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BLACKS IN FRANCE FIGHT EQUALITY BIND

By John Tagliabue
The New York Times
WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 21, 2005

PARIS, FRANCE: The outdoor market in the north of the
city known as Marché Dejean does not feature foie
gras, fine wines or pastries. Instead its carts are
heaped with sweet potatoes, ginger, cassava,
plantains, corn on the cob and mounds of fresh fish,
and many hawking the goods are Africans.

"You see these fabrics? All from Africa, from my
family," said Sissouo Cheickh, as he gestured toward
neat mounds of colorful fabrics inside his shop,
started up six months ago, an a street just off the
market.

Cheickh, 28, got a university degree in France, but
rather than working for someone, decided to start his
own business. Six months ago he scraped together some
money and opened his store.

The open market and the small shops surrounding it
like Cheickh's form the nucleus of the humming
neighborhood of Chateau Rouge, one of a number in the
city inhabited mainly by blacks. The people living and
working in them are among the hundreds of thousands of
non-white immigrants - blacks but also Arabs - that
France has absorbed over the years, mainly from former
colonies in Africa and the Caribbean.

For decades many African countries have sent their
young to work or study in France, a nation that boasts
of itself as the cradle of human rights and a bulwark
against racism, and where the road from Harlem to
Paris was wide, welcoming artists like the singer
Josephine Baker, the musician Sidney Bechet and the
writer James Baldwin.

But French insistence on the equality of man, a
fundamental legacy of the Revolution, leaves the
African immigrants in a bind, by perpetuating the
fiction of a society without minorities, according to
black critics of the French system.

In France, it is not permitted for a census to list
people by race. Nor is it permitted to ask about race
on a job application. Hence while blacks are thought
to number about 1.5 million, of a total population of
59 million, no one knows the exact number, which some
experts estimate to be far higher.

What the French government sees as a color-blind
neutrality, many blacks see as an obstacle to their
social progress. Their alienation was only heightened
this summer when fires in several crowded apartment
buildings in Paris left 48 blacks, mainly children,
dead. In neighborhoods like Chateau Rouge that anger
spills out.

"It could be a coincidence," said Cheickh, bitterly,
"but one question the French have to answer is, of 48
people who died, why were 48 black?"

Corporate offices are virtually bare of blacks, and
blacks are in a political vacuum. No black person sits
in the National Assembly or in a regional Parliament
and only a smattering are found in city councils.
While the European Union finances programs for
minorities, none of them are in France, for its
refusal to recognize minorities. "Such programs are
not wanted for ideological reasons," said Dogad
Dogoui, 41, a native of Ivory Coast and a business and
political consultant. Adding with a note of sarcasm,
"France is the only European country without
minorities." So today, blacks are not much on the
French agenda.

After the recent fires, the interior minister, Nicolas
Sarkozy, proposed enacting a program of positive
discrimination in hiring and requiring anonymous
résumés for job applications. But the remainder of the
cabinet, including the minister for equal opportunity,
Azouz Begag, rejected the idea, saying it offended the
principle of equality.

"The French like to say, blacks are a social problem,
not racial," said Gaston Kelman, 52, a native of
Cameroon who has written widely on France's blacks.
"So our institutions have no means to overcome it."
Until recently, virtually all blacks were on the
lowest rung of the social ladder. Gradually, however,
a younger generation of blacks is starting businesses
and giving birth to a black middle class. They feel
the discrimination in French society and are beginning
to resist.

After graduating with a degree in economics and data
processing, Claude Vuaki tried his hand at several
jobs, before deciding to start his own business.
Together with Kibé, his wife, he opened a beauty salon
in central Paris. Vuaki's search for startup capital
was typical of the black experience. When banks he
contacted turned him down, he and his wife gathered
some family savings and self-financed their shop.
"They said right off, no loan, no money," said Vuaki,
52, describing the banks' refusals.

The business is so successful that they plan a second
shop, in southern France, in Nice or Cannes. His wife,
whom he calls the locomotive of the business, travels
regularly to the United States, to study black
American hairstyles.

Still, Vuaki remains one of a relatively small
minority. Most blacks are employed in menial jobs, in
construction or transportation. What encourages people
like Vuaki is that the glass ceiling often felt by
young blacks who get an education is prompting them to
strike out in business on their own.

"A lot of people I know want to create something of
their own," he said. Favorite activities for small
black businesses, he added, include gardening,
construction and delivery services.

Still, Kelman said, many other young Africans with an
education strike out for Britain, Canada and the
United States, where the chances of starting a
businesses are considered better.

It will probably be a long way before a small black
middle class makes itself felt politically. Few blacks
vote and even fewer take part in politics. "We are not
yet in the places where decisions are made," said
Dogoui, "We are consumers, not decision makers."

Copyright © 2005 The International Herald Tribune |
www.iht.com






Aggo Akyea
http://www.tribalpages.com/tribes/akyea

"Instead of studying how to make it worth men's while to buy my baskets,
I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them."
WALDEN by Henry David Thoreau – 1854

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