefore, it is not surprising that they don’t consider the idea of affirmative action. Their whole political system believes in denying race.
These are some serious claims; throwing around Molotov cocktails doesn’t lighten the burden of their proof.
Seriously speaking, now that the rioters have now got the media attention, why don’t they speak about their problems in specific terms (without ambiguous “failure of integration” lithurgy)?
(For me it would suffice to show that the low life standards of the rioters are a cause of systematic discrimation, i.e. lower chances of success with the same effort than for middle and upper class people – or in intuitive terms, “inequal opportunities”. Mere low life standards do not necessarily imply discrimination.)
I’m sorry to be a cynic here, but according to some rioter interviews I read, it seems that these rioters are mainly high-school dropouts enjoying the fact that they have nothing to lose.
I read that whole Doug Ireland link. I think I’m going to post it on Free Republic to give a somewhat different perspective on these riots there.
Apparently warehousing low-income people of a obviously different race/nationality in large vertical housing units didn’t work any better in Paris than it did in Chicago. However, the question becomes how much responsibility the government bears, how much that French racism is responsible, and how much responsibility the immigrants themselves bear.
After all, it really isn’t the government’s responsibility to build housing, it’s the responsibility of the individual to earn money and buy/rent it themselves. Now, if racism keeps wages for these people artifically low and allows landlords or property owners to arbitrarily deny people of a particular race access to the private housing market, then government has a role in fixing that problem.
But it turns out that government subsidized housing that concentrates those people in one particular area isn’t a good fix. That furthers the isolation of those people and keeps them from becoming assimilated. Note that the link references the high birthrate as being caused by their culture; having a bunch of babies that you can’t support is the responsibility of the people having the babies, but it isn’t helped by cramming everyone together and isolating them from a culture that would discourage that. An actually effective fix for this problem would be anti-racial discrimination laws that are vigorously enforced. This makes a much better solution, as it furthers integration of those people into the national culture.
France and other European countries have criticized the United States for years about the racism in our culture. Now we see that these countries themselves are possibly even more racist than we are, and that they are now going to pay for that. I’m trying to resist schaudenfreude (sp?), because people are dying and are going to die. But they are reaping what they’ve sown.
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(I was unconvinced by the second one – I’m not saying that making the legal system more representative isn’t a useful goal, but in and of itself it isn’t going to change anything, anymore than having Clarence Thomas on the supreme court did).
I agree with this. Why is the answer to a permanent underclass to help those “one-notch-below-elite” up to becoming “elite”. Then you have the same permanent underclass of North Africans with a handful of elite North African judges. While certainly nicer, it doesn’t seem to really address the problem.
RonF it seems unlikely that religion is the answer to my question, as similar modern riots in America have also been mainly male. If I remember early modern history right, rioting has not always been a gendered phenomenon, women participated in bread and grain riots of previous time.
The police certainly have policed French law in the ghettos, if you’d read any of the interviews with rioters, you’d know that was one of their complaints.
I’m astonished anyone could read Doug Ireland’s piece and wonder if this was deliberate government policy and the result of racism, or just the result of different choices people make. He spells out the racism and deliberate policy right in the article. For example, he says that literacy was seen as a job hinderance, so workers wouldn’t make trouble.
Weren’t these riots sparked off by an altercation between the police and some young teenagers? I do remember reading the neighborhoods were heavily policed, people subjected to questioning, ID checks. That sounds familiar…
chronology of sorts:
French civil unrest
As for the women not rioting, it seems that a group of Muslim women weren’t even safe praying in their own mosque which was teargassed and hit by flash balls used by police. As the women fled, they were called gender slurs by police. Another rule of occupation, people especially women in those neighborhoods are not considered people.
It’s interesting that the U.S. would even stand in judgment, after all, our country is no stranger to this.
Racism, classism, colonialism, isolation, disenfranchment, little acts and big acts, accumalating for years like a pile of kindling that just increases in size, then you have the spark which almost always involves an altercation or misconduct involving the police.
riots are ugly and deadly, but they don’t happen in a vacuum and it’s easy to write them off as isolated events caused by hoodlums, much easier than addressing what’s been building for the prior ten years or so.
Ronf:
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Now you are lying. Not only news reports do not say that “virtually all moslems”, but more importantly, it is NOT true that “wabbhist law” is the law in the streets. I have walked with my sisters in those nighborhoods and never ever felt that we were going to be raped. Just starting from there, your credibility is zero to me.
Well, Sergio, I’ve never walked those streets myself. I’m going by news reports I’ve read in the American media. If I’m misinformed, I’m glad to accept correction. Thank you. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time that American media gives an incorrect picture of what’s going on in a foreign country.
Rebecca, did you read my posts and conclude that I don’t think that what’s going on there is the result of government-supported racism? I believe you’ve misinterpreted me. If that is your conclusion, what led you to it?
Radfem says
“It’s interesting that the U.S. would even stand in judgment, after all, our country is no stranger to this. ”
Perhaps because from what I’ve read in American media, Europeans have often stood in judgement of us.
It’s quite true that the U.S. is no stranger to various kinds of civil unrest and rebellion fueled by racism. But we at least learned something from it. These days, an American has recourse to the courts and to other agencies to get something done about racism. It’s far from being a perfect system, but the principles are there and they can be applied. Victories have been won. Whereas nowhere in the Doug Ireland story did I see any reference to any French anti-racism laws or any ability for these folks to go to court and gain access to better employment, the private housing market, etc.
Sergio, I’ve reread your post to me and I believe that you should do the same. You accuse me of being a liar, but I don’t think so. I said that I have read news stories reporting various things. You deny those things are true, and I cannot contradict that because I haven’t been there. But I didn’t lie; it’s quite true that I have read such news stories, and if you care to do any kind of search I’m sure you can find the same.
Now, if those stories are in error, that’s a different issue. But those stories do exist.
How come when some thugs who belong to a minority group riot, we ask “what is France doing wrong?”
I mean, there has been a long thread of comments on Nick Kiddle’s posts arguing that we shouldn’t blame the victim when someone commits a rape, or ask what the victim should have done differently. So why should we blame the victims when some thugs riot? Why should we ask what France did to the disaffected youth? How about asking, what kind of moral reprobtes are these people who will spend nearly two weeks (so far) burning people’s cars and torching property?
Why not place the blame on the thugs who were rioting?
Of course we blame the rioters too, that goes without saying. They’ve gone beyond making a political statement and are just causing havoc for personnal reasons. However, every government should be responsible for creating conditions in which such events do not happen. Also, judging France will get it to act upon the situation, whereas judging the rioters would be far less constructive, other than to show that we find their acts intolerable.
I believe that France failed in its intergration program by ignoring the race issue completely. Though it hasn’t encouraged racism directly, it has let it foster without doing much to stop it. I also think that the American “Melting Pot”, though by far superior to France’s model, could use some work too. Though it prevents unrest by integrating immigrants, they often loose their culture (they might keep their identities, but still loose their traditions), which could add diversity to the cities they live in. I would suggest a combination of multiculturalism and integration, which I believe exists to a certain extent in Canada (as you’ve probably guessed, I’m Canadian). Though our model’s far from perfect, we integrate immigrants fairly successfully by teaching them english (french for Quebec) and assuring that they get jobs, but our culture and values lets them keep their own culture while encouraging them to explore other’s cultures as well. Though we end up having Ghettos like every other country, and racism is still very present, I believe racial conditions are better than in Europe and maybe even the United-States. I might be wrong and making quick judgements on other countrie’s systems however, so I value your comments.
P.S. Sorry for getting off-topic somewhat
Judging the rioters can be very constructive. A few harsh prison sentences, or perhaps telling them to stop and shooting some people if they don’t.
The use of force might stop the looting, but it will just increase the resentment and lead to more problems in the long run. Or worse, it would spark even more violence, since these youths have no future and nothing to loose.