Ethnicity and Equality: France in the Balance

Author's Preface

xxiii When I became minister for equal opportunities in June 2005, I did not know that the government in which I had agreed to serve would be faced a few months later with the most serious civil disturbances seen in France in almost forty years. But, when the disorders broke out in the fall of 2005, I knew what lay behind them, for, shortly before entering the government, I had painted a portrait of the young men from whose ranks the rioters were to come and invented a name for them: jeunes ethniques [young ethnics]. That portrait, based on my work as a sociologist and many years of firsthand experience in the disadvantaged urban areas known as the banlieues, lay at the heart of a book manuscript that I completed in May 2005. When I gave the typescript to my friend Alec Hargreaves , he proposed to translate it for English-speaking Author’s Preface readers, and I immediately agreed. Neither of us imagined that, even before the ink was dry on the translation, the government in which I was about to serve would be forced to declare a state of emergency in response to widespread attacks by groups of young ethnics on police and public buildings in the banlieues. Yet those attacks came as no surprise to me, for they were rooted in the alienation and anger that I had highlighted among young ethnics toward the more favored and powerful parts of French society. I call these youths young ethnics because they are the children or grandchildren of immigrants from former French colonies who have been stigmatized by members of the majority ethnic population, many of whom feel that people of non-European origin do not deserve to be treated as equal members of French society. Young ethnics are, in that sense, ethnicized. But this does not mean that they are themselves motivated by a desire to perpetuate an ethnic or cultural identity inherited from their immigrant parents or grandparents. On the contrary , they are far more attached to the material values dominant in French society than to the Islamic heritage of migrant forebears from former French colonies in North or West Africa. During the fall 2005 disturbances, a number of prominent intellectuals and politicians blamed the disorders on Islam. Such claims were quite unfounded. The police, intelligence services, and mainstream media all reported that there was no evidence of an Islamic agenda among the rioters. Where Islamic organizations intervened, it was to urge an end to the violence, not to stoke it. Few, if any, of the rioters said that their aims were Islamic. In fact, very few of the rioters were quoted in the mainstream media as saying xxiv au thor’s preface anything at all. This was not simply because mainstream journalists lacked contacts among young ethnics. More fundamentally, it was because the young ethnics who had taken to the streets were generally poorly educated and lacked the training, experience, and leadership with which to articulate a coordinated set of demands. Exactly as I had said in the portrait I had painted, their frustration over ethnic discrimination and social marginalization was such that they were liable to erupt into violence at the slightest provocation, especially if it came from the police. When two of their number died while fleeing a police identity check and the government minister in charge of the French police described disruptive youths in the banlieues as racaille [scum], their seething resentment exploded in cities throughout France. The task we now face is to reconstruct the Republic. That reconstruction is a double process. We must first understand how the Republic came to this pass and then find the tools with which to repair it. French politicians have often prided themselves on the supposedly unique virtues of their “republican” model of integration, which they have frequently contrasted with the ills attributed to so-called Anglo-Saxon (i.e., American and British) approaches to “race” relations . The events of 2005 demonstrated the illegitimacy of this arrogance.As a citizen, as a writer, and as a sociologist , I have learned much from the United States, especially where the experiences of minorities are concerned. As a teenager at junior high school in my hometown, Lyon, the first book that moved me to tears was Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Its poverty-stricken and generous African American protagonist reminded me of my father. And in reading Uncle Tom...