Race riots: coming soon to your neighborhood?

First, an update on the rioting in France. Since Wednesday, forty municipalities have imposed curfews on minors. In Paris, according to the Globe and Mail,

police banned public gatherings that could "provoke or encourage disorder" from 10 a.m., local time, Saturday to 8 a.m. Sunday. It was the first such ban in the French capital in at least a decade, said police spokesman Hugo Mahboubi.

Rioting has weakened in intensity since the curfews were introduced. Nonetheless, police counted 315 cars torched across France yesterday night.

Europeans are nervously monitoring events in France, wondering if they soon will be facing a similar crisis. The Washington Post reports:

The burning cars and social fury exploding across France have transfixed the rest of Europe, where countries with sizable and growing immigrant populations are confronted by some of the same underlying tensions but are cautiously hopeful that the violence won't spread. …

While politicians and police chiefs in other European nations with substantial immigrant populations — notably Britain, Germany, Italy, Spain and the Netherlands — say they have seen no visible signs of unrest, they acknowledge that the French riots have grabbed their attention and reminded them of what could happen if they don't do more to address problems at home.

One phenomenon cries out for an explanation. The discontent in France and elsewhere is traced not to recent immigrants, but to the children of immigrants. In other words, visible minorities who were born in Western cities. The issue first came into focus when it was discovered that some of the perpetrators of the London bombings had been born in England.

An article in yesterday's Globe and Mail offers an interesting perspective. Recent research

shows an emerging population of Canadian-raised daughters and sons of visible-minority immigrants à la France whose accents and cultural reference points are as Canadian as maple syrup, but who in many respects feel less welcome in the country than their parents.

"Their parents came to improve their lives," says University of Toronto sociologist Jeffrey Reitz, one of Canada's foremost academic experts on immigration and multiculturalism.

"They can make comparisons to where they were. They can [move] on. But for their children born in Canada, they don't have the option of going anywhere else. And they expect equality. Therefore their expectations are much higher."

I don't know that this is the full explanation, but it's the first analysis that makes any sense to me.





(an idyllic photo from Citizenship and Immigration Canada)




Visible minorities born in Western cities have higher expectations than their parents. Westerners boast about equal opportunity for all, and they take those comments at face value. When they discover that a lot of doors are closed to them it comes as a rude shock.

Are the doors closed because they are visible minorities? Or do they face the same kinds of obstacles as those who are not visible minorities?

We all start out with some characteristics that work to our advantage and others that hold us back. For example, some studies have shown that income is related to height, with each inch adding about $789 to one's yearly income. If this is true, the fact that I'm vertically challenged (5'6½") holds me back economically.

On the other hand, if you're Paris Hilton, you can become rich and (in)famous despite having neither talent, brains, nor anything else that should qualify you for success in a meritocracy. Equal opportunity for all doesn't work out quite as advertised.

Still, you can't argue with people's experience:

Listen to the voice of 22-year-old Rahel Appiagyei, a third-year student in international relations attending Toronto's elite bilingual Glendon College at York University.

"No, I don't feel accepted," she says. "The one thing I don't understand — me, personally, and for blacks in general — is why we're still seen as immigrants."

In the Canada of her experience, she says, "the word 'immigrant' is used to mean coloured and the word 'Canadian' is a code word for Caucasian." Her parents emigrated from Ghana in 1988, when she was 5. Immigrants from Ghana — along with those from Ethiopia, Somalia and Afghanistan — have the highest rates of poverty in Canada, between 50 and 80 per cent. She, her parents and five siblings live crowded into a three-bedroom apartment.

Ms. Appiagyei, whose idiom and accent with trademark raised ou diphthong are flawlessly Canadian, says with pride that her family has never needed a penny of welfare, that her father has steadily worked since he arrived, and that she is the first in the family to be accomplishing what her mother and father brought their children to Canada to do.

She cites the Toronto school board's policy of zero tolerance for violence and points out its targets are overwhelmingly black students. Something can't be right with a policy that winds up being aimed at a single racial group, she says. "It gives me a lot of messages."

Ms. Appiagyei tells the story of living one summer in Quebec with a family to learn French. The father made clear that he associated blacks with poverty and one day commented that he had never thought blacks attractive until he met her. "It was a compliment and insult at the same time."

The Ethnic Diversity Study found 37 per cent of Canada's visible minorities report discrimination, and for blacks alone the figure is 50 per cent.

Ms. Appiagyei says the more engaged and involved in Canadian life she becomes, the more she encounters gaps between her expectations of what Canadian society should be and the reality she encounters.

She tells of being often asked: "'You're from Africa, how come you know English so well?' I feel I'm always being assessed with lions and tigers, with remoteness. Why is it we're not allowed to feel we belong here?"

I accept that visible minorities face an additional obstacle to success. And maybe it's a big obstacle — there's no way for caucasians like me to evaluate it.

Nonetheless, as I explained in my previous post on the riots in Paris, I think the social problem is particularly acute in France. Citizens of other European nations evidently feel the same (returning here to the Washington Post article):

European lawmakers and analysts also pointed to evidence that the French riots were being fueled by conditions that were not mirrored elsewhere. While there is widespread dissatisfaction with the pace of integration and assimilation throughout Europe, they said, segregation, unemployment and social alienation seem much more pronounced in the suburbs around Paris and other French cities. …

Friedrich Heckmann, a professor of immigration studies at the University of Bamberg in Germany, said studies show that it is more difficult for second-generation French to move out of the slums or segregated neighborhoods and find jobs than for people of the same age and background in Britain and Germany.

That's my impression, too — that conditions here in Canada are not what they are in France.

But maybe I'm unduly complacent. What is your opinion? Are similar riots likely to break out in Canada? Are they likely to break out in the UK or the USA?