Liberty, equality, fraternity' for all? New riots make France confront an old problem

Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”: The lofty ideals to which France has long aspired are embossed on coins and carved above school doors across the land. Yet they are the polar opposite of what some French people who are Black or brown saw in a shocking video of a police officer shooting and killing a 17-year-old delivery driver of north African descent during a traffic stop.That kid, some said to themselves, could have been me — or my children, or my friends. Within hours, the first fires of anger and revenge were lighting up the night skies of Nanterre, the Paris suburb where the teenager, Nahel, was declared dead at 9:15 a.m. last Tuesday. His left arm and chest had been pierced from left to right by a single shot fired before the yellow Mercedes he was driving then slammed into barriers on Nelson Mandela Square

From the town on the fringe of the French capital’s high-rise business district, with its disadvantaged housing projects, glaring wealth gaps, and melting-pot mix of races and cultural influences imported from France’s former colonies, the flames of fury quickly spread.After more than 3,400 arrests and signs that the violence is now abating, France is once again facing a reckoning — as it did after previous riots in mixed-race, disadvantaged neighborhoods in the 1980s, 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.

Still, inequalities are too glaring to be ignored. The government's statistics agency found in 2020 that death rates among immigrants from sub-Saharan Africa doubled in France and tripled in the Paris region at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic — an acknowledgement of the virus’s punishing and disproportionate impact on Black immigrants and members of other systemically overlooked minority groups. Other research has also exposed racism in workplaces and hiring.

Boyi, who is Black, decries the state's colorblindness as “a French hypocrisy." He says he regularly encounters young people of color and also white people from disadvantaged neighborhoods who apply for dozens of jobs but aren't hired “because the family name sounds foreign, because the address isn't a good one.Unfortunately, when there's an injustice, there's always a radical fringe that tips into violence. We saw these young people, aged 12 to 19 ... at 1, 2, 3 o'clock in the morning burning cars, stoning police officers, stoning buses. It's terrible,” Boyi says.