[Comment] Similarities between poverty in the United States, France

From The Alameda Times Star

PARLEZ-VOUS pauvret, discrimination, dsespoir? (that is poverty, discrimination and hopelessness.)
That has a different ring from libert, egalit et fraternit (the French national motto translating to liberty, equality and brotherhood.)

Anyone surprised by the recent rioting in France hadn't been paying attention to the living conditions of the immigrant population, largely from North and West Africa.

They are isolated in ghettos living with dilapidated public housing, inadequate schools, gangs, drug dealing, police harassment, a 30-percent unemployment rate, fatherless families.

Are we talking Saint-Denis or Ghosttown in West Oakland? In France, the inner-city is in the suburbs. The projects are called Les Cites.

The impoverished suburbs have even produced French rap, which includes a hardcore variety along the lines of gangster rap in the United States.

The similarities are striking. But they haven't gone unnoticed. The youth advocates there sound like the youth advocates here. A couple of years ago, a young French sociologist interviewed me about the Oakland community reaction to youth crime as part of her research on youth crime in the U.S. She planned to apply her research to the immigrant communities in France.

"All the youth know that they won't find equality if they go to high school here. They will have the chance of a snowball in Hell to enter one of the 'grandes ecoles.' (specialized higher education) How do you justify that?"

"All this gives rise to a real feeling of abandonment on the part of the residents."

"Just in Seine-Saint-Denis, there were 160 teaching positions not filled at the reopening of schools this fall. There are still 80 posts vacant."

"The level of education in primary school is low, very low. The average of national evaluations in (grades 5 to 6) is lower than in all the other (educational priority zones.)"

"We have the feeling of being trapped in here. We are not the ones who have the keys. It's them. For (the majority of the youth) it's difficult for them to imagine another future than in the housing complex."

As I said, are we talking Clichy-sous-Bois (where the rioting started) or Coliseum Gardens in East Oakland?

The French even have their version of hard line conservatives who vilify the poor. Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy's comments calling the young residents "thugs" and "scum" were believed to have escalated the violence. It calls to mind the comments of Republican Congressman Richard Baker, overheard by a reporter: "We finally cleaned up public housing in New Orleans. We couldn't do it, but God did."

The scenes from suburban Paris recalled Watts in 1965. The scenes from New Orleans depicted a different calamity. Both were born of the same causes, poverty and neglect.

The United States, France and other developed countries have spent the last two or three decades ignoring poverty. Conservatives blame poverty on the moral weakness of the poor. Liberals throw up their hands, exasperated by the complexity of the problem. In either case, we lost the will to get people out of poverty and left them to their inner cities or suburbs.

However, pretending poor people don't exist clearly does not work. That is the inescapable lesson coming out of New Orleans and France's suburbs. We can ignore consistently underperforming schools, dropout rates, crime in ghettoized areas and the country's unrealized potential when large segments remain uneducated. But eventually the society will be forced to deal with the anger and frustration of its poor citizens.

Borrowing from Langston Hughes' classic poem, "A Dream Deferred," what happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up, fester, stink, sag? Or does it explode?

When it explodes, it isn't contained in the ghettos. It spills over to the entire society.

In the wake of Katrina and the French riots, top government officials of both countries have vowed to renew their efforts to eradicate poverty and discrimination. Maybe these events have been a wakeup call. Maybe.