Finds unhappy parallels between America's "long hot summer" and France's recent upheavals
Sugrue, Thomas J.
FOR DECADES, the French have perceived themselves as immune to the racially polarized politics of the United States, liberated by a national rhetoric of "universalism" and color blindness....
...As the lesson of the United States makes painfully clear, racial differences will not go away just because they are invisible in the public sphere...
...But, however disorganized, the riots got the attention of the authorities...
...Plainfield, New Jersey...
...The struggle against entrenched discrimination, educational and housing segregation, and racialized poverty in the United States has been uphill, particularly in the current political climate, but the climb would be even steeper in the absence of reliable data...
...To many in a nation that prided itself on its supposed tradition of universal citizenship, the Kerner Commission's conclusion seemed outrageous...
...They were part of an expanding welfare state...
...After six days of arson, looting, and sniping, forty-three people were dead...
...France must also respond to the simmering and unaddressed problems of police-community relations...
...They were young and angry...
...Not surprisingly, almost every riot in the 1960s was sparked by a clash between blacks and the police...
...To Southern blacks, refugees from Jim Crow's last, desperate days, places such as Detroit and Newark were "the promised land," with plentiful jobs and decent housing, where the right to vote was protected...
...But the rioters did not have such radical goals: they wanted to be incorporated into America's affluent society, not cordoned off from it...
...Young rioters perceived cops—or "pigs" as they were called— as an occupying force in the black slums...
...DISSENT / Winter 2006 7...
...By contrast, social scientists, policymakers, and activists in the United States have used official government data on racial inequality in education, in housing, in health, and in employment, to devise policies to overcome exclusion and segregation...
...After decades of protest, blacks had been integrated into an ostensibly color-blind nation...
...What was most striking about the tumult that swept through France last fall was not how distinctly French it was, but how much it looked like the United States during the "long hot summer" of 1967...
...Until blacks had economic citizenship—full employment, decent housing, and dignity—they would seethe with anger...
...Despite the rhetoric of universal citizenship, Africans and Arabs suffer from high unemployment, deeply entrenched racial exclusion, and segregation in housing...
...The "long hot summers" of the 1960s came at a moment in American history when America's deep racial divide seemed—finallyto have been bridged...
...Rather, as the riots demonstrated, they will get worse...
...Segregation fueled blacks' distrust of the state—particularly of the police...
...Relations between young minorities and the police are bitter...
...and even in small towns such as Nyack, New York...
...By contrast, law enforcement officials in the United States were responsible for most of the riot-related deaths...
...Only then might the burning stop...
...FRANCE TODAY looks more like America in July 1967 than most commentators want to admit...
...That is the most important lesson of the riots...
...and Waterloo, Iowa...
...Unrest spread to black neighborhoods throughout the country...
...The political integration of blacks was necessary but not sufficient as a condition for full equality...
...The most notable effect was a dramatic increase in the number of black police officers—probably the main reason why only a handful of riots, notably Los Angeles in 1992, have broken out in the United States over the last thirty-five years, even if police-community relations are still sour in many cities...
...The result was intense hostility in the streets...
...in middle-sized places such as Fresno, California, and South Bend, Indiana...
...After nearly a week of violence, the toll was twentythree people dead and millions of dollars of property destroyed...
...In Detroit, where nearly 40 percent of the population was nonwhite, only 5 percent of the police force was black...
...But they are not enough...
...And most important, France must come to grips with the root causes of rioting—persistent ex6 DISSENT / Winter 2006 clusion and discrimination by race and ethnicity...
...Despite the rhetoric of full equality, they were excluded from large sectors of the economy...
...The sight of young African American men breaking windows and tossing Molotov cocktails showed that American universalism was still a distant dream...
...They had witnessed firsthand the false promises of integration and equality...
...Black unemployment was twice that of whites...
...During the 2005-2006 academic year, he is a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton...
...Gathering data by race and ethnicity does not mean accepting racial differences as fixed, permanent, and unchangeable, as advocates of color blindness fear...
...A youthful generation—mostly migrants and second- and third-generation children of immigrants—led the rebellions...
...They had become full American citizens, unburdened by race...
...The one major difference between the two nations' riots was the number of fatalities (a reminder of America's gun-toting exceptionalism...
...In America, as in France, color blindness as a principle did not eliminate the everyday practice of discrimination or the institutionalization of racial and ethnic difference in housing and labor markets...
...Above all, France must follow the (not very good) example of the United States, of pulling away the blinders of universalism and admitting that it has a deeply entrenched race problem...
...We need to take account of race to eliminate racial inequality...
...First came Newark, where thousands took to the streets on July 12, after a clash between a black taxi driver and the police...
...Like their French counterparts last fall, most of the 1960s rioters in the United States did not share a coherent vision...
...As long as Arab and African youth perceive the police as the enemy, the situation will remain explosive...
...If those programs are sustained —rather than starved, as they have been in the United States since the 1970s—they might make a difference in the long run...
...The vast majority of the rioters were not, however, recent migrants from the South...
...If Martin Luther King, Jr., promised that "we shall overcome," many Americans believed that with the passage of sweeping civil rights and antipoverty laws by President Lyndon B. Johnson we had indeed overcome...
...Even more devastating was the uprising in Detroit that began early on the morning of July 23, when police raided an after-hours bar...
...Including Detroit and Newark, altogether 103 riots broke out throughout the United States that July—in cities as large as Cleveland, Ohio, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania...
...Because French universalism has been blind to racial discrimination, the French government has been unwilling to gather statistics on race and ethnicity...
...They demanded that the police be given stricter powers and that the rebellions be suppressed by any means necessary...
...They expanded job-training programs for the "hard-core unemployed...
...The parallels were striking—and the lessons for France are grim...
...They could vote...
...The Kerner Commission, established by Johnson in 1967 to investigate the causes of the riots, offered an honest appraisal of the root causes: "Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal...
...Despite the fact that northern cities had large black populations, the police were overwhelmingly white...
...THOMAS J. SUGRUE is Kahn Professor of History and Sociology at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Origins of the Urban Crisis, selected as one of Princeton's one hundred most influential books of the last hundred years...
...Without official, reliable statistics, however, it will be very difficult for France to develop social policies that address the root causes of discrimination and exclusion...
...No single leader emerged from the flames that engulfed America's ghettos...
...Yet a majority of French nationals—like their American counterparts in the 1960s—saw the riots as a breakdown of law and order, as a nihilistic rebellion, as anarchy in the streets...
...But it was, sadly, true...
...It is likely that, as in the United States, French politics will be reshaped by even more vocal demands for law and order and efforts to expand the carceral state...
...But the reality was much starker...
...And DISSENT / Winter 2006 5 they were bitter that they had not been given the chance...
...In the aftermath of 1967, the federal government and the private sector briefly increased spending in black neighborhoods...
...American cities exploded in violence in July 1967...
...Observers described black inner cities as places that had never come out of the Great Depression...
...For Americans who believed that political integration was enough, the riots were a rude awakening...
...It is likely that as the French riots recede into memory, the French government will increase spending in the banlieues (indeed, the Chirac government has already pledged to increase its efforts to tackle the problem of youth unemployment...
...Blacks were entrapped in crowded ghettos—confined to decrepit projects or to run-down apartments and rat-infested houses...
...Eventually seventeen thousand law-enforcement officials were deployed to put down the violence, including the National Guard and the elite 101st Airborne (the same military unit that had been dispatched to calm white-supremacist rioting when Little Rock, Arkansas, desegregated its public schools...
...Beginning with the Second World War, blacks had moved north in one of the largest mass migrations in American history...
...For the first time since the Civil War, blacks had the full rights of citizenship...
...America's color blindness was, however, a myth...
...Many observers feared, or thrilled, at the belief that black rioters were the revolutionary vanguard of black separatism...
...And federal officials adopted policies such as affirmative action as "riot insurance"—that is, to buy off black discontent...
...Most were second- and third-generation Northerners who no longer shared the optimism of their parents and grandparents...
...He was a visiting professor at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris in 2002...
...Charges of police brutality were commonplace...
...Most of the French rioters were unarmed and, more important, the French police were restrained in their use of force...
Vol. 53 • January 2006 • No. 1
