Nov. 16--Andrew Diamond lives near the Canal Saint Martin in Paris' 10th Arrondissement, a five-minute walk from a popular intersection that's home to a Cambodian restaurant, a pizzeria and a bar with an expansive terrace frequented by tourists and the neighborhood's "Bobos," or artsy bourgeois bohemians.
It was in this area where one of Friday's terror attacks occurred.
A professor of American history and civilization at the Paris-Sorbonne University, Diamond lived in Chicago when he wrote "Mean Streets: Chicago Youths and the Everyday Struggle for Empowerment in the Multiracial City, 1908-1969."
I talked to him Sunday afternoon because earlier this month he returned to Chicago for a trans-Atlantic symposium that included discussions on how high unemployment, income inequality, social exclusion, poverty, and racism in Paris and in Chicago can make it easier for young folks to be radicalized.
These conditions also inspire marginalized and disaffected youth to join gangs of thugs who commit horrendous acts of terror -- or as we prefer to call it here in Chicago, gun violence. On both continents, the weaponry is too easily accessible.
The symposium, called "City/Cit麠A Transatlantic Exchange," was a joint production of Chicago's French Consulate, the University of Chicago and the Great Cities Institute at the University of Illinois at Chicago.
One of the topics was the uprising a decade ago when France's immigrant population, many of them youth, took to the streets of Paris' suburbs protesting everything from joblessness and police harassment to disillusionment and discrimination.
Since then, France, which has one of Europe's largest populations of Muslims, has been struggling with ways to inscribe race (and religion) onto the country's political agenda.
"We still have horrible problems with race discrimination in France, and race is not something the French like to talk about," said Diamond.
Now, the big concern, he said, is whether some of the terrorists were born and reared in France, or had other ties to the country.
Although Paris is pretty well-to-do, it's still ringed by pockets of long-standing extreme poverty, exacerbated in recent years by the country's austerity program.
"The state has eliminated many jobs that used to be open to working-class ethnics," said Diamond. "Europe isn't doing well economically, and when you compound that with the problem of race discrimination, you have youths of North African origins who are facing the double burden of race and class in the job market. They don't have the same cultural and social capital."
They may not, as I've written about youth here in Chicago, feel like they have much to lose.
In the 1950s and '60s, around the same time Chicago was building its public housing corridors, Paris was developing its low-income housing projects in the suburbs. The structures were isolated from the job base and not well connected to Paris by transportation, which set the stage for another form of segregation.
"Many low-income neighborhoods here are not racially defined ghettos, as we have in Chicago, but are somewhat mixed," Diamond said. "People have argued it's not a racial problem here, but a class problem. But many of the housing projects are occupied overwhelmingly by immigrants and people of color, and the fact that there's a decent percentage of whites in the area doesn't change the fact that minorities in France face the double burden of race and class. If you have an Arabic-sounding name you don't get the same consideration as people with a French name."
France has been slow to react to this. And, maybe somewhat unwilling when you consider the country's emphasis on secularism and laicite, laws that say religious symbols, such as the hijab or head scarf, have no place in state-sponsored public spaces.
"This year the director of my son's elementary school announced there would be a program to teach children about laicite," said Diamond. "I wondered, 'Why can't we talk about laicite, but also talk about racism, racial discrimination and being tolerant of differences?'"
He said that just like after the Charlie Hebdo attacks earlier this year, many Muslims now fear a backlash, even though most people understand that last weekend's violence was committed by a fringe group of radicals.
"Racism is part of the problem, but the bigger problem has to do with creating opportunities for people who find themselves in the position to be attracted to these types of terrorists," said Diamond.
In the short term, he said, the country will invest in more cops to patrol the streets and spend more money on intelligence.
But in the long run, we all will have to deal with these types of problems by investing in communities and more jobs.
We use the word integration often, but maybe it's time to go back and really study its true meaning.
dmturner@tribpub.com
