The Frustration of the Disadvantaged

By Wenke Husmann, originally printed by Zeit Online, November 16th 2015

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On the Sunday after the Paris attacks, four young men in dark grey anoraks, with shaved black hair and darker skin stand at the edge of the square in front of the town hall in Saint-Denis: the Arabs – this is, though a terrible generalization, what many French call people with such biographical details. The only thing which the term really describes is the visible features of dark skin and black hair. “It’s horrible what happened here, a huge disaster,” says Massinissa, one of the four men. He has tears in his eyes which he tries, with thumb and forefinger, to wipe away. “Now they’re all pointing the finger at us again.”

That means that at every type of checkpoint, regardless of whether it’s at an airport or a football stadium, he will be specially marked for thorough checks. “Our constitution says that all people are to be treated equally, but it’s not like that. This democracy has hierarchies.” Do he and the other three men feel like they are, as a result, less connected? No, not at all. They say how many positives they see in French society. “France has such a long history of tradition.” In Algeria, where Massinissa was born, democracy is still young, weak, and not authentic. He only wishes that democracy in France worked for everyone. For him and all other Muslims. But this right shouldn’t be abolished “because a few idiots spread terror”, says Massissina.

In Saint-Denis the terrorists began their attacks with an explosion. Over the course of half an hour, three suicide bombers blew themselves into the air in front of the Stade de France, killing one person. Their goal was to kill more. Reports suggest that they wanted to get inside the stadium. They didn’t come from Saint-Denis. But they met in a part of the city which, as a ‘banlieue’ (note: poor suburb), has had a bad reputation for a long time.

In 2005 there were serious troubles. Young men burned cars, destroyed buses, and threw Molotov cocktails at police stations because two teenagers in the disadvantaged Clichy-sous-Bois area had been shot by police as they ran away from a spot check (note: they weren’t shot, they were electrocuted when hiding from police). The street violence spread through the whole of France, lasting for weeks, and made France look as if it were on the verge of civil war. Two people died, thousands were injured, more than 9000 cars and a number of buildings were destroyed. The culprits were largely disadvantaged young immigrants. What united them was the strong feeling that they were locked out of French society, left with no prospects. Similarly in Saint-Denis today, they are especially anxious about integration and equality of opportunity.

The stigma remains

Of the 100 000 inhabitants of the neighbourhood the majority are Muslim, and most families have a background of migration. Many people came decades ago when the area was characterized by industry. It was here that the first HLM (social housing apartment block) was built in the ‘50s; those which in 2005 the then home affairs minister and later president Nicolas Sarkozy said that he would clean up.

The stigma has remained. Muslim, Arabic-looking people or people with an address from a notorious banlieue have always had worse prospects, right up till today. How so? In terms of everything: in school, looking for jobs, at work. In Saint-Denis unemployment is more than 18 per cent, in the neighbouring area, La Courneuve, it is 25 per cent. François Taddéi is the Director of the ‘Centre for Interdisciplinary Research’ in Paris. He is extremely occupied with education and the reasons why social stratification continues to reproduce itself so strongly; why social mobility is not working. “Equality of opportunity, of prospects, starts even before a person begins school”, he says.

Not only because teachers with the least experience work in disadvantaged areas. Above all, Taddéi is convinced that it is because the French school system is based on a competitive philosophy. “We used to have the aristocracy,” says Taddéi, “we beheaded them.” In their place, though, comes the idea of merit.

It’s not so long ago that French school students didn’t just get grades, but also saw where they stood in the academic hierarchy of the class. Whoever didn’t manage to keep up dropped towards the bottom of the hierarchy. If internalised, this type of system is fatal when a student has difficulties at school. “Our teachers, rather than what they do in Finland or South Korea where they see how they can help a student who is struggling, think only about how they can get the student to pass exams regardless.” It is suggested to the children who are slipping down that they deserve nothing more than to slip further. “At some point, a student who has been devalued in this way rebels against the system. In fact, France has 200 000 school dropouts per year, the highest in Europe. Most come from disadvantaged areas.

Frustrated school students need lessons they relate to

As a result, Taddéi set up a project in Saint-Denis for school dropouts. The key idea is not to try to teach them all the knowledge they missed, but rather to give them knowledge of future technologies. For example programming, or dealing with 3-D printing. They should experience the feeling of being able to do something. To apply it. Away from theory, towards practice. In addition, the people who teach the courses were themselves once school dropouts. “This is how a lesson on equal footing can be taught,” says Taddéi.

But are we being unfair to Saint-Denis? “Saint-Denis isn’t a disadvantaged place,” says George, who was born in Paris 35 years ago after his parents moved there

from Haiti. “It’s just that the people don’t know us. It’s rare that a Parisian comes this far out.”

There are particular streets or individual apartment blocks which are seen as the face of an entire area. However, in Saint-Denis there is a well-off middle class who live there contentedly. Around the large, historic Basilica, for instance. The area has little traffic since only local residents can drive through. A gay couple stroll across the square with a cutely wrapped cake box. A placard advertises a demonstration against evictions and rent increases. At the market there are stalls full of sequined fabrics, hairbands, nail polish, air fresheners, and handbags; vegetable stands with huge mountains of onions, broccoli, and tomatoes. Now, before noon, for the most part women are doing the shopping, many with veils or colourful draped turbans.

Only a few stations along the new tramline, at the La Corneuve stop, the shops are open too. Next to onions and tomatoes, there are also fresh yellow dates, manioc, yams. Behind the stop is a bar, which is full of men drinking coffee or beer. The ground is littered with fallen leaves, cigarette butts, and torn betting tickets.

Even further south, you can see, above the three-storey houses, the silhouettes of apartment blocks of up to 20 or 30 floors. These are the streets people mean when they talk about problematic banlieues. Where unemployment is above the already high 25 per cent of La Corneuve. Where the crime rate is higher than the average for the area, which in turn is above the average of both the department and of France as a whole – whether referring to physical violence, damage to property, or burglary. A feeling sets in: after a burglary here, you would not feel comfortable by night again.

Universities should bring prospects to the suburbs

The bus, which goes from here to the Stade de France, purrs. It is a shiny, new hybrid model. Many people get out, and many more get on so that inside a friendly nod is used to help people to pass their tickets from person to person to have them validated at the machine. Contrastingly, at the Stade de France on this Sunday morning, there is no one around. It was opened in 1998 in Saint-Denis so that some Parisians would come up here to see their team play. From Saint-Denis you can see very little: the area is situated between two motorways and is characterised by modern, somewhat faceless office buildings. The only building which stands out is the Internet boutique Vente Privée which has taken residence in one of the few remaining industrial-era brick warehouses completely renovated with narrow metal staircases outside and pots of bamboo by the walls.

The football stadium is testament to the will of many French politicians who wanted to build important sites and facilities in disadvantaged areas. In 1980 the famous Université VIII Vincennes moved out here. Academics and students were initially against the move. But today it is influential in particular for all its – often leftist – non-conformist publications in the humanities and social sciences. Giles

Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Lacan taught here. Alice Schwarzer and the Slovenian cultural critic Slavoj Žižek studied here. In 2019, a little further south in Aubervilliers, another huge campus for several Parisian universities and Grandes Écoles will be opened. It will be named after the mathematician and philosopher Marquis de Condorçet. In the eighteenth century he promoted the abolition of capital punishment, female suffrage, and equal rights for all “for women, for blacks, for Jews”. But it took a long time before these ideas were heard at all.