This is the reality

There's been a lot of talk about Europe erupting into Muslim-on-Christian warfare. This talk comes from the right, from the racist, from the fear-mongerers, from fundamentalists of various stripes. France had immigration programs in the 1960s for workers from the former French North African colonies, which served to create a large Maghrebian and sub-Saharan population especially in the big cities -- Marseilles and Paris in particular. The rightist Front National grew out of racist hatred for the burgeoning immigrant population (not Russians and Poles, but Maghrebians and black Africans) and its later generations -- kids with Algerian or Tunisian or Senegalese parents or grandparents who are born and raised in France -- under the guise of burdens on the French social system, etc. The same sorts of arguments we hear in the US along the border with Mexico. "France for the French," goes the rightist refrain. But the rest of France, the vast majority, has nevertheless always allowed immigrant families to remain marginalized, despite France's grand homage to the principle of equality. Parisian ghettoes are not like American ghettoes. In France they are "outer city" rather than inner city, rings of Le Corbusier "cites" [with the sharp accent on the "e"] around Paris where second and third generations have few jobs, few opportunities for jobs, and do indeed live off of the generous French social welfare system. But... they are French, after all. During the daytime and nighttime, groups of youths with nothing else to do hang out on street corners, in parks, next to the small late-night convenience stores dubbed "Arabs" in French (which are the most significant outward signs of any Maghrebian "prosperity" in Paris). Violence, drug use, and petty theft has increased, but not nearly at the scale of similar American situations. Only in the past couple of years, for example, have guns come into play and they remain few and far between. The US has more gun deaths and injuries than France by a factor of precisely one gazillion.

The point is that, contrary to UK and US and European rightist fears of a Muslim backlash, this is the reality. It's structural. Since Americans generally still believe in class mobility -- even when they're sitting jobless at home on a ragged couch -- Americans don't discuss structural social problems in the American public discourse. The American public discourse, rather, elides structural problems by putting the discussion in essentialist terms, in terms of identity -- black, hispanic, white, Christian, Muslim, etc. Each group, so the story goes, has an essence, a certain racial or religious character. Sure, some say, there are good ones and bad ones. But the strange and foreign -- the hispanic or the Muslim -- has something essentially different about them. They don't fit the "mainstream" (another political favorite). They're a problem waiting to happen. Since 9-11, that problem waiting to happen casts suspicion on Muslims. That very suspicion and cowardly fear will, in the end, accelerate a transformation in structural conditions, opportunities, and racial attitudes (since Sikhs in the US get beat up or killed for being "Arabs"). The fear-mongering United States government and its party and media thugs are the worst offenders. "Uniter not a divider" -- if ever there was a more inane and false pronouncement by a president....

The reality, of course, is that like France but more so, the US is a highly inegalitarian society in practice, but not in principle (two pretty darn good constitutions, after all). Unlike France, however, Americans tend to believe the previous articulation of the principle is all it takes for the practice to be true. If you wish hard enough, you can fly.

Recently, post-Katrina, Americans express surprise at the terrible pre-Katrina conditions of many living in New Orleans. Surprise! Look folks, that's everywhere in America and it's getting worse by the minute. It has nothing to do with essences, identities. It has everything to do with the structural conditions of our society. Like "French" France's relation with its Arab and African immigrants, "mainstream" America ignores its own huge underclass that is disproportionally populated by blacks and hispanics. Just why that is so is structural, but that structure goes deeper, it has its own causes, and we ought to start confessing to our own betrayal of the great constitutional principles and ideas of Jefferson, Franklin, and Madison, the great philosophies of Whitman, James, and Dewey, and the great thinkers and activists of the civil rights era. They've warned us. We give in return, like the spoiled child acting in spite, our own spoiled President-Child acting in ignorance given the blindness and idiocy that living at the top of the structure of society incurs.

"If you want authority over these kids you need their respect - but all the normal channels of authority lost their respect a long time ago," said Ali Aouad, 42, who has lived in this northeastern town [Clichy-sous-Bois] for two decades. "They feel neglected by the government, and the police just provoke them."...

Abderamane Bouhout, president of the cultural organization that manages Bilal mosque, mobilized small groups of young believers during recent rioting to go between the rioters and the police and urge the disaffected youths to express their anger in nonviolent ways.

Aouad, who witnessed one such intervention on Monday night not far from the mosque, said it was impressively effective. "It worked," he said. "They went right between the two sides and a lot of the kids listened to them. The damage the next day was a lot less serious than the previous nights."...

"If they listen to us it is because we give them what they most want: respect," said Mihi, who organizes sports activities for teenagers at city hall. "If you respect them, they respect you."