The Roma issue

An interesting testimony regarding the recent issue on Roma from a representative of the Roma community from Romania, studying now in the United States. Romani/Gypsy heritage is part of the European culture and history and we, Westerners have to be fully aware of their importance and value. Everybody is talking extensively about the problems with the Muslim communities, or the situation of religious minorities and so on. But, wait! For centuries, an important Roma community is living in Europe and we are too blind to see it but when there are becoming too visible for our diffuse view.

A proof that we, as Europeans, are self-centered not only in relation with the overseas worlds, but also in relation with our closed neighbours.

Related articles

• Romania is shirking its Roma responsibilities | Nicolae Gheorghe (guardian.co.uk)
• EU suspends Roma complaint against France (foxnews.com)
• Q+A: Who are Europe's Roma? (reuters.com)

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France - The change of paradigm?

I was very happy the last week to be able to attend the Mona Ozouf's conference in Berlin. I had the occasion to read many of her books since I was at the university, together with the works of Pierre Nora being valuable tools in guiding me across the complicate world of national symbolism and painful national identities. In the last months I followed the various political interventions from France regarding the national paradigm and its possible crisis or, at least, the lack of adaptability to the daily reality from the Hexagone.

The conference was interesting and useful as an update of reevaluating the crisis from the point of view of the possibilities to go beyond the current conflict at the level of mentalities. Because, as Mona Ozouf outlined by various examples, the theoretical reality included by the political definitions of identity don't correspond to the daily and human reality of nowadays France. A ministry of national identity will not solve the increasing tensions by symbolic interventions in the educational system, as singing the Marseillaise or preaching about the common identity.

On the other hand, the messianic vision of a France fighting for universal values is contradicted by the daily reality of the diversity - regional, religious, ethnic. You might not recognize the idea of minority - of any kind - but it doesn't mean those minority don't exist or will accept to give up their identities. The structures and histories of the communities you have to deal are diverse and with different relations to modernity and various reasons - economic and political mainly - to choose France as their home country. Theoretically and simplified, if you are entering my house, you have to accept the rules of the house, isn't it? But you cannot impose me what to say or what to dress or what to eat! It is against the general value of human rights. And if you are not able to convince me by your "soft power" that I have to adjust my attitude, it is, perhaps, an error in the projection of the whole system, isn't it?

Purposely I will not refer to specific situations and cases: as the burqa prohibition. Our secular Western values and societies are in obvious contradiction with some values preached in the anti-Western religious communities from the Middle East. The dramatic tension is the result of two opposite standpoints, refusing any kind of dialogue and critical thinking.

But the daily human, social and political reality is different of the historical projections from the history books. The "glorious past" of France is not the necessary liaison to reinforce a national profile. We are living global, this is obvious, but our global world is made up of various networks and communities, created by individuals with different backgrounds. You can be in the same time European, France citizen, Hindi speaker and with a strong Corsican identity. It might be contradictory in some cases, hard to understand, but there we need first to map the reality, to understand it and after to find solutions, new solutions for new realities.

Sommer time

and intercultural problems on the beach.

in Egypt

and

in France.

And what the "burqini" creator thinks about.


Plus: another view from the Middle East: the religious Israeli beaches customers.

Le bonheur en Allemagne?

Michel Tournier, about France and Germany, how they see each other and a long time cultural relationship

About stereotypes and how it is necessary to look into reality in order to overcome them:

"Chaque peuple revendique la vertu dont il est en vérité le plus dépourvu. Il en va ainsi du fair-play anglais, du sens de l'honneur espagnol, de la propreté hollandaise et de la prétendue joie de vivre méditerranéenne.

S'agissant de l'Allemagne, il faut se garder de prendre pour argent comptant ses prétentions à l'ordre, le travail et la rationalité, l'efficacité, la méthode". (:49)

As for France:

"Ils revendiquent l'esprit, la légéreté, la finesse, l'ironie, bref toutes les qualités qu'on trouve chez Jean Paul, Holderlin, Goethe, Heine, les petits chateaux baroques et la musique de Mozart et de Schubert. (...) En vérité, le Francais esf un fier-à-bras dont l'ambition est toujours d'éclipser le reste de l'humanité. Ses écrivains sont des encyclopédistes qui prétendent faire entrer la totalité du savoir et du monde dans une oeuvre massive, énorme, définitive. Faire en sorte qu'il ne reste plus rien à écrire après eux". (:51)

Should France Start Counting Its Minority Population?

Bruce Crumley / Paris
TIME
March 24

It's news to no one that France's blighted unemployment-ravaged suburban housing projects have disproportionately high black and Arab populations. It's also no scoop that those same two ethnic groups are under-represented in the nation's elite schools, corporate management ranks and political establishment. The French themselves are acutely aware that racial discrimination is a problem — and since the 2005 suburban riots have appeared eager to do something to remedy it.

A good place to start might be figuring out the exact size and location of France's ethnic groups. Except that every time someone proposes including ethnic data within national statistics all hell breaks lose. The accepted wisdom in France, it seems, is that acknowledging difference, and naming it, is bigotry itself. (See pictures of Paris expanding.)

"Ethnic statistics, affirmative action [and] quotas are caricatures," fumed Fadela Amara, France's Secretary of State for Urban Affairs, who before entering government led a civil rights movement advancing minority and feminist causes. The daughter of Algerian immigrants, Amara sees official ethnic statistics as dangerous, not helpful. "Our republic must not become a mosaic of communities," she says, rejecting calls to add race to the gender, age and occupational categories contained in official data researchers use to study French society. "No one should again have to wear a yellow star."

Linking the ethnic make-up of a multiracial nation to genocide may sound like hyperbole elsewhere, but the French know that tinkering with the founding principles and universal values of the nation was central to some of the ugliest episodes in the country's history. The French constitution proudly declares the country "an indivisible, secular, democratic and social Republic [that] assures equality before the law for all its citizens, without distinction of origin, of race, or religion". That gender- and color-blindness, national ideology holds, protects minority populations by ignoring the differences that divide them into often mutually hostile groups in societies like the U.S. and U.K. Indeed, few words are uttered in France with the same disdain as communitarisme: the proud identification with a component group within wider society so beloved in multi-cultural nations. (See pictures of 40 years of Concorde.)

France's indivisible ideology is noble in theory — but often mocked by reality. There are plenty of periods in French history where racial and religious discrimination were rife — from the colonial era to cooperation with Nazi occupiers. The 2005 rioting that spread across France's suburban housing projects — and the international media attention that it drew — provided another reminder that something was seriously wrong in the land of fraternité et egalité. That unrest seems to have finally provoked a period of soul searching in France.

That means re-examining some of France's founding principles. President Nicolas Sarkozy, for one, has broken ancient taboos by suggesting France study American-style equal opportunity, quotas and the use of ethnic data within official statistics to get a more accurate picture of the nation's face. "There are two Frances," Arab-French businessman Yazid Sabeg told the daily Libération. "One wants to look things in the face — meaning the way demographics in this country have changed. The other is conservative France, which is prone to immobility in the name of largely artificial equality." (See pictures of France's Bastille Day celebrations.)

Tapped by Sarkozy in November to suggest ways of mending the nation's race relations, Sabeg has proposed compiling and analyzing racial statistics as one of several ways of making the nation's anti-discrimination initiatives and laws stronger and more easily applied.

But that's prompted a backlash from opponents who believe the goal should be getting France to practice the color-blind promise of the Republic — not swapping it for U.S.-style multiculturalism and affirmative action. "Even if it's out to do the right thing, positive discrimination remains discrimination, and classifying people by race and ethnicity is in a manner itself racism," argues Malek Boutih, former head of France's seminal civil rights group S.O.S. Racism, and now a member of the Socialist Party's national bureau. "You don't surrender your principles because they are being abused in practice, but rather find ways to shape reality to your principles. You can't give into one discrimination by creating counter-discrimination."

That's a view widely held across French society. But in a sign of change, more and more voices are speaking up to support Sarkozy's and Sabeg's ideas. The number of minority characters on television, film and in the media generally has noticeably increased over the past few years. People in other industries have begun pointing out the practical problems created by the legal ban on including ethnic data in official statistics. "From a sociological point of view, I'm for it, just as I'd be inclined to include any qualitative statistic as revelatory and essential to social, political and economic evolution as race is," says Dominique Reynié, president of the Foundation for Political Development, a think tank in Paris. "It's not just a valuable tool — it's one that may offer ways of combating discrimination."

It would also at last let France see its real face clearly. France's highly centralized government and top-to-bottom administration can keep tabs on myriad ways its 64.1 million population is evolving except in terms of its racial make-up. The prohibition on using ethnic or religious data — even if volunteered — means France can do no better than estimate that its population includes 4 to 7 million Arabs, 3 to 5 million blacks, some 1.5 million Asians, and around 600,000 Jews. (See TIME's pictures of the week.)

Using the highest of those estimates, those four categories represent nearly 22% of France's population — a group that includes arguably the biggest victims of racism and discrimination. The vast majority of French people want to change that. The question is how.

Urban diversity, Perpignan, France, January 2009

Why should we learn "subjonctif imparfait"?

A movie with only one professional actor, taking place exclusively "entre les murs" of Collège Francoise Dolto from the 20e arrondissement of Paris, based on the novel with the same name of François Bégaudeau, a teacher himself.

If we don't have too much knowledge of the social map of Paris, and we don't know too much about the ZEPs - Zones d'Education Prioritaire, the name of school, of the French psychanalist, purposive or not, might be took as a suggestion of interpretation. Among others, she supported the idea of the childhood as an important part in the evolution of the individual, stressing the way in which the feelings represent a basis for the development of intelligence and and ways to express them as sign of inner troubles encoutered at the beginning of the life. Also, the language of the body needs to be considered on equal foot with the spoken language, mainly when it is about small children. And this finding could be took into consideration when we try to go deeper into the movie's core ideas.

In this college you have mostly children - 13-14 by age - with "problems" - second or first generation immigrants - from Morocco, China, Mali, Carribean area etc - , with a poor knowledge of French, encountering high social problems, with parents who cannot communicate with the teachers directly, because themselves they don't know French, or illegal immigrants. This unclear status is translated into anomic behaviors and even we don't know almost nothing about their lives beyond the school's wall, we have many hints to guess. As for the teachers, they have good will, at least at the beginning of the school year, but for some of them, the problems faced are overwhelming and even the most tolerant and openminded are failing to resist a mounting pressure from the part of the children.

The short conclusion could be easy: Well, they don't want to learn, it's their responsability, they will fail to get a brighter future than their current present so, why to use your time and energy ? The most disobedients, in order to show an example for the rest, will be expelled from school - and it is what happening with one of them - the rest have to learn this lesson. In fact, is neither black or white. On both parts they are efforts to do better their jobs. The big problem is the failure to make themselves understood because, even they are speaking in French - good or bad, doesn't matter, they could find the common words - the worlds they are communicating through the language are extremely different.

The teachers aren't showed in the movie as visiting the children's homes, their daily environment. The discussions between them and the parents are taking part in the classrooms, the parents sitting with or without their kids at desks, with the teacher sit on the opposite part, in the school teacher's desk. All they could get in a couple of minutes meeting is the professional evaluation versus the inner dreams they all have for their children. And here still they are many inadvertences and reality missing links.

The composition of the classroom is offering a good case of analysis of the diversity at work. Do this diversity works by encouraging the children to share their experiences. Rather not. When it is about a football championship, those who are talking prefer to stress their bad-wishes for the other part, even if they belonging to the same geographical entity, Africa. A Chinese child, with a poor French, but with a big desire to learn is rejected, even his situation could offer many reasons of solidarity with the others.

And this situation is available for the teachers themselves. They fail in explaining the "ways" of a subject they are discussing in the classroom and even the language used is not understood in the same way by the children. Of course, they don't have to speak in slang to rise their popularity or wrap up their subjects matter in a more attractive clothes. On their part, the children simply consider them "bourgeois" and treat them as old-fashioned remnants of a bigoted world they don't think ever will let them go in. And the world they are all in is having well known limits, whose transgression will took generations.

The key of this is, I think, the question asked by one of the kids, at one of the French lessons, about the reason to learn "subjonctif imparfait", not used in the everyday speech, but to be found in formal writing. It sounds as by their own will, at the age of 13-14 they decided to comply with a situation they don't know how to change it. And the teachers don't offer them that the description of the changes, without empowering with them with the tools to do it.

Europe's Minorities Welcome Obama Election

By Sonja Pace, Voice of America

The election of Barack Obama as America's first African American president is leading Europe's minorities to ask themselves: could it happen here? The expressions of hope in the ethnic communities of Britain and France also are tempered with a certain amount of skepticism, a - "maybe not just yet."

US President-elect Barack Obama

Most Europeans were enamored with Barack Obama from early on - the young, energetic, well-spoken man who promised change, new leadership and a new partnership.

And Europe's ethnic minorities, on the streets or in the corridors of power, began asking the question - could it happen here.

Baroness Patricia Scotland, Britain's attorney general, says the U.S. election was a great day for democracy and showed people of all ethnic backgrounds that even the highest aspirations are possible to achieve.

"He has demonstrated it is possible if you have got the talent, if you have got the energy, the courage, if you have got the determination, if you have the ability and the passion all things are possible and it does not really matter the color that you come in or the shape or the size or the religious or sexual orientation," she said. "That is really powerful."

Baroness Scotland

Baroness Scotland is the first woman and the first black person to become Britain's top lawyer - she is the top legal advisor to the British government. She was born in Dominica in the Caribbean and came to Britain as a small child. Some say she is a prime example that minorities can advance to high jobs in government. So, will Britain one day have a black prime minister?

"Absolutely. I have to be very conscious that I am the first woman attorney general in 700 years," she said. "If you were to ask someone - is it likely that the United Kingdom would have a woman as attorney general after having waited 700 years you might think some people would say - not that likely. It is likely that the first woman to be made attorney general is likely to be a black woman - well, I think even less likely. So, I think change is possible - absolutely."

Britain has a rich mix of ethnic communities, often from former British colonies. They come from the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia and that mix is celebrated every year at London's Notting Hill Carnival with music, dance and ethnic food.

Blacks in London are part of the rich mix of ethnic communities

But, unlike in the United States, where most black Americans trace their roots back to the days of slavery, Europe's minorities came much later.

Their history may be different, but the process of fully integrating can remain a difficult one.

France has a large immigrant population - predominantly Arabs and Africans - estimated at between 10 to 15 percent of the overall population of more than 60 million. The Paris neighborhood of Barbes has a rich ethnic mix, and its people have mixed views about being able to replicate an Obama-style victory.

"I do not think we will have a black president elected here with all the racism in France; I do not think it could happen here," said one man.

"Given the conditions and the social situation here in France, I think that if it happened it would simply be a miracle," one woman said.

"You see the French have understood that why not? I am convinced that the French have understood that from now on they have to make room for black people," one man added.

France prides itself on its model of citizenship with an emphasis on being French without reference to race, religion or national origin.

But minorities often feel left out and complain about the lack of opportunities, says Louis-Georges Tin, spokesman for the Representative Council of Black Associations.

"France keeps on maintaining the philosophical principles of equality but, in practice, things are very different," he said. "We know, for example, that it is five times more difficult to have a job if you are black or of Arab origin."

Change has to go much further say minority rights activists. George Pau Langevin agrees. She is the only black member of mainland France in the National Assembly.

George Pau Langevin

"For us in France, we have to face facts that we are behind because we really struggle to get people elected who are representative of French society," she said.

Back in London in the ethnically-mixed neighborhood of Brixton people also wonder if and when the kind of change that brought Barack Obama to power in America, might come here.

"Most definitely, most definitely," said one man. "If we have a black candidate that want to reach and can get there on merit, I support that, I endorse that."

"You will probably see after the whole Obama thing, you will see a few people get to higher positions who are of color, but whether it will be that high up? In this country, I think it would take another 15 years probably," a woman added.

"Yes, we can," chanted Barack Obama supporters in America - the question is - will Europe follow and when.

Sarkozy acts for ethnic diversity

AP

President Nicolas Sarkozy, impatient with what he said was the slow pace of promoting diversity in France, announced measures Wednesday to put more ethnic minorities on TV screens, in political parties and in elite schools.

A government action plan to be presented by March will spell out the measures in detail. The project is to be overseen by a newly appointed commissioner for diversity and equality, Yazid Sabeg, a son of Algerian immigrants who is known for his efforts to bring equality to the workplace.

"It's not moving fast enough," Sarkozy said in a speech at the elite Ecole Polytechnique, south of Paris, a symbol of the very system that has locked minorities out of the mainstream. France must change so that "no French person feels like a stranger in his own country."

Turning to his audience, Sarkozy said prestigious schools must make room for all.

"We are going to throw open the doors of places where tomorrow's elite are formed," he said.

He wants top schools to reserve 25 percent of their places for students receiving state aid by September — and 30 percent by September 2010. Many students who receive government education funds are ethnic minorities from underprivileged backgrounds.

Increasing diversity was a campaign promise of Sarkozy, elected in May 2007. Long ignored, diversity topped the political agenda after fall 2005 riots in poor French neighborhoods exposed deep anger among people of immigrant origin and revealed the extent of discrimination in France.

The election of Barack Obama as U.S. president sparked renewed soul-searching about why so few ethnic minorities rise to the top in France.

Sarkozy squarely rejected affirmative action for France. But in a significant departure from French practice, he raised the possibility that scientists might begin gathering statistics on ethnicity — long taboo in a country that is officially colorblind.

Researchers are handicapped by the inability to make head counts based on religious or ethnic factors and have pressed for permission to do so. Sarkozy said scientists must be able "to clearly identify lagging and measure progress."

While offering no firm promises or dates, Sarkozy said a dialogue would be opened with scientists on how to advance ethnic diversity in France.

He encouraged companies to accept anonymous resumes from job seekers to avoid discrimination due to name or address as is often the case today.

The government will propose that 100 large companies experiment with using such resumes in 2009, Sarkozy said, adding that he wants to extend the reach of the High Authority Against Discrimination so that it has the right to make surprise checks of work places.

Among other measures, political parties will be asked to sign a "diversity charter" that could become a criteria for receiving public funds, Sarkozy said.

Sarkozy also said TV stations will be required to spell out diversity goals to the CSA, France's audiovisual watchdog.