Et la place pour les Magbhrebs a la France? Whodda thunk America to be so progressive versus France?

Hmm.. so there have been approximately nine nights of rioting in Parisian suburbs due to the unfortunate and most likely accidental electrocution of two young North African Arabs (also known as Maghrebs). These aren't your picket fenced, Leave It to Beaver suburbs. These are for lack of a better word ghettos; ghettos whose population happen to be a bit browner and less agnostic than...er...the rest of La République. But after a long thoughtful conversation with my enlightened roomate I've come to some conclusions.

Startling enough, the US (the only real paradigm I have to work with here) is painfully more progressive when it come to its relationship with immigrants versus our gastronomic and pacifist (not an indictment but a compliment) neighbors across the Atlantic. Granted, the US is no grand example of a perfectly harmonious mosaic of people and ideas, cultures and religions, but damn. The French? After a week of increasingly tense violence plaguing the Parisian metropolitan area, the leading newspaper, Le Monde leads with a transportation strike in Marseille.

Merde.

Despite what at times borders on a caustic accusation of political, economic, and cultural exhaustion with the American behemoth, France has got some internal reflection to do. The master's of subtly, I'm sure a glaring absence of true dialogue and understanding of the matters at hand is not lost on many. France is paralyzed an inability to mitigate what it colonial history has created: a nationality no longer bound by a traditional culture or ethnicity.

This has been less of a problem for the United States. The English-speaking New World was created essentially by the efforts of waves of new people which paradoxically created the very national identity they were emmigrating to. Plus, we only got a little over 2 centuries of formal history so the American identity is far more plastic. Let's compare to France. 2 millenia of refining refinement, and a culture that is so protectionist that it has created whole bureaucratic bodies to safeguard the language from English interlopers (L'Acadèmie Française).

So what's a young non-French Frenchman to do? Political power is exquisitely intangible. Your ethnic cultural influence is seen a tainting. Your history writhes with French colonial suppression and deriding hope.

You burn some shit. Cars, stores, whatever. Just as long as someone hears your cry. I cannot claim to know what will become of this, but certainly it requires prompt genuine attention and more than politically (read non-Maghreb) soothing superficial promises of modern and uniquely French change. We'll see. The less than sensitive wife of Louis XVI once said, "Qu'il mangent de la brioche" and we all know what happened to her.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4408972.stm
http://www.lemonde.fr/web/articleinteractif/0,41-0@2-3226,49-707051@51-704172,0.html