French cities are in flames over systemic racism

In a recent sur vey of B lack and mixed-race residents of France, 9 in 10 said they had encountered racial discrimination, and roughly half said they had been stopped and asked for their identific ation more than t wice the share of the overall population who repor ted the same thing torched, incendiary devices hurled at police in riot gear Shops and stores have been looted, ATMs demolished, windows smashed In the first three days of violence nearly 1 000 people were arrested and at least 200 police officers injured On Friday Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said 45 000 police would be deployed to quell the riots around the country President Emmanuel Macron cut short a trip to Brussels and returned to Paris to address the convulsions on Thursday Facing calls that he declare a state of emergency which would trigger curfews and allow authorities to ban protests he tried to strike a balance between insisting on a return to order and expressing indignation at what he called Nahel s unjustified death

WASHINGTON POST L e e H o c k s ta d e r

IN the sprawling housing projects that ring many French cities heavily populated by working-class minorities the rage is rarely far from the surface Often for good reason it is directed at the police

That simmering fury erupted in waves of violence in suburbs and cities across France this week after police shot to death a 17-year-old named Nahel M from a family of North African origin in a town just west of Paris Video of the incident which went viral almost instantly showed a policeman opening fire as the boy started to pull away from two motorcycle officers who had stopped his car Nahel was unarmed French police discharge their weapons and kill civilians at a fraction of the rate their U S counterparts do and many people in France tend to reg a r d v i o l e n c e a n d r a c i s m b y l a w e n f o r c e m e n t a s mainly American problems Many White people in France, that is

Among migrants and their children, most of them from North and sub-Saharan Africa, hard feelings toward law enforcement have run deep for years and many regard police bigotry as a symptom of bias in French society generally

In a recent survey of Black and mixed-race residents of France 9 in 10 said they had encountered racial discrimination, and roughly half said they had been stopped and asked for their identification more than twice the share of the overall population who reported the same thing In the first months of the pandemic lockdown a survey by Reuters found that in France s five departments with the greatest percentage of immigrants police issued fines at a rate more than 50 percent higher than elsewhere in the country

Such routine racial profiling is a quotidian reality for millions of residents who, even if they were born in France or have lived here for decades often are made to feel not fully French For years researchers have documented discrimination in hiring and schools and on the streets

That was the social kindling lit by the death of Nahel on Tuesday, which ignited riots in and around Paris, Marseille and other major cities France has been set ablaze cars incinerated buildings

But as Macron surely knows, he has been forced to address symptoms, not causes, of France’s inequity schisms with roots in the country’s colonial past that have been papered over for decades by a policy of official colorblindness untethered to real people s lives Under French law data collection on race and ethnicity is strictly limited meaning the government which, for instance, publishes no information on the racial or ethnic composition of its police operates in a state of self-imposed ignorance and denial For minority residents of France however the absence of data is irrelevant Their lived reality is evidence of actual bias even if Macron has previously asserted there is no systemic racism in the police This is a moment for the country to seriously address the deep issues of racism and discrimination in law enforcement,” U N human rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani told a media briefing in Geneva

Similarly anodyne calls for France to grapple with those dilemmas are all too familiar They were issued with numbing regularity even before the resentments of the country s migrant communities exploded into weeks of anarchy in 2005, after two teenagers were electrocuted inside an electrical substation where they had fled following a confrontation with police It didn t help that the interior minister at the time Nicolas Sarkozy who later became president referred to the rioters, many of them from migrant families, as gangrene and rabble

In that instance, the government declared a state of emergency to contain the crisis after nearly two weeks of running street battles between rioters and police often set against a tableau of flaming cars The emergency lasted two months enabling the authorities to impose curfews and regain control of the streets

Yet despite the ensuing years of reforms, including programs targeted at the cities and neighborhoods that burned in 2005, the problems still fester And the police remain reviled by communities they are dutybound to protect

Lee Hockstader has been a member of The Washington Post s Editorial Board since 2004

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After years of marches, petitions, open letters and public requests, a disaffec ted youth finds no other way to be heard than by rioting It is difficult to avoid asking if, without so many uprisings in cities across France, Nahel’s death would have garnered the attention it has And as Mar tin Luther King rightly said: “A riot is the language of the unheard”

SI N C E the video went viral of the brutal killing by a police officer of Nahel, a 17-year-old shot dead at point-blank range the streets and housing estates of many poorer French neighbourhoods have been in a state of open revolt France faces George Floyd moment I read in the international media, as if we were suddenly waking up to the issue of racist police violence This naive comparison itself reflects a denial of the systemic racist violence that for decades has been inherent to French policing

I first became involved in antiracist campaigning after a 2005 event that had many parallels with the killing of Nahel Three teenagers aged between 15 and 17 were heading home one afternoon after playing football with friends when they were suddenly pursued by police Although they had done nothing wrong (and this was confirmed by a subsequent inquiry) these terrified youngsters, these children hid from the police in an electricity substation Two of them Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré were electrocuted The third Muhittin Altun suffered appalling burns and life-changing injuries

Those boys could have been my little brothers, or my younger cousins I remember the sense of incredulity: how could they simply lose their lives to such terrible injustice? “If they go in there [to the power plant], I don’t fancy their chances of making it” were the chilling words spoken by one of the police officers as he watched this horrific event play out France was ablaze for weeks with the rioting that followed – the worst in years But just as now, with the death of Nahel, the initial media and political reaction in 2005 was to criminalise the victims, to scrutinise their past, as if any of it could justify their atrocious deaths As if responsibility for their tragedy lay in their own hands Nicolas Sarkozy who was interior minister at the time sullied the memory of young people whose fear had led to their death with the remark: If you have nothing to hide, you don t run when you see the police

The numbers of cases of police brutality grow relentlessly every year In France, according to the Defender of Rights young men perceived to be black or of north African origin are 20 times more likely to be subjected to police identity checks than the rest of the population The same institution denounced the absence of any appeal against being checked as a form of systemic police discrimination Why would we not feel scared of the police?

In 1999, our country, the supposed birthplace of human rights was condemned by the European court of human rights for torture following the sexual abuse by police of a young man of north African origin In 2012

Human Rights Watch said: the identity check system is open to abuse by the French police These abuses include repeated checks – countless , in the words of most interviewees – sometimes involving physical and verbal abuse ” Now, after the death of Nahel, a UN rights body has urged France to address “profound problems of racism and racial discrimination within its law enforcement agencies

Even our own courts have condemned the French state for gross negligence , ruling in 2016 that the practice of racial profiling was a daily reality in France denounced by all international, European, and domestic institutions and that for all that, despite commitments made by the French authorities at the highest level this finding had not led to any positive measures More recently in December 2022 the UN committee on the elimination of racial discrimination denounced both the racist discourse of politicians and police ID checks disproportionately targeting certain minorities

Despite such overwhelming findings, our president, Emmanuel Macron still considers the use of the term “police violence to be unacceptable This time Macron has unequivocally condemned an act that he called unacceptable – which is significant Yet I fear that the focus is being placed on an individual police officer instead of questioning entrenched attitudes and structures within the police that are perpetuating racism And not a single one of the damning reports and rulings has led to any meaningful reform of the police as an institution

Worse a law passed in 2017 has made it easier for police to resort to the use of firearms Officers can now shoot without even having to justify it on the grounds of selfdefence Since this change in the law, according to the researcher Sebastian Roché, the number of fatal shootings against moving vehicles has increased fivefold Last year, 13 people were shot dead in their vehicles

Nahel s death is another chapter in a long and traumatic story Whatever our age many of us French who are descended from postcolonial immigration carry within us this fear combined with rage, the result of decades of accumulated injustice This year, we commemorate the 40th anniversary of a seminal event In 1983, Toumi Djaïdja a 19-year-old from a Lyon banlieue became the victim of police violence that left him in a coma for two weeks This was the genesis of the March for Equality and Against Racism the first antiracist demonstration on a national scale, in which 100,000 people took part

For 40 years this movement has not stopped calling out the violence we see targeted at working-class neighbourhoods and more broadly black people and people of north African origin The crimes of the police are at the root of many of the uprisings in France s most impoverished urban areas and it is these crimes that must be condemned first After years of marches petitions open letters and public requests, a disaffected youth finds no other way to be heard than by rioting It is difficult to avoid asking if, without so many uprisings in cities across France Nahel’s death would have garnered the attention it has

And as Martin Luther King rightly said: “A riot is the language of the unheard

Rokhaya Diallo is a writer journalist film director and activist