Social situation in the French suburbs
During the winter of 1954, popular priest Abbé Pierre urged the government to work on behalf of the country's large homeless population.
To relieve the shortage, and end the practice of illegal squatting in public places, the governments of the Fourth and early Fifth Republics began the construction of huge housing projects.
During the Trente Glorieuses, a period of economic growth which lasted from the war's end until the 1973 oil crisis, and was accompanied by the baby boom, the French state and industrials encouraged immigration of young workers from the former colonies, mostly from the Maghreb (both Berbers and Arabs), to help fill labor shortages.
This led to the isolation of the living centers, with two consequences: This model became increasingly contested; in the 1990s there were a number of demolitions of housing facilities in "inhumane" areas.
Many locally elected officials opposed the law, which sought to relieve residential segregation that had developed as a consequence of the earlier, uneven construction of the cités.
In the wealthy Parisian suburb of Neuilly-sur-Seine, of which President Nicolas Sarkozy served as mayor from 1983 to 2002, less than 2.5% of its housing stock meets the social-housing criteria.
After the 2005 riots, the government announced that it would enforce the SRU law more strictly, although it would accommodate local circumstances such as the absence of land on which social housing could be built.
A typical illustration of this is the use by some members of the French media of the words "second-generation from immigration" (deuxième génération issue de l'immigration, opposed to "just arrived", primo-arrivants)[citation needed].
According to anti-racist associations such as SOS Racisme, this reflects the ambiguity of the administration, who consider these people to be both French and foreign at the same time[citation needed].
In this particular regard, France has long had a problem with dealing with both its present and its historical memory, especially with respect to its colonial past and its role during World War II—especially significant, for instance, is the lack of attention around the Paris massacre of 1961 and the still ongoing controversy surrounding the number of victims therein, an amount which as recently as ten years ago was still officially recognized as below 50 although most independent accounts place it by the hundreds.
[4][5][6][7] The February 23, 2005 law on colonialism, voted by the UMP conservative majority, stating that the positive consequences of colonization must be taught to students, created a wide uproar, including among many university teachers outraged by what they have called a mark of "historical revisionism", and an infringement on the legal principle of academic freedom.
Today, children of immigrants claim that they frequently encounter economic segregation or racism:[citation needed] they have problems getting a job, or finding an apartment, or even entering a nightclub, because of their names or skin color.
[citation needed] One explanation for this is that the general level of education in these areas is well below the national average, which, in a context where it is difficult to find jobs requiring little or no qualifications, is bound to generate high unemployment.
According to the BBC, the inability of educated people who happen to be nonwhite to obtain employment and the connection to documented racism have left many feeling that they face dim prospects regardless of their actions.
Residents of the banlieues frequently complain that they are subject to racial profiling by the police ("face features offense", délit de faciès).
[9][10][11] The perception that French police are effectively immune to the law, especially with regard to offenses committed against nonwhites, has also helped to fuel anger against them in the banlieue.
[citation needed] The French newspaper Le Monde has written that "Justice is at a special tariff for police officers: they are never seriously punished.
In April 2005, Amnesty International released a report that suggested that the French judicial system tacitly supports racially motivated violence by police.
[13][14][15] In contrast, some in the right and especially the far-right, such as Jean-Marie Le Pen, claim that youth from the banlieues enjoy de facto immunity from prosecution and that most of them should be either sent back to the country of their origin or stripped of their French citizenship.
Low-income families receive CMU (Couverture maladie universelle - universal health allowance), a law voted in 1997 by Lionel Jospin's Plural Left government, meaning that not only 100% of the cost of medical expenses is paid for, but also that it is not necessary to pay up front for service.
After another violent episode in Vénissieux in March 1983, the Front National improved its standing in local elections, tapping into widespread fears that the violence would continue.
Others have taken a more hard-line stance, asserting that the best way to curb the violence is to increase the police presence in poor and violence-prone neighborhoods (the 'stick' approach).
[19][dubious – discuss] During most of the period when Algeria was part of France (1830–1962), Algerian Muslims were treated differently under law from French citizens, a situation which has been described as "quasi-apartheid".
According to Paul A. Silverstein, associate professor of anthropology at Reed College and author of Algeria in France: Transpolitics, Race, and Nation, and Chantal Tetreault, assistant professor of anthropology at University of North Carolina at Charlotte, who has researched and written extensively on language, gender, and social exclusion in French suburban housing projects, the colonial apartheid in Algeria has been re-created in the cities of France: As such, the colonial dual cities described by North African urban theorists Janet Abu-Lughod, Zeynep Çelik, Paul Rabinow, and Gwendolyn Wright — in which native medinas were kept isolated from European settler neighborhoods out of competing concerns of historical preservation, public hygiene, and security — have been effectively re-created in the postcolonial present, with contemporary urban policy and policing maintaining suburban cités and their residents in a state of immobile apartheid, at a perpetual distance from urban, bourgeois centers.
In his view, France's "5 million brown and black residents" have "failed to appreciate discrimination, jobless rates of up to 50 percent, public humiliation, crime, bigotry and, of course, the glorious French culture that excluded them through an informal apartheid system.
[23] French media also tend to ignore blacks and North Africans, failing to market to them, and not representing them in television, print, the internet, or advertisements.
The affair triggered national debate in France, revealed previously unusual alliances between the left, feminists, and the right, and exposed differing views of and visions for the nature of French society.
The problem for large parts of the Left was that they were often sharing the same discourse as Le Pen who used the affair to warn against 'the islamicisation of France'… in a splended example of the either/or choice facing France, in which there was is a convergence of many of the discursive elements mentioned above, the Prime Minister Michel Rocard announced on 2 December 1989, that France cannot be 'a juxtaposition of communities', must be founded on common values and must not follow the Anglo-Saxon model which allows ethnic groups to barricade themselves inside geographical and cultural ghettos leading to 'soft forms of apartheid' (quoted in Le Monde, 7 December 1989).
The authors agree with Laurent Bonelli that the violence was the result of "a process of urban apartheid" as well as "discrimination and racism that afflict young Berber, Arabs and Blacks".
