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Spiffor
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CPA - Evil Clone brigade
Nov 2001
time: 06:20
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quote:
Originally posted by chegitz guevara
I've heard France is rather schizoid towards Black people. Africans are treated rather shabbily, but African-Americans are treated as if they walk on water. Interestingly, the longer an African-American lives in France, the less well they are treated, as they lose their American accent. |
I would believe it. We don't obsess on African-Americans (especially since we don't meet them any often), but since they are the underdogs of evil evil America, I find it believable that we have lots of sympathy for them.
We treat our blacks shabbily indeed, though it's a very different form of racism than what we indulge to the Arabs. The racism toward blacks isn't really hatred, but more of a paternalistic neo-colonial mentality: "the Blacks run fast", "they're better at dancing than at working", things like that. There's the occasional "they stink" (which is said of every group of population that has another diet anyway), but hatred is rarely involved. However, blacks get often underestimated (which lets many Blacks stuck at low-level jobs), and bossed around. They also suffer from discrimination during job-search, house-search, and at nightclubs (this discrimination is wholly illegal, but widespread).
The anti-Arab racism has considerably evolved since the days of the massive North African immigration in the 70ies. It used to be similar to the anti-Black one, as the Arabs were seen as fairly nice, Couscous-eating fellows, who work shabbily and speak with a heavy accent, but who were otherwise pretty nice.
However, we now have many Arabs who are born here, who went to school to become standardised French citizens, who speak French as well as I do, and who still suffered from the old clichés and from the discrimination. However, these yooung people didn't accept their niche as factory workers we gratiously attributed to them. A counter-culture has grown in the impoverished suburbs where they are located for the most part. This sub-culture is anti-France (and against the main French insitutions these people encounter: police and school), is organized in form of gangs, and has many values completely opposite to the Republic's (terrible sexism, vigilantism, antisemitism...). Petty crime is immediately associated to them, and it is not undeserved.
Though this sub-culture (called "racaille") is multi-ethnical, the stereotypical racaille is seen as a violent arrogant young Arab. In response to the racaille sub-culture, the anti-Arab racism has strongly evolved, and it is now more about hate than about paternalism.
As an aside: a significant reason of the alienation of this population group is the constant "random" checking of IDs, which is blatantly racist.
Clothing can do wonders if you don't want to suffer from the stigma of hate-filled anti-Arab racism*. If you dress in a suit, people are likely not to see you as a dangerous potential mugger, regardless of the colour of your skin. I don't know if clothing affects the paternalistic racism however.
*clothing can also do wonders to trigger being mugged. Quite a few muggings have a component of class-racial hatred (the whities, especially the well dressed ones, being often seen as oppressive bourgeois, or as weaklings who can't defend themselves, or both)
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12-05-2005 17:53
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