[Mb-civic] Why France Is Burning - David Ignatius - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Why France Is Burning

By David Ignatius
Wednesday, November 9, 2005; Page A31

One day in the late 1970s, the writer James Baldwin was explaining to an 
Arab friend that he wanted to go back to America after many years as an 
expatriate in France. "America has found a formula to deal with the 
demon of race," Baldwin told Syrian businessman Raja Sidawi, who had a 
house near him in St. Paul de Vence. In France and the rest of Europe, 
people pretended that the race problem didn't exist, Baldwin said, but 
"someday it will explode."

Baldwin was right, on both counts. The United States began to find 
solutions for its tormenting "original sin" after its cities burned in 
the 1960s. And France, unable to make the same transition toward racial 
integration, is now watching flames engulf the poor suburbs of Paris 
that are home to many of its black and brown immigrants. By yesterday 
morning, the rioting had spread to 300 towns and cities, and a desperate 
French government was imposing curfews under a 1955 state-of-emergency law.

"The Fire Next Time" was the title Baldwin gave to his prophetic 1963 
book about race. Sure enough, the fire came. Americans of my generation 
remember the riots in Watts and Newark, and the explosion of rage in 
Washington after Martin Luther King Jr.'s death. It was a trial by fire, 
and it changed America. Racist politicians such as George Wallace tried 
to sow more hatred, but a consensus emerged that America needed to 
provide real opportunities for the enraged young blacks who were 
throwing the molotov cocktails. The country began a period of 
court-ordered affirmative action that was acutely painful for blacks and 
whites but changed how America looks and feels.

The sin of slavery will never be fully redeemed, but America today is a 
far different place than where I grew up. African Americans now play 
prominent and powerful roles in every area of American life -- as chief 
executives of huge companies, on television and in the movies, in top 
positions in government and politics. Like a recovering addict, we're 
still solving the issue of race one day at a time, but we've come a long 
way.

France has scarcely begun that journey. But the events of the past two 
weeks suggest that the day of reckoning Baldwin foresaw may finally have 
arrived. Over the past two weeks, more than 5,000 cars have been set 
ablaze. More than 70 police and 30 firefighters have been injured in the 
violence. The angry kids haven't been intimidated by hard-line Interior 
Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, who said he wanted to cleanse the "scum" in 
the suburbs with a water gun. And they haven't been soothed, either, by 
the calls for reconciliation by French Prime Minister Dominique de 
Villepin. In fact, the catfight between these two rival politicians has 
made the crisis worse -- devaluing both carrots and sticks.

America's lesson for the French is that they have a long, hard road 
ahead. The starting point is to break the French state of denial. The 
average (white) French person believes fiercely in the country's 
revolutionary traditions of liberty, equality and fraternity -- to the 
point of pretending that these virtues exist for everyone when they 
clearly don't. France's prized educational meritocracy -- a gulag of 
tests and exams that prepare the way for the best and brightest to enter 
elite national schools -- is in fact gamed by the existing elite. They 
know which lyces are the fastest entry ramp for their kids, which 
test-prep programs will produce the best results on the feared 
baccalaureate exams. Right now, France has what amounts to a reverse 
affirmation action -- a system of supposed equality that guarantees 
unequal results.

I lived for several years in France, returning to America a year ago, 
and I was always astonished by the French inability to reckon with 
racial divisions. You just didn't see black or brown faces in prominent 
positions -- not in the National Assembly, not on French television, not 
among business leaders, not in the media. French analysts have been 
warning for decades about the dangers of warehousing African and Arab 
immigrants in the suburbs, but the French have refused to adopt 
aggressive affirmative-action programs that might change the situation. 
The country was so worried about Muslim extremists that it ignored the 
more immediate problem of the soulless, sullen suburbs.

The French daily Le Monde recalled in an editorial Monday the warning by 
President Jacques Chirac in 1995, when he was still mayor of Paris, that 
youths in the poor suburbs would end up revolting if they couldn't find 
good jobs. How right he was. Chirac, like most thoughtful people in 
France, could see the crisis coming, but he couldn't take action. Now it 
is upon them. As Baldwin warned: "No more water, the fire next time."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/08/AR2005110801106.html?nav=hcmodule
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