Why France is burning

Why France Is Burning

By David Ignatius
Wednesday, November 9, 2005

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."

davidignatius@washpost.com

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

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