Yet again, France has been rocked by violent protests—this time in response to the police killing, during a traffic stop in a Paris suburb, of a 17-year-old boy named Nahel, reportedly of Algerian descent.
Sociologist Fabien Truong tells Le Monde that those taking to the streets have been “boys of the same age as Nahel, who react in an intimate and violent way for one simple reason: His death could have been theirs. … Every teenager in these neighborhoods has memories of negative altercations and clashes with the police. Repeated, unpleasant identity checks just downstairs from one’s home are humiliating, stressful, and—in the long run—breed a deep resentment.”
Known as lower-income than cities, France’s “suburbs” or “banlieues” carry the opposite connotation as in the US. Calling the unrest an expression of “the rage at being ignored,” The Guardian writes in an editorial: “Many in the banlieues are afraid both for the safety of their children at the hands of police, and of the unrest. They are also concerned about how Marine Le Pen and the far right in general may exploit events.”
At CNN Opinion, Keith Magee writes of France’s complicated relationship with race and racism: “(T)he color of Nahel’s skin … has been almost entirely ignored in the initial barrage of domestic news reports and commentary. … (I)n France, despite a wave of anti-racism protests in 2020 inspired by the murder of George Floyd, the issue of race remains largely taboo. Discussions about race that happen every day in the US rarely occur there, at least in the official discourse. … We may never know for certain whether Nahel’s race was a factor in his killing. But surely, if it is taboo to even ask the question, something is very wrong.”
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