Predictably, the view stateside was fittingly twisted. Fresh from blowing away the competition in Iraq as the world's top manure producer, the US mainstream media saw the French riots as the perfect excuse to crank up production. The New York Times informed its readers that "No other country in Europe immolates cars with the gusto and single-minded efficiency of France. Even during tranquil periods, an average of 80 vehicles per day are set alight somewhere in the country" [16]. Never mind that, even during tranquil periods, an average of 192 vehicles per day are set alight somewhere in the UK [17]. But, to quote Saint Judy, why let facts get in the way of a good story?

The Washington Times wouldn't know. Taking a break from bouncing off his padded walls, the reliably batty Mark Steyn put on his tinfoil hat to identify the culprit: "an assertive Muslim identity more implacable than anything likely in the Middle East" [18]. (Take that, Osama.) By then fully intoxicated with his own brilliance, Steyn had to let his hallucinations do the talking:"France's Arab street correctly identified Jacques Chirac's opposition to the Iraq war for what it was: a sign of weakness." Nothing like a nice big cup of Neocon Kool-Aid to cheer up the asylum.

Of course, the Islamofascist connection did not escape the paranoid gaze of the vigilantes manning the barricades at The New Republic: "If a significant fascist party existed in France, it is among these young Arab and North African children of immigrants [...] that it would recruit for its storm troopers" [19]. Yes, of course; and when the KKK tries to sign up new members it goes scouting the hood in Compton for recruits. TNR has been nicknamed the "in-flight magazine of Air Force One." Evidently, it doubles nicely as a barf bag.

Men in designer suits order bombs to be dropped on pajama-clad children in the dead of night: some call them war criminals; others statesmen. Boys in hoodies shoplift burger patties from supermarkets: some call them vermin; others rotten vermin. And when they compound their crimes by having names that no decent churchgoer can even spell we call them rotten vermin twice evil-or Beurs, for short.

Poverty is the key variable that correlates crime and ethnicity. This correlation is the sea in which the racist fish swims. Distribute nonwhites across the social spectrum of wealth and watch racial discrimination recede like the ocean at low tide. Here's how you do it: have the government hire all unemployed white guys named Jacques and dispatch them all across France to steal burger patties. This way, when Ahmed applies for a job, the interviewer will sigh with relief and say: "Well, at least your name is not Jacques." (To appreciate the full genius of my scheme, note that all Jacques will be fully employed, so it won't matter a whit if they're now the ones to suffer employment discrimination).

Another solution is to jail everyone named Ahmed. America has been working on a variant of this for a while now and the verdict is mixed: only 30 percent of all black males are expected to be incarcerated in their lifetime, so there's still some ways to go [20].

If all else fails, of course, one can always ask white people to stop being such racist pigs. But recent genomics research indicates that mutation from swine to angel requires more than a hectoring preacher with a wagging finger. It requires creating job opportunities and enforcing anti-discrimination laws. The latter is tough to do in France because the state may not gather any racial, ethnic, or religious demographics. The ban was meant to propitiate the gods of égalité but seems to have riled them up instead. Pinning yellow stars during the Vichy years was not the best advertisement for ethnic monitoring, and the idea is still unpalatable to many. But, regardless of what pleases its tastebuds, France needs the proper tools to fight discrimination. No one shines a brighter light on race than the racist, and it is an abiding irony that the Republic's blindness to the light has only enhanced its brightness.

France needs affirmative action; the preferred term is discrimination positive, a lovely oxymoron that evokes the upbeat desperation of "exquisite pain" while begging the transience of "hot ice cream." The nutty fundies of the Republic can bleat all they want about the evil of affirmative action and the dread of communautarisme that it drags in its wake: it is a red herring. An ostracized, ghettoized populace is the ultimate form of communautarisme. Affirmative action is no panacea: in fact, it is the worst possible remedy-with the exception of all the others.

Political representation is another sore point. The marvelous chromatic unity on display in the gilded halls of the Palais Bourbon (the parliament) suggests a new French tricolor: white, white, white. Legislators recently passed a "parity law" meant to promote the presence of women in politics. It would do well to extend the idea to ethnic minorities. The Cassandras who read in the tea leaves of affirmative action the end of the Republic suffer either from bad faith or from a tragic lack of imagination.

From Tom Friedman's business class seat, 30,000 feet above the Calcutta Golf & Country Club where he'll soon be predicting the end of Indian poverty while practicing his tee shot, the world looks awfully flat. From the burning banlieues it is anything but. Friedman's cherished globalization has deepened inequalities and tied up the government's hands just as it needed more wiggle room. Despite its tight labor market and high unemployment, France has been a neoliberal's dream: more companies in the Fortune Global 500 than both Germany and the UK; more foreign direct investment flowing into it than into the US; tighter fiscal policies, etc. [4, 21]. If anything, the riots prove that France is well on its way to being fully Friedmanized: a flat world with cracks just wide enough to swallow up the impoverished masses.

Racism and globalization are the ingredients of the stew brewing in the cités: France's political class is the chef that keeps it stirred. Frighteningly competent and hopelessly out of touch, the chef suffers from advanced autism. The competence stares you in the face: trains run on time without the help of a fascist dictator; cell phones are real phones-not cheap excuses for standing outside in the rain while pretending to be searching for a signal; potholes are tiny orifices in the sort of kitchenware that... well, you get the point. As for being in touch, the ruling elite is passionately in touch with its favorite kind: itself. It is obsessed with self-preservation, ossified, and lordly. De Gaulle once compared the French to dawdling calves: apparently, someone forgot to tell Chirac it was a joke.

Both wings of the political spectrum have fused into a gloppy miasma of opportunism. Most politicians these days graduate from the same school, ENA, and learn early on to confine their differences to their choice of dessert in the school cafeteria. From the recent European constitution fiasco to Le Pen's day in the sun of the 2002 presidential election, French leaders have demonstrated a phenomenal ability to misread the electorate. The Beurs were born to be the left's dream catch. That the only catching they got was from the neighborhood cops says much about the socialists' state of decay. Alas, civil unrest invariably rewards the wrong side, and few sights are more repulsive than a smug Le Pen licking his drooling chops.

* * *

France might elect to treat its immigrant population as an ill to be cured. Perhaps the suitable medical attention will make the pain go away; the ENA graduates who staff government ministries are masters at scribbling analgesic prescriptions to keep the plebes sedated. This would be a tragic blunder. The current crisis is a blessing in disguise. Demographic projections show France overtaking Germany as the biggest economy and population in Europe in just a few decades. Immigrants are the key to France's future. Forget that the most admired Frenchman, Zinedine Zidane, is of North African descent. Forget that France's 1998 World Cup triumph was a gift from the seething banlieues to their country. France is an old, weary nation with a rich, heavy history: it badly needs the infusion of youth, talent, and vigor that sits untapped in the cités. Bring 'em on!

The past half-century of French pop music has been an uninterrupted feast of aural mouthwash. The standout exception to this orgy of sudsy gurglings has been French rap-the hottest hip-hop scene outside the United States and the most exciting musical act in Europe. (Sorry, Radiohead fans.) Freestyling requires a virtuosic mastery of verlan, the backslang that produces Beur by inverting the syllables in Arabe. Street language and wordplay conspire to make verlan confusing even to native speakers; that's its purpose. The word itself is verlanesque: invert it and you get lanver, which is the phonetic rendering of "backwards" in French. Verlan even verlanizes itself: arabe Æ beur Æ rebeu. Verbal pyrotechnics aside, French rappers have a story to tell and it is time that all of France listened.

New York Times homeboy David Brooks did. He recently shared some of his deeper insights about French rap [22]. It would be sinful to dumb down his meticulously chiseled arguments; and so, with apology to the readers who will find themselves unequipped with the proper neuronal apparatus, let me switch into intellectual high gear for one brief moment. French rap is bad, says ThoughtMaster Brookz, real bad-as in rotten, stinkin' bad. And it's very bad, too. By now ready to wrap up his analysis, Brooks plants the victory flag: the rioting is all rap's fault and you wouldn't believe the foul language! The only piece missing from this tableau was a picture of the horrified columnist flipping feverishly through his French-English dictionary with his ear glued to his rap-filled iPod.

Brooks's prose often reeks of the facile certitude of the clueless, but it takes on an added comic twist when the subject is hip-hop. French rap's marvelous rhythm and wordplay get lost in translation, but I hope some of the wit and poignancy survives my piddling efforts. Here's a sample from Shurik'n of Marseille's leading rap group IAM [23]:

In the heat where hearts wilt,
wide-eyed and kind, the southern rose has died.
Even Our Lady cried.
Not long ago, I'd go
trippin' at school cause of a "Your mom's a ho."
Now I open the cage, tame the rage,
vomit my blackness on the page.
I write of twin dragons shooting for the dark moon,
of voices shouting from the hilltops "Liberty for all!"
Words that soar like hot air in the night, night flares in the sky,
skywriting through clouds of tear gas.
Word up. There's no Moses in the hood: shit ain't gonna part.
People die of cold, of boredom.
Others court amnesia,
forgetting that today's ho may become
yesterday's princess;
that mudslingers who spit upon our roots,
and see our destiny at the end of a rope,
soon find out that we all die the same-stretchin' out our hands
to the angels.

One day after 9/11, Le Monde famously headlined its editorial: "We are all Americans." US observers were moved by this distant echo of John F. Kennedy's "Ich bin ein Berliner." In fact, the echo was not quite so distant. In the spring of 1968, amidst massive student rioting in Paris, the threat of expulsion from France of Jewish-German student leader Daniel Cohn-Bendit was met by 50,000 Frenchmen chanting "We are all German Jews." It is time for the heirs of '68 to dust off their marching boots, take to the streets, and shout out the true motto of the Republic: "We are all French Beurs."

Bernard Chazelle is a professor of computer science at Princeton University and author of The Discrepancy Method: Randomness and Complexity. He can be reached at: chazelle@CS.Princeton.EDU

Notes

[1] The Explanation of Ideology: Family Structures and Social Systems, by Emmanuel Todd, Blackwell, Oxford, 1985.

[2] La terre et les hommes, by Emmanuel Todd.

[3] Parions sur l'intégration, by Marceau Long, L'Express, May 1993.

[4] France, Wikipedia.

[5] The fires of disintegration, by Niall Ferguson, Los Angeles Times, November 7, 2005.

[6] http://usgovinfo.about.com/cs/censusstatistic/a/foreignborn.htm 

[7] Les immigrés en France: une situation qui évolue, by Chloé Tavan, INSEE, September 2005.

[8] Rien ne sépare les enfants d'immigrés du reste de la société, by Emmanuel Todd, Le Monde, November 2005.

[9] Interracial marriage gender gap grows, by Steve Sailer, UPI, March 2003.

[10] Inter-ethnic marriage, March 2005. Source: Office for National Statistics, UK Census, April 2001.

[11] Who counts as "them?": racism and virtue in the United States and France, by Michèle Lamont, Contexts 2(4), pp. 36-41, Fall 2003.

[12] De la nécessité d'une loi inutile, Paul Bernard, Le Monde, February 2004.

[13] Burke's Peerage & Gentry, by Charles Mosley, American Presidential Families, Part 2.

[14] 2005 civil unrest in France, Wikipedia.

[15] 1992 Los Angeles riots, Wikipedia.

[16] A very French message from the disaffected, by Mark Landler, The New York Times, November 13, 2005.

[17] US vehicle fire trends and patterns, by Marty Ahrens, National Fire Protection Association, pp. 15, February 2004.

[18] Who will raise the siege of Paris? by Mark Steyn, The Washington Times, November 7, 2005.

[19] The riots could only have happened in France, by Pascal Bruckner, The New Republic, November 2005.

[20] African Americans, crime and criminal justice, Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, 2004.

[21] Can-do France, The Wall Street Journal, by Jérôme Guillet, August 19, 2005.

[22] Gangsta, in French, The New York Times, by David Brooks, November 10, 2005.

[23] "Our Lady" refers to Marseille's hilltop cathedral

by the same author Anti-Americanism: A Clinical Study

Recommend this article...

Did you enjoy this article? Please bookmark it onto:

Be first to comment this article

Write Comment

Please keep the topic of messages relevant to the subject of the article. Personal verbal attacks will be deleted. Please don't use comments to plug your web site. Such material will be removed. Just ensure to *Refresh* your browser for a new security code to be displayed prior to clicking on the 'Send' button. Keep in mind that the above process only applies if you simply entered the wrong security code.
Name:
E-mail
Homepage
Title:
BBCode:
Comment:
Code:*
	I wish to be contacted by email regarding additional comments

Powered by AkoComment Tweaked Special Edition v.1.4.4