In her insightful article on the Paris riots (France on fire, Nov. 14), Cathia Badière expresses a concern that has been widespread throughout op-ed pages lately-one that is intuitive, yet perhaps simplistic.
Badière rightly identifies the cause of France’s turmoil as a systemic one, in which “racial minorities have been denied the same level of access to work and upward socio-economic mobility as their white compatriots.”
She then wonders whether the resentment and anger of minority groups could also “simmering beneath the surface” in Canada.
According to many, it most definitely is. Ask them why, however, and the reasons contradict each other.
One Globe and Mail article said that Canada could have its own riots because we are “Americanizing,” with two-tier privatization of schools and healthcare resulting in greater gaps appearing between the rich and poor strata of society.
Another op-ed (possibly in the Sun; if not, it might as well have been) declared that the reason for the riots was that France is not enough like the U.S., with its melting pot of cultures that ensures that immigrants are Americans first, and whatever other ethnic or national denominator second. Canada’s problem, then, is that it doesn’t assimilate immigrants into one national identity, leaving them on the sidelines as outsiders.
Of course, the idea that the U.S. has fared any better than France in racial relations is an embarrassing oversight. Doesn’t anyone remember the Rodney King riots, when the headlines screamed that L.A., not Paris, was on fire?
Indeed, among the three countries, Canada is actually the only one that has not seen racially motivated uprisings on a massive scale. Not that we don’t have our own history of unforgivable failures in ensuring the equality of our citizens-just one look at a Kashechewan reserve will tell you that.
What France and the U.S. share that Canada lacks is a nearly sacred sense of national identity. Only a country that reveres its cultural artifacts as holy relics would pass a bill, as France did, to protect foie gras from animal-rights activists by declaring it a special part of French culture. French Arabs and American blacks and Latinos have been violently excluded from this notion of identity.
Most importantly, to say that conditions like those in France prevail here at home is to completely ignore France’s damning colonial history. Many of the rioting Arabs in France’s slums come from Algeria, where French was made the official language and Arabs were treated abominably. Those who managed to learn French and immigrate to France have largely been treated as second-class citizens there, and many were beaten and murdered by white Frenchmen following Algeria’s 1962 fight for independence.
Although discrimination does exist in Canada, Canada never had colonies-we were one. Toronto does have poor, isolated neighbourhoods rife with violence. But we don’t have an Algeria.
Ignoring these essential historical differences creates a one-dimensional understanding of these issues that clouds our view of our own history.
