A man carries an injured protester at the subway station at Place
de La Republique, Paris, during a pro-Palestinian protest, July 26.
France has its
Own 'Ferguson' Problem (Liberation, France)
"We attribute
the flaws in American society to the outbreak of violence in Ferguson. … Commentators
have urged the American authorities to fight discrimination more vigorously. How
about the French authorities? There may not be enough Black members of the
American police. But do we have enough Muslims in the French police? … A recently unknown
municipality in France, Ferguson is in fact not that exotic."
Is this an "American" story? A priori, the murder in
Ferguson and the riots that followed hearken back to the eternal ills of urban
life in the United States. A largely African-American suburb, a trigger-happy
cop, a suspicious death, and inflamed community brutally repressed by security
forces lacking facility in crowd control. More than 50 years after the initial
successes of Martin Luther King's civil rights movement, and six years after
the election of a Black president, despite decades of struggle against racism,
urban exclusion and discrimination, the same causes still produce the same
devastating effects. Despite all of its efforts, America has failed to overcome
its ethnic and social tensions.
Posted By Worldmeets.US
Here it is said that this is a local syndrome, that against
all odds racism persists in the American population, Obama's victory was after
all, merely symbolic, and that a police force with leaders who may be elected necessarily
reflect the widespread prejudices prevalent in that society. In short, we attribute
the flaws in American society to the outbreak of violence in Ferguson.
Yet there is more general lesson from these tragic events:
the difficulty of contemporary democracies to integrate diverse and socially
unequal minorities. Does anyone believe, for example, that the relationship
between French police and a population that includes a wide array of minorities
is any better than it is in the United States? Commentators have urged the American
authorities to fight discrimination more vigorously. How about the French
authorities? There may not be enough Black members of the American police. But
do we have enough Muslims in the French police? And why have we retreated in
the fight against racial profiling? A recently unknown municipality in France, Ferguson is in fact not that exotic.
