Posted by Editor on December 19, 2005 9:56 AM to Commentary GreaterDiversity.com The New Voice of American Media
Commentary GreaterDiversity.com The New Voice of American Media: Paris Diary -- An American Calls Out France's Undercover Racism
By Josué Rojas
On a reporting trip to France's burning suburbs, 26-year-old Josué Rojas recognizes the adverse effects of understated French race politics while reaffirming the importance of his own hyphenated identity.
I
PARIS--It's about 2 a.m., my last night in France. Fancy chandeliers hang above me. I'm in a ritzy party in a national museum in Paris. The Eiffel tower glows outside the glass walls. I'm having a blast, although the DJ needs to be slapped. He's on a techno diet and I can't take it anymore. The place is packed, but no one seems to be having fun. No one makes eye contact. Too cool for it.
As a young reporter for a California-based youth magazine, I've had one of the greatest learning experiences in my life -- eight days in November covering the youth riots that rocked the suburbs of Paris. But now I just want to go back to where things make sense. Where words are pronounced the way they're written, where legroom comes standard in cars, where the racism is kind enough to be blatant.
II
I was born in San Salvador, raised in San Francisco. I'm a hybrid, a "Salvadoran-American." I like the way it sounds when I say that. I'm not more one than the other. I am fully both. I like the way food from the country of my origin smells. I make people say my name in Spanish. I'm comfortable with my own duality.
III
Young French Arab and black youth don't have the option. Once you gain French citizenship, your country of origin is no longer regarded as a motherland.
France's attitude toward its immigrants is: "You're French and nothing else, you're part of a republic." But in the same breath it tells them, "You're Black, Arab, not French. You can never really be French."
"It's a discrimination that you cannot see," Tahar Illikoud says. Tahar is of Algerian descent and works as a security guard in the housing projects of San Denis, a suburb on the outskirts of Paris.
"If France wants to give immigrants French nationality, then let it give it. But, give it with the full benefits of what it means to be French," Tahar tells me. "My mother and father worked for France, my grandparents did too. It is immigrants who rebuilt this country after the war."
It's Tahar's job to put out cars set ablaze by youngsters. "We're sick all of this. Burning your neighbor's car isn't a good idea. I don't like it," Tahar says. "But inside, I know this needs to burn. Because we're sick of it, we're fed up with injustice."
The fact that Tahar's been subjected to prejudice doesn't affect his national pride. "I am for France, not for my country of origin. I work for France. I live for France. I love it. The only difference is my face is a bit Arab, but my heart and my mind are French, and that's why I don't comprehend this prejudice."
His 8-year-old son is restless. I draw him a cartoon character, he draws me a police car.
"Now the country knows, there is a problem, a serious problem. And from one day to the next it could get worse," Tahar tells me as we walk out into the night. He's got blazing cars to put out.
IV
Earlier that week, on our fourth night in Paris, I'm wandering the wet, freezing streets trying to locate a power chord that won't fry my camera battery.
Instead I find a local charity handing out bread and soup. On a night like this I'll take whatever I can get. Especially since these people are the only strangers to smile at me since I've been here. I sip the soup as I approach a group of young black men drinking, getting high and rapping.
I point my camera at one of them and tell him I work for an American magazine in France to cover the riots. Instantly I've got guys fighting for the spotlight and a chance to flow about the state of France. They go off, street karaoke style over a Gangstarr song. The only thing I can make out is in English and sign language -- "f--- the police" in unison, amongst a flurry of raised middle fingers.
"So you're here to see the burning cars?" one of them states "If you want I can take you to where the real sh-t's going down."
He smiles and lights a hand-rolled cigarette, "Sh-t, we'll burn a car for you." We laugh.
One of them asks me where I'm from. The Bay Area, California, I tell them, "Where Tupac's from." He looks at me sharply and says, "I'm from Africa, where Tupac is from."
And like this cluster of young men, like myself, Tupac was plural: an intellectual with the words "thug life" tattooed across his chest.
Myself, an American art nerd, who solely speaks Salvadoran Spanish at home.
And these guys, French Africans who love France, and aren't allowed to say they're French.
V
Fifty years after the conflict, there is no official history of the Algerian Revolution. In French schools, measures are being proposed to extol the virtues of French colonial presence in Africa. Many of the young people we spoke with had parents who fought in that conflict.
The way I see it, French discrimination, in all its subtle, old glory, lies beneath a veil of unspoken cultural habit. Like the taste of aged wine, it's hard to articulate.
The overwhelming sense I got from the young people I spoke to pleads for France address this unspoken phenomena and build for the future -- or prepare its palate for the acrid smell of smoke and the taste of tear gas.
Rojas is the art director of YO! Youth Outlook Multimedia (www.youthoutlook.org), a project of New America Media.
Related Links
Ethnic Media in France Respond to Riots
Paris Diary -- A Salvadoran - American Calls Out France's Undercover Racism
France's Parallel Media Universe: Ethnic Media
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