What Britain Can Tell France About Rioters
LONDON - After months of unease, a humdrum incident in a hardscrabble part of town turns suddenly sour. Pretty soon, the police and the poor are locked in street fighting. Gasoline bombs fly. Cars burn.This was Brixton in south London in 1981 - not much different from the suburbs of Paris in 2005. Twenty-four years ago, riots in the mainly black district of Brixton were regarded as a turning point in Europe's struggle to absorb its former colonial subjects, just as this month's French riots may become a moment of decision about how France treats its own immigrants and their descendants. But if there is a lesson the British would gladly teach the French, it is that riots can only begin a revolution in race relations; a quarter-century from now, the issues may still be unresolved. After Brixton, Britain adopted policies that in some ways echoed America's response to its own urban racial disturbances. They encouraged Britons to embrace ethnic diversity, although they fell short of American-style affirmative action, which Britons see as illegal discrimination. Two and a half decades later, the results are still ambiguous, and today Britain is slipping into a new debate - over whether identity politics is a good idea at all. Maybe, some people are saying, immigrants should be stripped of their distinct ethnic identities, rather than made to feel more comfortable in them. That sounds remarkably like the way the French already think. In Brixton in 1981, as in the suburbs of Paris today, young black people resented routine police searches; discrimination and unemployment had left ethnic minorities with a profound sense of grievance. There, too, said Jenny Bourne, a researcher at the not-for-profit Institute of Race Relations, it was the children and grandchildren of a first generation of immigrants who were "rebelling against the fact that they had nothing in society."
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