Riots in France are fading and the end of violence, French police say, is in sight. But what lessons have we learnt from three weeks of arson, mayhem and rage? I recall how puzzled several of my friends, educated professionals one and all, here in Washington were that the head scarf — known as hijab, worn by young Muslims in class often to affirm their identity — became an issue of such paramount significance in the public debate in France a while back. Don’t Frenchmen, and the jurists who later legislated laws against its use, we argued, have better things to do interpreting constitutional law than to go after uppity teenagers copping attitude with their fashion statement? One of the reasons for our puzzlement was that we were clearly extrapolating from our own social and political experience. We must realize that France, along with other countries in Western Europe that are host to large immigrant communities, is not the United States.
European societies have a higher population density and different rules governing integration.
Above all, they do not have a tradition of assimilating immigrants — inviting minorities to participate in the evident vitality of cultural, political and economic life to an extent where they, or their children, become full-fledged citizens, unencumbered by a sense of crippling alienation and held back by a chip on their shoulder.
The recent rioting in the ghettos outside Paris and other French cities, mostly by African youngsters from countries in the Maghreb and south of the Sahara, highlighted the core frustrations of millions of first, second and third generation ethnic Frenchmen denied access to elite schools, decent jobs and a place in society by leading political parties on their candidate lists.
Inhabitants of these ghettos, known as “banlieusards” (an ironic moniker if there ever was one, since in French it means “suburbanites”) make up, by the best estimates, 10 percent of the population in France. Their grievances against the state have been, all these years, like a virus that at times lies dormant but can suddenly erupt with vengeance, particularly during periods of stress.
Truth be told, the issue of race, immigration, inter-ethnic conflict and inequality were daily copy at one time in the United States. But almost half a century ago, the country decided, as it were, to go where no nation had gone before — a journey that tested its people’s mettle — and commit itself to the goal of ethnic justice, which translated as the integration of minorities that had suffered wanton economic discrimination and outright exclusion from the middle and upper echelons of social life — discrimination and exclusion similar to those that Maghrebi and African minorities continue to suffer in France today.
There were those in the US who thought the transition would be both painful and traumatic. And in a way it was. Bigotry accumulated over centuries dies hard and where it wanes, the cultural perceptions that had sustained it will linger. You cannot, after all, legislate away a state of mind with the flick of a Supreme Court finger.
But the experiment worked. After a while, different people came to discover that they shared something seminal beneath their surface differences — they were all Americans.
Indeed, beyond all that, it was clear that the victims of segregation, by their struggle for equality, not only succeeded in having the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act introduced as part of the law of the land — two monumental pieces of legislation that dramatically altered the way Americans lived their lives — but in effect tapped into the moral power of American ideals, and by doing so transformed and humanized American society by making it more open, more tolerant and more free.
You would have imagined the French, who like Americans draw on ideals from the Enlightenment to define themselves, would also have seen that there was no way out, around or through the problem of their disenfranchised minorities, than meaningful integration of their minorities.
But, no, these minorities were not only denied “equality, fraternity and liberty,” the hallmark slogan of the French Revolution, but diversity as well, a major building block of the multicultural world we live in today.
Snicker all you want at multiculturalism, but it works. People of different races, faiths, languages, backgrounds and nationalities can live together harmoniously in a pluralistic society, given the right conditions. I know that they can and that they do because I live in such a society right here in the United States.
Yes, there was a time when the influx and assimilation of immigrants would have — indeed had -triggered a backlash, a call to stem the flow into the country of all those shifty-eyed Middle Easterners, drunken Irishmen, greedy Jews, violent Italians, inscrutable Chinese, and the rest of it, because of concerns about “threats to our way of life.” Not today.
Not only do those immigrants who arrive to these shores legally via the Pacific and the Atlantic, but illegally via the Rio Grande (and please in these politically correct times, call them “undocumented immigrants”), sooner or later move into the mainstream, recapitulating the experiences of all those early immigrants, of every hue and caste, from every country in the world, who had arrived fresh off the boat to build America as “a nation of nations.”
“We manage quite well,” wrote the Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson last week, in his commentary on the riots in the City of Lights, “especially if you compare our society to those like France, that cover their ears and go ‘no, no, no’ to avoid facing complicated truths.”
If France wants its immigrants to become truly French, productive, integrated citizens, then let them be French in their own way, and foster the emergence in society of the values of diversity within unity. Being French and ethnic are not a mutually exclusive conditions. In the United States, people flaunt being Irish-American, Jewish-American, Arab-American, and so on, without causing a single eyebrow to raised. For us here in the US, it is a contradiction in terms for a people like the French, who are claimants to something they call “la mission civilizatrice,” to have allowed a marginal issue like the hijab, for example, to insinuate itself so vociferously into the public debate.
Monsieurs: We may eat Velveeta cheese and you Marquis de Lafayette Brie, read Stephen King and you Jean Paul Sartre, and watch “Star Wars” and you “The Bicycle Thief,” but I’ll tell you this, when immigrants arrive in this country, we take pride — not to mention derive a major economic benefit — in their being here, for they help make America a better place than earlier Americans had done themselves.
Migrants in France can equally become an asset to society and a humanizing force in culture — given half a chance.
