Opinion | French cities are in flames over systemic racism

French police discharge their weapons and kill civilians at a fraction of the rate their U.S. counterparts do, and many people in France tend to regard violence and racism by law enforcement as mainly American problems. Many White people in France, that is.

Among migrants and their children, most of them from North and sub-Saharan Africa, hard feelings toward law enforcement have run deep for years, and many regard police bigotry as a symptom of bias in French society generally.

In a recent survey of Black and mixed-race residents of France, 9 in 10 said they had encountered racial discrimination, and roughly half said they had been stopped and asked for their identification — more than twice the share of the overall population who reported the same thing. In the first months of the pandemic lockdown, a survey by Reuters found that in France’s five departments with the greatest percentage of immigrants, police issued fines at a rate more than 50 percent higher than elsewhere in the country.

Such routine racial profiling is a quotidian reality for millions of residents who, even if they were born in France or have lived here for decades, often are made to feel not fully French. For years, researchers have documented discrimination in hiring and schools and on the streets.

That was the social kindling lit by the death of Nahel on Tuesday, which ignited riots in and around Paris, Marseille and other major cities. France has been set ablaze — cars incinerated, buildings torched, incendiary devices hurled at police in riot gear. Shops and stores have been looted, ATMs demolished, windows smashed. In the first three days of violence, nearly 1,000 people were arrested and at least 200 police officers injured. On Friday, Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin said 45,000 police would be deployed to quell the riots around the country.

President Emmanuel Macron cut short a trip to Brussels and returned to Paris to address the convulsions on Thursday. Facing calls that he declare a state of emergency — which would trigger curfews and allow authorities to ban protests — he tried to strike a balance between insisting on a return to order and expressing indignation at what he called Nahel’s unjustified death.

But as Macron surely knows, he has been forced to address symptoms, not causes, of France’s inequity — schisms with roots in the country’s colonial past that have been papered over for decades by a policy of official colorblindness untethered to real people’s lives. Under French law, data collection on race and ethnicity is strictly limited, meaning the government — which, for instance, publishes no information on the racial or ethnic composition of its police — operates in a state of self-imposed ignorance and denial.

For minority residents of France, however, the absence of data is irrelevant. Their lived reality is evidence of actual bias — even if Macron has previously asserted there is no systemic racism in the police.

“This is a moment for the country to seriously address the deep issues of racism and discrimination in law enforcement,” U.N. human rights office spokeswoman Ravina Shamdasani told a media briefing in Geneva.

Similarly anodyne calls for France to grapple with those dilemmas are all too familiar. They were issued with numbing regularity even before the resentments of the country’s migrant communities exploded into weeks of anarchy in 2005, after two teenagers were electrocuted inside an electrical substation where they had fled following a confrontation with police. It didn’t help that the interior minister at the time — Nicolas Sarkozy, who later became president — referred to the rioters, many of them from migrant families, as “gangrene” and “rabble.”

In that instance, the government declared a state of emergency to contain the crisis after nearly two weeks of running street battles between rioters and police, often set against a tableau of flaming cars. The emergency lasted two months, enabling the authorities to impose curfews and regain control of the streets.

Yet despite the ensuing years of reforms, including programs targeted at the cities and neighborhoods that burned in 2005, the problems still fester. And the police remain reviled by communities they are duty-bound to protect.