“Apartheid” in France, says diversity commissioner

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The Assemblée nationale

– By Scott Sayare –

PARIS — As Obama’s historic election and inauguration begin to fade from the front pages of the French press, so too does an opportunity to change the country’s culture of quiet, but fierce, racism and xenophobia slip away.

“Today, we’re digging a trench that’s leading us directly to apartheid,” said  Yazid Sabeg, the French government’s commissioner of diversity and equal opportunity, in an interview yesterday on the LCP-France Info-AFP television and radio show “Questions d’info.”

“We are a society splitting apart,” he later told Le Monde. “The place of minorities in the ensemble of French society has been stationary for a half-century in our country. It’s not changing much.”

Sabeg, Algerian by birth but a French citizen since the age of two, has long been a proponent of affirmative action, a concept with the perhaps more descriptive but also disapproving title, in French, “positive discrimination;” politicians have deemed it, or any such differential treatment on the basis of “origin, race or religion,” to be prohibited by the French constitution, and most French citizens agree.

Sabeg’s is not a popular position, then, and his explicit recognition of France’s deep racial schisms is not (and never has been) in social or political vogue.

But the country’s racial imbalances are difficult to ignore. The nation’s poor and défavorisés are overwhelmingly of Arab or African descent. The situation is even more clear in the national political realm; a recent study, whose numbers appeared in yesterday’s Figaro, describes a mere three of the 555 elected members of the Assemblée nationale as members of “visible minorities;” of 305 sénateurs, only four fall into that category.

French politics, which Sabeg has made his primary target for efforts to promote diversity, is dominated by a culture of elitism that runs far deeper than the boys’ club mentality that has long been the rule in Washington.

But French Immigration Minister Eric Besson, who spoke yesterday with Le Figaro, disagrees with Sabeg’s calls for affirmative action.

“We must invent methods that are faithful to and conform with our traditions, without categorizing individuals by race, ethnicity, religion,” he said. “It’s quite complex.”

In order to begin to correct the skewed racial composition of the French government without recognizing race (and so betraying traditional French ideals), Besson proposes a census of French provincial politicians employing the absurd technique already in use by the country’s High Council on integration: a computer program that identifies an individual as a member of a minority group by comparing his or her first and last names with a list of the most prevalent French names at the end of the 19th century, and a list of names that have only recently appeared in the country.

An exceedingly inefficient, inaccurate way to glean racial information that has been deemed useful and important without making an explicit endorsement of the consideration of race. In other words, Besson proposes to continue to pretend that race does not matter, even as he attempts a half-hearted response to manifest racial inequities, lest France appear not to live up to its high ideals of equality and brotherhood.

Last year, Sarkozy (himself a proponent of affirmative action) assembled a committee for reflection on the Constitutional preamble, headed by Simone Weil, charged with amending the French constitution in order to “assure the respect of diversity and its varied approaches” and to “render possible a true politics of integration.” But in December the committee determined that no such changes to the constitution were necessary, and that the preamble, as it stands, could allow for “ambitious measures of positive action of potential benefit to, notably, populations of foreign origin.”

Of course, to date, such “ambitious measures” have never gotten very far, and the constitution, as Sarkozy clearly understood, has been the sticking point.

And so the French maintain their traditional values, an attachment to ideals that remains overly idealistic, even in the face of harsh, contradictory reality. Race is, of course, specifically referenced in the constitution, an indication of the obvious social significance of the concept. To propose that it simply be ignored by the legal system, to hope that the government’s willing denial of race carry over into the realm of hearts and minds, to pretend that if we ignore inequality it will cease to exist, is to ignore reality.

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Tags: Apartheid, Equality, Eric Besson, France, Government, Immigration, Minority, Obama, Politics, Race, Racism, Sarkozy, Yazid Sabeg