Charles Bremmer on France and Race:
So France is one of the few developed nations which does not ask for ethnic origin in the national census. There are no reliable statistics that can be used to measure discrimination or gauge diversity in education and the work place.
[…] Last summer the Sarkozy parliament passed a law that reversed the statistics ban. It allowed the collection of ethnic data in projects approved by the national agency for the protection of personal data (CNIL).
The new law was furiously opposed by some groups, such as SOS Racisme, which raised 90,000 signatures on an internet petition against it, including that of François Hollande, the Socialist Party leader. It was also strongly supported by other groups. "We are about to open the way to something fabulous," said Patrick Lozès, president of the Representative Council of Black Organizations. “We are going from just talking about equality as a moral standard to doing something to help achieve it.”
Then two weeks ago, the Constitutional Council threw out the law and upheld the old ban, saying that measuring ethnicity contradicted article one of the Constitution. The decision has been welcomed as a blow against racism while others deplore it as a set-back in the fight against discrimination.
Its immediate impact has been the suspension of a planned survey by two state statistical agencies (INSEE and INED) which would track the impact of ethnic origin on French citizens of African origin. Those involved have been voicing their frustration, saying the ruling, designed to uphold the noble ideal of the constitution, will block attempts to remedy discrimination.
[…] President Sarkozy himself carries some of the blame for the confusion because he has muddied the waters over race. On one hand he is in French terms progressive. The son of a Hungarian immigrant and part Jewish, he favours affirmative action, or positive discrimination, to balance diversity in work and education (There is no chance that the Constitutional Council will let this happen). Yet he has also played to the unhealthier instincts of white France by creating a new ministry of Immigration and National Identity, headed by his old friend Brice Hortefeux. His parliament stirred the pot further by adding the possibility of DNA testing for people seeking permission to immigrate to rejoin family members. The Constitutional Council upheld this at the same time as rejecting the change on ethnic data.
Sarko's hard line on last week's riots -- saying that they had nothing to do with any social malaise -- has further fanned suspicion among minorities and on the left that he does not understand the exclusion that they suffer. He has promised a new approach to the plight of the banlieue, to be announced next month. All we know so far is that, as he put it, "this will not just be another attempt to throw money at the problem."
What disturbs me is the fact that Bremmer’s unsavory assumption that the banlieues is related to ethnicity and immigration rather than to assimilation integration and unemployment and crime. In other words, one would logically assume, after reading Bremmer, that France has problems controlling its banlieues because it is more multiethnic and multicultural than it knows and that the French youths get in the streets because they have foreign roots and look different than Sarkozy. The problem is in my opinion more complex in the sense that French youths are rioting because they have foreign roots or look different but precisely because to the contrary of Sarkozy who had a father who came from Hungary, people assume without even knowing their name that they aren't french and that they are lazy, uneducated, and potentially dangerous. They don't enjoy the presumption of Frenchness and for these reasons, they believe that the State doesn't treat them like every other citizen. The refusal of France to acknowledge its multi-ethnicity has made French society unwilling to accept that Francité, frenchness is neither about race, ethnicity, or religion, which means in other words that even those who don't have french blood can become French. The solution to this problem starts with the realization that Integration means in part the acceptance that foreignness doesn’t pollute the French national identity, but enriches it.
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