Ten Days in November
There is a lot of turmoil and unrest. I’ve been thinking a lot about the riots in France and I suppose that this is because they help distract me from my own inner turmoil and unrest. I think it is a bit vain and ridiculous to assume synchronicity but at the same time, we can learn new things if we make connections between distant things. And, as my friend mentioned to me for the previous entry, barbarism begins at home...
Don’t believe what you read about the riots. For this level of protest and violence to sustain itself for over two weeks, something more than frustration had to be at work. It is clear that part of the struggle among the French dominant classes has to do with whether the events can be made to appear as a racial and law-and-order problem – as riots organized by ethnic criminal gangs – or as a problem of social welfare. But this is just what the chiefs of state are arguing about; it is not what the people on the streets who are facing down the police and setting cars on fire are thinking about. We don’t really know much about the latter.
The reason I believe that it is vain and ridiculous to reflect on my own inner unrest in this context is because on the face of things, my situation appears nothing like that of the rioters. I have an interesting job with excellent prospects. I don’t suffer discrimination. The state, the economy, the society and the culture I live with are not organized to tell me that I cannot be who I am. What I may have in common with at least some of the people on the streets is distinctly human and personal: the privilege of having some remarkable people in my life who love me.
Why have the riots lasted so long? The residents of the banlieu are multi-ethnic; no “clash of civilization” theory can grasp this situation. The North African, Arab, African and white populations of the Parisian periphery suffer from as much as 50% unemployment rates, police harassment, racism, and degraded social services where such services remain available at all. These are the very policies that are intended to prevent them from becoming a social force in the first place. The spark for the events – the electrocution of two boys who at least plausibly were avoiding the police – cannot explain the vehemence or duration of the response. Something mobilized the youth of France and turned them into a social force that might be shaking the foundations of the French state.
The paralysis that was supposed to keep the immigrant French off the streets is organized and expressed differently from my own stress. Mine has to do with the very sources of happiness and well being that I enjoy. My life is flying along on three rails right now. Each of these gives me tremendous joy. Living has turned my world upside down again and again but lately it has reminded me how important love and truth and courage and beauty are. But these three rails run in different directions. It’s a classic double-bind: if I make certainchoices, where there are choices to be made, people I care for deeply get hurt. If I don’t make any choices, people I care for deeply get hurt. If I choose happiness, someone else will be unhappy. If I choose to be unhappy, a lot of people close to me get caught in the cross-fire.
Imagine you are the grandson of an Algerian who had immigrated to France. You are French – you’ve been to school and maybe to University in France, you listen to French hip-hop and can only barely understand the Arabic or Berber your parents and grandparents speak in the house. You watch your parents and grandparents work themselves to death with modesty and with the hope that your future will be brighter if they endure the humiliations of precarious and poorly paid work. But the state tells you that you’re not French every time a cop asks to see your papers when you were just waiting for a bus. The employers tell you that you are not French every time they hire a white guy with the same qualifications as you when they won’t hire you. The culture and society tell you that you are not French every time they go into paroxysms about the dangers of multiculturalism. Who are you? Where do you turn?
And your mates are angry and on the streets. People who in the same circumstances as you who help you get by as you help them, people you love and who love you, are putting their lives on the line to let the cops know that they are righteously pissed off. You join them and it hurts your family who don’t want to see you arrested and beaten and deported, they want you to have the chance to be French. You don’t join them and you betray people who love you, just to reach for a chance at Frenchness that you know damn well is illusory. What do you do?
Luckily for me, my quandary is different. I’m not going to be burning any cars or fighting any cops. But I do know what a lot of those kids in France are feeling, even if it is different for me. To force a political solution, the rioting youth of France will need a political project. That project cannot be projected onto them from outside their experience and their material circumstances, their social relations of power and of community. The riots will end, they will burn themselves out, the military may even replace the cops on the streets. The bourgeois honnêtes hommes will be glad to collect their car insurance and return to normalcy. The pain of the suburbs will continue to produce the double-binds. My own circumstances will also soon change: new sets of problems, new challenges, new opportunities. I will hold the people I love as close to me as I can and hope I can always count on their trust because it is with them that I can work through massive changes in my life. I hope France can learn to embrace the people who want to be French, even though that will mean changing what France is.
Don’t believe what you read about the riots. For this level of protest and violence to sustain itself for over two weeks, something more than frustration had to be at work. It is clear that part of the struggle among the French dominant classes has to do with whether the events can be made to appear as a racial and law-and-order problem – as riots organized by ethnic criminal gangs – or as a problem of social welfare. But this is just what the chiefs of state are arguing about; it is not what the people on the streets who are facing down the police and setting cars on fire are thinking about. We don’t really know much about the latter.
The reason I believe that it is vain and ridiculous to reflect on my own inner unrest in this context is because on the face of things, my situation appears nothing like that of the rioters. I have an interesting job with excellent prospects. I don’t suffer discrimination. The state, the economy, the society and the culture I live with are not organized to tell me that I cannot be who I am. What I may have in common with at least some of the people on the streets is distinctly human and personal: the privilege of having some remarkable people in my life who love me.
Why have the riots lasted so long? The residents of the banlieu are multi-ethnic; no “clash of civilization” theory can grasp this situation. The North African, Arab, African and white populations of the Parisian periphery suffer from as much as 50% unemployment rates, police harassment, racism, and degraded social services where such services remain available at all. These are the very policies that are intended to prevent them from becoming a social force in the first place. The spark for the events – the electrocution of two boys who at least plausibly were avoiding the police – cannot explain the vehemence or duration of the response. Something mobilized the youth of France and turned them into a social force that might be shaking the foundations of the French state.
The paralysis that was supposed to keep the immigrant French off the streets is organized and expressed differently from my own stress. Mine has to do with the very sources of happiness and well being that I enjoy. My life is flying along on three rails right now. Each of these gives me tremendous joy. Living has turned my world upside down again and again but lately it has reminded me how important love and truth and courage and beauty are. But these three rails run in different directions. It’s a classic double-bind: if I make certainchoices, where there are choices to be made, people I care for deeply get hurt. If I don’t make any choices, people I care for deeply get hurt. If I choose happiness, someone else will be unhappy. If I choose to be unhappy, a lot of people close to me get caught in the cross-fire.
Imagine you are the grandson of an Algerian who had immigrated to France. You are French – you’ve been to school and maybe to University in France, you listen to French hip-hop and can only barely understand the Arabic or Berber your parents and grandparents speak in the house. You watch your parents and grandparents work themselves to death with modesty and with the hope that your future will be brighter if they endure the humiliations of precarious and poorly paid work. But the state tells you that you’re not French every time a cop asks to see your papers when you were just waiting for a bus. The employers tell you that you are not French every time they hire a white guy with the same qualifications as you when they won’t hire you. The culture and society tell you that you are not French every time they go into paroxysms about the dangers of multiculturalism. Who are you? Where do you turn?
And your mates are angry and on the streets. People who in the same circumstances as you who help you get by as you help them, people you love and who love you, are putting their lives on the line to let the cops know that they are righteously pissed off. You join them and it hurts your family who don’t want to see you arrested and beaten and deported, they want you to have the chance to be French. You don’t join them and you betray people who love you, just to reach for a chance at Frenchness that you know damn well is illusory. What do you do?
Luckily for me, my quandary is different. I’m not going to be burning any cars or fighting any cops. But I do know what a lot of those kids in France are feeling, even if it is different for me. To force a political solution, the rioting youth of France will need a political project. That project cannot be projected onto them from outside their experience and their material circumstances, their social relations of power and of community. The riots will end, they will burn themselves out, the military may even replace the cops on the streets. The bourgeois honnêtes hommes will be glad to collect their car insurance and return to normalcy. The pain of the suburbs will continue to produce the double-binds. My own circumstances will also soon change: new sets of problems, new challenges, new opportunities. I will hold the people I love as close to me as I can and hope I can always count on their trust because it is with them that I can work through massive changes in my life. I hope France can learn to embrace the people who want to be French, even though that will mean changing what France is.
posted by spike at 12:03 am
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