The violence in Paris is a warning to Europe that race issues have become central to politics

A burning issue for us all

The violence in Paris is a warning to the whole of Europe that race
issues have become central to politics

Trevor Phillips
Sunday November 6, 2005
The Observer

In the Caribbean, the phrase 'nine nights' usually betokens a period
of mourning. France's nine nights of rioting started in the Paris
suburbs and spread to other cities, including Marseille, Dijon and
Rouen. They were triggered by the deaths of two French teenagers of
North African extraction, who were fleeing the police, no doubt
fearing the routine harassment meted out to black and Arab youths in
France's ghettoised banlieue

The hundreds of cars that have now been burnt in French streets are
pyres that mark the passing of a French delusion - that the
incantation of 'liberté, égalité, fraternité' would somehow mask the
réalité °of life for non-white French men and women: repression,
discrimination, segregation.

The French establishment, which a generation ago exiled immigrant
workers to the doughnut of miserable new towns around Paris, is in
full panic mode. Prime Minister Dominique Villepin called emergency
cabinet meetings, met the bereaved parents and urged a moderate
response. His rival for the presidency, Interior Minister Nicolas
Sarkozy, having denounced the rioting youths as 'scum', ordered a
police lockdown. Whoever wins this power struggle will instantly
become the frontrunner for the top job.

France is not alone. The Netherlands, which most of the world had
marked down as the ultimate in relaxed, progressive cosmopolitanism,
is gripped by a vicious anti-Muslim backlash. Both reactionary
Christian conservatives and anxious liberal secularists talk openly
and sometimes approvingly of the virtues of 'black' and 'white'
schools which inoculate the Dutch from the 'toxin' of Islam.

Across the Atlantic, the issue of race, ghettoisation and neglect has
also penetrated mainstream politics. The sight of thousands of poor,
elderly African-Americans left to fester in a sports stadium,
sheltering from hurricane Katrina, ripped away the mask created by
celebration of black success in entertainment, sport and politics, to
reveal a nation that remains deeply divided by ethnicity. The
government's faltering response marked the moment that George W
Bush's presidency started its slide into disrepute.

Everywhere, smugness about the state of race relations is being
punctured. And this is no longer the patronising 'be kind to blacks'
territory with which politicians and minority leaders of the past may
have felt safe. It is big politics, on which governments will stand
or fall. In the 1970s and 1980s, industrial relations marked a tense
dividing line in Western societies. Disputes periodically erupted
into dangerous and even violent confrontation - remember Orgreave,
Grunwick and Wapping? - that menaced and sometimes brought down
governments. Race relations threaten to become a similarly potent
battlefront in the first part of the 21st century.

In the UK, we passed, 40 years ago this week, the first serious anti-
discrimination laws in Europe. A generation ago, we set up what has
become a network of local race equalitycouncils, involving several
hundred full-time workers and tens of thousands of unpaid volunteers.
Their patient work at local level has often prevented tensions
flaring into open conflict, but the face-off in Birmingham two
weekends ago shows we still have to be smarter and work harder. We
cannot afford to hope that everything will come right with time and
goodwill.

There are two big mistakes we could make. The first is to imagine
that racial conflict is caused only by the sort of foul white
supremacists convicted last week, or by the sick bigots (who may have
been white or black) who desecrated a Muslim cemetery in Birmingham.
The million or so people who voted for BNP councillors last year
aren't all knuckle-dragging racist apes. Many are ordinary folk
frightened by the pace of change in their communities who can be
persuaded that somehow this must be the fault of people who do not
look like them.

The other error is to believe that regeneration of areas in which
poor minorities live will overcome all differences. Yes, the poor
need jobs and better homes, but this will not be enough. In New
Orleans, the left-behind blacks complained of being neglected. In
Paris, when asked what they want, young people say: 'Stop addressing
us as tu ', a bit like the French equivalent of being addressed as
'boy' in pre-civil rights America.

In Birmingham, African-Caribbean and Asian community leaders talk
about a lack of mutual respect. So, alongside equality of material
things, we have to instil other kinds of equality, starting with
equality of esteem between different communities.

Another missing equality is that of power: why is it that in all the
countries involved there are still so few minority politicians who
have clout? Even the much-vaunted American success story can only
boast one black senator. We, who should be able to count more than 60
MPs from minority communities, can muster just 15.

Finally, we need equality of interaction. The far right thrives on
our residential segregation, which allows them to scare people about
communities they do not know and understand. And when we have the
chance to mix with people not like ourselves, we increasingly fail to
seize it.

At the CRE, our integration agenda - more equality enforcement, new
targets for government, better scrutiny of new laws, more diverse
public appointments - is designed to meet this challenge. But there
is only so much we can do.

This is a job, above all, for politics. And so far, politics seems
distressingly comfortable either fighting old race battles or
celebrating our imagined happy diversity.

Our French neighbours are giving us the loudest alarm call they can.
Wake up, everybody.

Trevor Phillips is chair of the Commission for Racial Equality

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2005

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