Three-dimensional French Mickey Mouse

Why am I writing about nothing but France these days? Is it a way of procrastinating in the face of impending law school exams? Well, today is not the day that's going to change, because the urge to share my discovery is strong: France has an excellent rock band. Yes! Mickey 3D. The recipe for Mickey 3D is as follows:

Take equal parts early Cure, Negresses Vertes, Moby and Shriekback; add half a cup of New Order and a pinch of Joy Division. Let rise. To bring out the flavor of the lyrics, sprinkle with Camper Van Beethoven and then dust lightly with Rimbaud. Just before listening, add a drop of Khaled in "Arab ululation" mode. Form the resulting mixture into a musical trio from Saint Etienne: two white blokes who look like they haven't been exposed to sunlight or performed any kind of exercise since the Cure released Pornography, and one beure (French-Arab woman), a certain Najah El Mahmoud who often dresses like a man, or more specifically, like a man who's a member of Run-DMC. Place in CD player for 45 minutes and dance. If you want to dance right now to perhaps their most mainstream-sounding song, watch the Quicktime video for Respire. This song is about what asses we human beings are for destroying the environment, and it proves that, yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as a serious political song that's also a great pop song. Allez Mickey 3D! (In French, that rhymes).

Recommended: Tu Vas Pas Mourir de Rire; La Treve.

French Riots: The Architect Speaks

Architecture in some way has the duty to suggest behaviour...
Places are the portrait of communities, and if the place is impossible,
the community becomes impossible.
- Renzo Piano

Piano is a Paris-based Italian architect responsible for the Pompidou Centre, Osaka's Kansai Airport, the reconstruction of Berlin's Potsdamer Platz, and more. An interview in today's Guardian notes that the French riots didn't surprise him; he attributes them to the misconceptions politicians have about the function of cities and their peripheries. "The big topic of today, and of the next 20 years, will be peripheries. How you can transform peripheries into a town. What is happening today in Paris is happening everywhere. It is mad, mad, and the insensitivity of people and politicians... They create ghettos. In Paris it is particularly bad. Now people are starting to understand that the real challenge of the next 30 years is to turn peripheries into cities." He adds that what politicians don't understand is that for a community to work it must be a place in which people work, sleep, socialize and, as he puts it, "merge" in some way.

Here's a 220-apartment low-income housing development his firm designed in Paris (19th arrondissement): birch trees, a central garden, the concrete structures disguised under a facing of traditional terra cotta tiles chosen for their warmth and "chromatic contrast" with the birch trees and grass. Every apartment has a balcony facing some part of the garden.

Note the size of the buildings: the normal Paris size (4-7 stories), homes on a human scale. And look, an outdoor space human beings might actually want to spend time in: a garden of trees and terra cotta open to the sky. And it's not just that this physical space is more responsive to human needs, it's also the message it sends to its inhabitants: "You may be poor, but you still matter enough for the rest of us to put some time and thought into your quality of life." Compare this with the Saint-Denis HLM in the post about housing projects; that place is just one big "fuck you" to poor people. Hmm. The next time Saint-Denis is working on its housing stock, they should give Mr. Piano a call.

"Ach," he says, "I am the son of a builder... I learned that, day by day, you make a better street, a better road, a better walkway, better houses, better something." His response to the high-flown theory that architecture is a form of sculpture: "Bullshit! Bullshit!"

French Riots #1: Context

Let's get a couple of things straight. One: In over two weeks of "rioting," only one person has died. For purposes of comparison, the LA riots in 1992 killed 55 people in three days. If people are wondering why the French government doesn't crack down on the rioters, consider this: they might actually prefer a few hundred more torched cars over the crackdown alternative, which is dead teenagers. The most dangerous incidents died down after the first week or so, and some of these "rioters" are only eleven years old. All they're doing now is setting fire to cars. As for the rioters last week who beat that man to death or tried to burn a disabled commuter alive, France can shoot them from a cannon into the middle of the Atlantic Ocean for all I care--but why on earth should the police risk killing middle-schoolers just to save a few cars?

Two: France is the most ethnically diverse country in Europe, and it has more foreign-born residents (i.e. immigrants) per capita than the United States. About six million Muslims (half practicing, half secular) live in France--that's 10% of the population--and the vast majority of them are not rioting and do not support the riots. One of the country's largest Muslim groups, the Union of French Islamic Organizations (UOIF), actually issued a fatwa against everyone involved in rioting; CNN has more.

Likewise, most immigrants (or children/grandchildren of immigrants) are doing somewhere between okay and great. There are a half-dozen senators of North African origin in French parliament: for example, Alima Boumediene-Thiery (Paris, Green Party) and Bariza Khiari (Paris, Socialist). There are another half-dozen black ones; France's first black senator, Blaise Diagne, was elected in 1914. Mixed marriage is common and has been for a long time; one of France's biggest movie stars, Isabelle Adjani, age 50, is half Algerian. My friend "Leila" (name changed to protect her privacy), with whom I shared an apartment when we were 19 and 20, has never had a problem finding a job that I know of. Her dad is a skilled laborer, she was a full-time nursery-school teacher at age 19 when I met her, and all four of her siblings are likewise gainfully employed. The only racist incident I've ever known her to have occurred when she was walking down the street with her white French boyfriend and several Arab teenagers harassed her about it ("Aren't you ashamed to be with a white guy," etc.). Both her looks and her name make it blindingly obvious that she's Arab, so the fact that she seems to have largely avoided racism isn't down to her "passing" for anything else.

So what's the problem? It's complex, but a big part of the problem is HLM (housing projects). More on that in the next edition.

French Riots #2: Housing Projects

"People here are bad. I don't want to live here anymore," Rebab Khalil, an 11-year-old whose divorced parents came from Tunisia, said when asked about the gangs. She lives in Saint-Denis, northeast of Paris, but she dreams of life "in a big house, on a quiet street. I want to live in the country, where it is calm." From CNN.

In the 1950s and 1960s, France fell prey to the same idea we did: that the way to improve housing for the poor was to build apartment buildings for them and rent them way below market rate. Projects, in other words; in French, HLM (habitation à loyer modéré, moderate-rental housing). Here's one in Saint-Denis:
Would you like to live there? I didn't think so. The idea was that poor people could live in an HLM for a few years, saving up for a down payment on a house or apartment, and then move out, making room for more poor people. As we all now know, this doesn't work: people don't move out, kids with nothing to do start committing vandalism and selling drugs, and the neighborhood goes to hell. Whatever stores originally existed close up shop, since you can't make money in a place where no one has money and the kids are constantly vandalizing and shoplifting. Normal life moves out; crime moves in. I lived in an HLM in Saint-Denis in 1990; it wasn't safe to go out after dark (not that you'd want to, since there was nothing to do: all the shops, cafes, etc. had gone out of business).

HLM were built in the Modernist style, the complete antithesis of traditional French architecture. Compare that HLM to this traditional neighborhood in central Paris. Where would you, or any human being, rather live?

The problem with the HLM was that they weren't mixed-income; they were warehouses for the poor. In French cities, the traditional pattern is for each building to contain a mix of incomes: in old buildings (pre-elevator) the first floor or two above ground level contain the nicest apartments, with high ceilings and frou-frou woodwork. The quality and size of the apartments diminishes gradually until you reach the "chambre de bonne" (maid's room) on the top floor, six or seven flights of stairs up.

In modern buildings there is less mix, because elevators make all floors equally easy to reach, but some mix is still possible--e.g. top-floor penthouses may be more desirable, and apartments facing the quiet courtyard are more expensive than those facing the noisy street. You're not going to get a complete cross-section of society in a single building (some neighborhoods are more expensive than others, after all) but you get a mix. French society owes some of its more notable strengths--good public schools, for example--to this.

And the big lesson of the 1960s mistake--that is, of Modernist architecture and public housing--is this: poor people do a lot better when they're physically integrated with the rest of society than when they're warehoused all by themselves with thousands of other poor people. The whole 1960s concept of housing for the poor was delusional: what a great idea, let's put all the people who couldn't write a resume if their lives depended on it in one place, so they can meet, make friends, and share valuable skills such as "how to remain poor and unemployed"! Being middle class is about a lot more than money: it involves behavior, speech patterns, dress, lifestyle. You can't learn that if you're marooned in some project miles from the nearest middle-class people, and your kids can't learn it if all the kids in their school are poor too.

This is particularly a problem when you consider that France, more than, say, Britain, brought in a lot of immigrants who were already desperately poor and uneducated in their own country. India and Jamaica are so far from England that, to immigrate, you had to be doing somewhat okay just to afford a ticket. But Algeria is only a ferry-ride away from France. The mother of my best beur (French Arab) friend got married at age 15 and is illiterate, even in Arabic, to this day. Before they immigrated to France, three of the eight children she had died in infancy. There are certainly plenty of Algerian and other North African immigrants who were doing okay back home and went to France in hopes of doing even better, but my guess is that France, compared to England, has a higher proportion of immigrants who were desperate, uneducated, and living in true third-world squalor before they came over. You can't warehouse thousands of people like that in HLM, school all their kids together without any better-situated classmates, and expect them to just spontaneously figure out how to succeed in France. And then there's the employment problem: in the US, France, or anywhere, submitting a resume or application with a ghetto housing project as your address stigmatizes you. HLMs were France's--and America's--biggest mistake.

(Did I mention that my friend "Leila" didn't grow up in an HLM? Her parents live in a little house with a garden and a couple of fruit trees in a mixed-race working-class neighborhood in a small town. Exactly the kind of place poor little Rebab Khalil wishes she lived.)

That's why these days, we're not building low-income projects. In the US, for example, federal dollars are subsidizing developments that mix low-income rental units with moderate-income rentals and units for purchase. I'm not up on the latest developments in France, but I do know they issue rent vouchers that can be used anywhere, and the income limits for getting an apartment in an HLM are high by US standards (details here): for a family of four in the Paris area, if you're making under $47,600 a year, you can live in an HLM. For a family of three or a single parent with one child, the ceiling is just over $39,000. (For purposes of comparison, remember how low poverty thresholds are set in the US: a family of four is not officially in poverty unless it's making less than $19,307/year). So maybe these high income limits are France's attempt to restore the normal French pattern of mixed income in housing, mixing the families that are doing reasonably well (nearly $50k/year!) with much poorer ones. Let's hope it works. Or maybe it can't work, now that the rioters have scared any sane person away. Damn them.

French Riots #3: The Cops

Although racist and otherwise stupid (abruti) cops are a problem in France, as in the US and elsewhere, I don't think the problem is worse there than it is here. However, I've noticed that you don't see a lot of minority cops in France, although the Paris police spokesman quoted in lots of riot-related articles, Hugo Mahboubi, is of North African origin. You also don't even see many female cops. So perhaps there's a recruitment issue. The branch of cops with the worst reputation, to my knowledge, is the CRS, who are responsible for crowd control and calming public disturbances. Obviously that's not a job many people want--most people interested in being cops want to investigate crimes--so the ones who get hired to that branch of the police are not exactly the cream of the crop. In the May 1968 revolts people insulted CRS, who usually arrive at scenes in buses, by saying that their initials stood for Car Rempli de Singes, a bus full of monkeys. Lovely. These, of course, are the cops who are now trying to calm the rioting suburban ghettos.

And now, a medley of anecdotes about interactions I or people I know have had with French cops, from which you are invited to reach your own conclusions on what French cops are like:

(1) A French Arab guy I knew at the Université de Toulouse-Le Mirail, let's call him Djamel, told me about a manif (public protest/demonstration) he was at in Paris, where a police officer--given the context, it must've been a CRS--asked to see his papers. He presented his driver's license, which had the usual three-inch-tall black "F" printed across it to indicate that he was a French citizen. The cop glanced at the license and then asked to see his passport (this question means "let me check your immigration status"). Djamel pointed out the F on his driver's license and said, "I'm French." The cop said, "Ah oui. Listen, I'm sorry." He handed Djamel's license back and they went their separate ways.

(2) I once called the French equivalent of 911 from a phone booth in Seine-Saint-Denis to report that a man in a car--a white man in a nice car, I should point out--had just called me over to ask for directions and started masturbating when I came over. (What an idiot: I walked to the back of his car, wrote down the license plate number, and continued on my way.) So, I called 911. It automatically picked up and placed me on hold. I was on hold for 17 minutes before I gave up and left. Seems like an odd way to manage one's 911 system, no? Are 17-minute hold times normal, or are they reserved for calls coming in from the ghetto?

(3) In central Paris, 4th arrondissement (wealthy area), I once accompanied a South African tourist to the police station to report that her backpack had been stolen (she didn't speak French, hence my presence). We spent about twenty minutes with a young cop who sat at his typewriter entering all the information (contents of backpack, value, etc.) and joking with us ("And this toothbrush, how much was it worth?"). He then sent out two cops to search trash cans and similar places near where the theft had occurred. That amazed me, and I said so. He gave a shrug of shy pride and said, "Eh bien, on est la police" ("well, we're the police").

(4) Eleven or twelve years ago in Toulouse, I overheard my neighbor (white, poor, total loser) beating up his girlfriend (likewise). A minute later, I heard someone ringing the doorbell and shouting Police, open up! My neighbor opened the door and was instantly subjected to a tirade of righteous insults and threats from the police officer, who had apparently been walking by and overheard the fight. Do you want me to arrest you? Do you want to come with me right now and get locked up? Shut up when I'm talking! You do not have the right to hit her! Shut up! I don't care what she did, you cannot hit a woman! Shut up! Mademoiselle! Are you injured? Do you need help? Would you like to bring charges? (No.) You realize that if you don't bring charges, he will continue to do this? You realize that you are in danger? Alright, since she is not obviously injured and I did not actually see you hit her, I cannot arrest you for this now, but I am putting this on record. Now any time something happens with you, down at the station we know who you are: you're the asshole who hits his girlfriend. Etc. etc. etc.

(5) Also in Toulouse, I was waiting at the bus stop near the university--which is right next to an HLM ghetto called Le Mirail--and I saw a few cops on the footbridge that connected the campus with Le Mirail and the bus stop I was at. As I watched, they stopped every single black male on the footbridge and spent thirty or sixty seconds asking them questions. I have no idea why they were doing this; I would assume they were responding to a report about some incident in which the suspect was a young black man. Still, it looked weird. An African woman I was chatting with and I started playing a game: when we'd see a black guy on the footbridge we'd talk like sports announcers--Will he make it? Is he going to get past them? Oh! He passed that one! That one let him pass! One more cop to go--OH, they GOT him! He almost made it, so close!

(6) At Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris when I was 19 I was seeing a friend off, and I asked a little group of cops for directions. This is a mistake, unless you look like a stereotypical tourist (postcards in hand, camera around neck, etc.): before helping you, French police almost always want to see your papers. Vos papiers?? The problem was that, number one, I didn't have my passport on me (a big no-no, in fact I think it's technically illegal for a foreigner), and number two, I actually was an illegal immigrant at the time (which is why I didn't have my passport on me: it showed that I had overstayed my tourist visa). They went at me in the usual aggressive way--You realize we could arrest you, we could take you to the station right now! You realize you have to carry your passport at all times!--and I pleaded ignorance of this passport-carrying rule and said instead of arresting me they could drive me home and I would show my passport to them so they could see everything was in order. In other words we were all bluffing each other--they were playing "bad cop/bad cop" (a French variation on the usual cop game), and I was playing "helpless small young American woman please-don't-hurt-me." They let me go, of course, having never had any intention of wasting two hours booking a teenage girl for not having her passport on her.

French Riots #4: Racism, or...?

CNN says: "Racism and widespread joblessness among minorities have left young people of the slums languishing in hopelessness and despair, creating the tinderbox of anger that has exploded."

Can I just ask, how useful is it to constantly repeat the message that racism is the root of this problem? How does saying that empower these kids, about half of whom are unemployed, at all? The subtext of that message is, "Your problems are the fault of people over whom you have no control at all." You might as well shrug and say, "Sucks to be you. Better luck next life." Of course racism is part of the problem. But it's the part over which those kids have zero control: how is some ghetto teenager supposed to overcome Racism with a capital R? How do you combat an abstract noun? How do you change the minds of Them, whoever They are, whose racism is keeping you down?

The problem is much more complex than racism, and parts of the problem are things over which these kids do have control. It's a lot more empowering to point to the things they can actually change, isn't it? Some people are plain and simply racist, but most white people who react badly to these ghetto kids are not reacting to their skin color/ethnicity: they're reacting to their behavior and presentation. To put it simply, on a good day these kids act inappropriately and look totally unprofessional; on a bad day they are flat-out scary. As stated in French Riots #3, they live in a milieu where it is almost impossible to learn the language, dress and behavior of the middle class. How can they assimilate without any models? And how can they even want to assimilate if they're constantly fed the message that the white middle class is racist, is Keeping Them Down, is a united front purposely blocking their way forward in life? The problem has more to do with class and culture than with skin color. If you look, act and talk like a ghetto troublemaker, your own father might hesitate to offer you a job.

But "troublemaker" is too mild a word. To walk down the street in Saint-Denis is to be the target of a barrage of insults and sexual comments from little posses of Arab boys. Why? Because I'm a woman who dresses western. I'm white, but that's not the key: Arab girls who dress western get harassed too, or, on a bad day, gang raped--this problem hit the headlines in 2001, when eleven teenage boys in Saint-Denis raped a 14-year-old girl and she went to the police. Normally they don't go to the police, because bringing charges means your family gets threatened so severely that they end up having to move, and, thanks to certain inhumanities that are part and parcel of that culture, sometimes the father and brothers of the victim blame her. For more on how wonderful it's not to be a woman in the Arab underclass in France, read up on Ni Putes Ni Soumises (neither whores nor submissive), an organization of French-Arab women. Being a woman in one of these neighborhoods that are currently in flames is so awful that, forgive me, but I can't find a hell of a lot of sympathy for the suffering of the boys who are burning cars--they're the ones who make life so bad for everyone else.

And even if I can sympathize, what's the point? I'd have to be on crack to say their suffering justifies what they're doing--namely, destroying people's property, hurting people, and wrecking the few businesses left in their neighborhood. They're only reinforcing the racism of racists and the fear of non-racist whites. They're making the problem worse. That's part of the reason most French minorities and immigrants are against what they're doing. Muslim groups all over France immediately and vocally opposed the rioters; their opposition is probably based in part on the feeling that, "You idiots, we've worked so hard for the progress we've made, now you're setting us back!" A similar feeling probably animates Nicolas Sarkozy, the Minister of the Interior whose somewhat inflammatory remarks made the rioters furious: his mom was Jewish and his dad, a Hungarian immigrant, told him to forget about becoming a politician because people wouldn't elect someone with a foreign surname. Immigrants who've worked their asses off hate what's going on.

But back to my point: part of the problem is under their control. If they could find it in themselves to alter what they wear and how they behave, so they created a first impression closer to "enterprising young man" than "potential criminal," it would go a long way towards improving their situation in life. If you doubt that, just ask Marva Collins. She's the African-American educator, profiled at least twice on 60 Minutes, who has spent the last 30 years turning kids from the worst Chicago ghettos into doctors, teachers, lawyers, etc. Her model has been exported to a few other cities, with charter schools opening to implement her teaching methods. What does she do? In addition to teaching a fantastic, classics-based curriculum (these kids are reading Hamlet at age 12), she teaches them how to dress, speak and act middle class. French schools already have the rigorous curriculum down; I only wish they would add the social component.

France Steps Up For New Orleans

Why haven't I heard about this in other papers? To figure out what the city needed, France sent its Ambassador to the US down to inspect the damage first-hand. French companies have given New Orleans $19.7 million in aid; the French government has donated 20 tons of emergency supplies and sent military divers to help clear the waterways. The French city of Orléans is letting college students displaced from New Orleans spend a year at the Université d'Orléans for free, not only waiving tuition fees but also paying for plane tickets and living expenses. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has pledged $180,000 to help French-oriented schools throughout Louisiana, and the town of Clermont Ferrand in central France donated $54,000 to rebuild New Orleans schools. France Louisiane, a Paris-based culture group, donated $48,000. Mayor Ray Nagin says France's efforts have been, quote, "awesome."

And now the French Minister of Culture, Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres, has visited New Orleans to announce cultural initiatives: the Louvre and other French museums will loan more than four dozen paintings to the New Orleans museum so it can host an exhibit to replenish its coffers; France will host a series of benefit concerts at which New Orleans musicians will play, so they can earn some money while helping raise funds to rebuild their city; and France will help rebuild the Tremé neighborhood, a historic seedbed of Creole culture. Now we just need to make sure the dispersed French Creole families come home...

"The French are part of our history, part of our soul, and now they are definitely part of our future." - Mayor Nagin