November 15, 2005

The fires in France may be dying down but the rage will burn on.

For decades, France has allowed debilitating ghettos on the edge of Paris and other cities to fester, all the while denying that discrimination, racial or religious, has been involved. The last weeks of riots have scorched those illusions and placed the issue of racism and xenophobia on the French political map.

The invisible have become visible, and the French government and the French people can no longer deny the marginalized existence of its black and Muslim populations.

But a positive resolution will not likely emerge out of the crisis.

As official government policy, France refuses to acknowledge racism as even existing in the country. It prohibits the collection of racial data or organizing along racial lines, contending that such activities actually introduce racial issues where there are none. In part, this position flows from the experiences of World War II and the murderous reign of the Nazis in Germany (and their Vichy allies in France).

As a result, France has delayed or ignored its obligations to the European Union to institute anti-discrimination policies and consult with those communities most affected by discrimination.

Unlike the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Belgium, the country has no explicit anti-racist policies. And as the country with the largest Muslim population in the European Union, France also offers little protection against religious discrimination.

This posture allows the politics of denial to rule. And it prevents even the most elementary steps to be taken to identify and address problems that are directly related to racial discrimination.

At the same time, the far right uses race -- through the proxy of ranting about immigration -- to fan the flames of hatred toward North Africans, Africans and Muslims, whether they were born in France or not.

Young people in and out of the ghettos are subject to constant racial and religious profiling, resulting in sharply antagonistic relations between the police and youth. It is this experience of harassment and distrust that led Bouna Traore and Ziad Benna to become electrocuted fleeing the police, although police dispute that the two boys were being chased.

Issues of race, religion and immigration have all come together at perhaps one of the worse times in French recent economic history. As in other parts of Western Europe, globalization closed factories and shifted many jobs in manufacturing and other forms of production out of the country.

French unemployment is hovering around 10 percent and is as much as 23 percent for those under 25. However, among African and North African youth, it is about 40 percent or even higher, according to The Guardian.

France's economic troubles and employment discrimination reduce to near zero the chances for outcast youth to advance in French society.

What's more, initial survey data in response to the uprisings show a majority of the French support Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy's hard-line rhetoric and policies, and other callous proposals, including a call for the stripping of citizenship for those involved in the riots.

Sadly, this attitude and the seething anger in the nation's ghettos could guarantee many more such riots in the months and years ahead.

Clarence Lusane is assistant professor in the School of International Service at American University in Washington, D.C. He is the author of several works, including "Hitler's Black Victims" (Routledge Press, 2002). He can be reached at pmproj [at] progressive [dot] org.