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Why Paris isn’t burning anymore
The construction of the threatening other as guarantee for social, racial and psychological superiority
By Diego Costa
France expected the socially scarred survivors of the colonial years to sit back and relax after years of inhuman exploitation and abuse and just be glad they haven’t been deported — yet.
Paris — I am back in Paris for Thanksgiving break. After the riots and the burning of hundreds of cars, all that seems to have changed are the newspaper headlines.
“Suburbs: How to rebuild them?” asks a political magazine, “The youth of the suburbs: what they told us,” says Le Nouveau Observateur.
But while the media from the rest of the world constructed a sense of civil war with published images, the unrest was not felt as such by Parisians, either because CNN sensationalized it or because the French may be less prone to social hysteria than Americans. Probably both.
Not surprisingly, the rioting gave the press something to talk about, Nicolas Sarkozy and Dominique de Villepin one more thing to fight over and quickly the social maladies became mere political agenda.
Thus, the crisis of immigrant living in France got abstracted into a foreign, elusive problem with unlikely pragmatic solutions (in the realm of world hunger, AIDS and the war on drugs).
The immigrant issue here, after coming to the forefront of television discussions and magazine covers, is likely fading into a state of benign social cancer or diabetes, something we will just have to learn to live with. A matter of perennial attempts of fixing with the realistic realization in the back of our heads that the crisis will never be over but, at best, appeased.
One of the biggest problems with poverty and segregation in France, and everywhere else, is the fact that we constantly — advertently and not — nourish this notion of “poor people” (along with all other alienating, differing traits) being the incomprehensible other.
We build this sense of otherness as defense mechanism and ethnocentric tactic for survival, the same way we build the concept of “the orient” as this mysterious and inferior place in dire need for our civilizing aid.
That very need to regard the other as inferior is in the root of much of human behavior (at home, in the bedroom, in the classroom, in the world), including the colonization process, which is where France’s crisis began in the first place. A mission of moral responsibility to civilize “the other,” like colonization is often referred to in Europe, would give way to nations completely exploited and socially teased into conquering this state of European civilized happiness.
Perhaps arrogantly, or at least naively, France expected the socially scarred survivors of the colonial years to sit back and relax after years of inhuman exploitation and abuse and just be glad they haven’t been deported — yet. And then move to the mainland and keep quiet before a veiled apartheid system that denies them everything but air to breathe and concrete to sleep on behind their modern art museum.
Palestine-born, U.S.-educated scholar Edward Said brilliantly exposes this need for superiority via imperial mentality in “Orientalism,” in which he decries the “subtle and persistent Eurocentric prejudice against Arabo-Islamic peoples and their culture.”
He argued that a long history of false assumptions about places we do not understand in Western culture served as justification for European (and American) imperial ambitions.
While France insists on the strategy of turning a blind eye to unavoidable malaises and allows its own self to be a little bit lawless, America can’t really take pride in being much different.
While our approaches to social issues are completely disparate, we are doing today in the Middle East much of what Europe did to Africa decades ago.
We have learned to make our enemies and demonize our others outside our territory. But France, too socially conscious, at least on the surface, to keep on cutting up Africa at its own volition, is forced to confront its colonial past at home.
It is very likely that no one from “the good parts” of France has bothered to cross bridges and see what life is like at the suburbs. The great majority of Parisians has probably not even seen a suburb.
So it becomes easy to look at them as these nebulous, strange and threatening bombs we must convince not to go off every time they start ticking.
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