That was just pillow talk, honey

Race riots in Paris! Quelle surprise! There are some things I would have adored to be wrong about. One of these things was the powderkeg-ishness of the Parisian ‘suburbs’, some of which I lived in and next to. How I harped on! ‘An Orwellian and cosmetic denial of the ghetto dynamic.’ ‘Post-colonial racism and chauvinism, rendering integration impossible and conflict inevitable’. ‘The systemic demonization of the Maghrebin’, ‘fundamentalist trends and reactionary sexism kick-started through police brutality and economic victimization’. Oh, and let’s not forget my favorite, ‘the simultaneous marginalization and abandonment of Muslim women by their own government’ following the headscarf ban.

How I opined! How I used big fancy words! How I attacked French interlocutors for their self-righteous condemnation of North American racism when the natives and the immigrants lived in two very different and very antipathetic solitudes!

Who cares how right I was. We’ll all be dead someday, the Earth will be swallowed by the sun, and everybody plays the fool sometimes. Saying it doesn’t change it. France would be Germany if the natives weren’t chauvinistic enough to put a line about ‘fertilizing the fields with the impure blood of the enemy’ in their national anthem; it wouldn’t exist if it hadn’t been an exploitative colonial power in Africa; it would be speaking English if it hadn’t been able to import cheap pools of unskilled labour from its old colonies after World War II; it would be of little diplomatic importance without its domination of ex-colonies’ political establishments now and through the Cold War; and even broker, if such a thing is possible, without its present economic interests in old colonies. France wouldn’t be France if it weren’t on fire right now.

That blows. That blows way worse than being wrong. It’s a beautiful country full of beautiful people, who are suffering the consequences and enjoying the benefits of an imperial history and who have an incredible talent for denying the brutally obvious. I love that country way too much to think about it as a bleak-ass cautionary tale. But what else is there to think?