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.