It is disingenuous of a segment of American commentators to use the riots in France as one more occasion for French-bashing and triumphalist economic theory of the sort summed up in a Wall Street Journal headline Tuesday -- "Why they riot in Paris, but not in New York." Memories should not be so shallow.
From the Atlanta race riot of 1906 to the labor riots of the 1920s to the Los Angeles "Zoot Suit" riots in 1943 (between servicemen and Mexican immigrants) to the ravaging race riots of the 1960s in New York, Jersey City, Newark, Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, Detroit and several other major cities, to the New York City "blackout riot" of 1977 (when the city's electricity blew out) to the Miami and Tampa riots of 1989 and the Los Angeles riots of 1992 -- and that's just a selective list -- it's been a century of riots. There's no room for self-righteousness or gloating. There's plenty of room for learning from French errors and remembering what helped diminish the risk of civil insurrections at home.
Admittedly, the French have only themselves to blame for the violence in their streets. Without excusing a single act of civil disturbance, it's clear that France's relationship with its largely Arab and North African immigrants is a miserable failure wrought by years of indifference, segregation and blind eyes to immigrants' economic and social disaffection from French society. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when France was enjoying its share of Europe's "economic miracle," immigrants were invited in, especially from former colonies, and given work the French didn't want to do.
But they were never welcomed into French society as equal members of French culture and politics. The immigrant experience in France was similar to the black experience in the United States, up to and including a legacy of slavery: The French can always say that they never had slavery within their borders, but they only abolished slavery in some of their colonies five years before the United States did in the South. The 1970s brought an economic slowdown, but not a concurrent slow-down in immigration from the Middle East and Africa. Immigrants piled up in city suburbs, Paris' northeast "banlieu" especially -- projects writ large, and as architecturally grim concrete jungles.
Warnings of a social time-bomb began spreading, provoking what the French do very well: talk, books, conferences, promises. In 1995, the French-born filmmaker Mathieu Kassovitz released a movie called "Hate" ("La haine"), depicting suburbs of violence, drugs, sex and desperation. He closed the movie with the story of the man falling from a high-rise and thinking, half-way down, that all is well. Last month, the body hit the pavement.
Immigrants it brought here in chains aside, America's immigrant experience is far more hopeful, not least because this is a nation of immigrants. It's never been perfect. Riots here have had the same roots as those in France: When swaths of the population feel excluded, they eventually rebel. The acts may be inexcusable. The causes should never so easily be judged, or dismissed. The relative calm since the 1970s may be deceptive. Immigrants continue to pour in, and for those with a measure of affluence, assimilation continues to be easiest.
But America continues to ignore its biggest immigration problem pretty much the way the French did theirs. The United States acknowledges that there are now up to 10 million illegal immigrants in the country, mostly from Mexico and Latin America, but does nothing about it. In a vast country with long borders, the problem is more diffuse. But no one traveling along the southern border with Mexico can call the culture of improvised ghetto towns (colonias) on the American side of the border either a minor or a diffuse problem. There, too, time-bombs are ticking.
This is cache, read story here
