World of Dennis

At the beginning of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s great novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, he describes the Earth as being so young that “things lacked names and it was necessary to point.” Today, however, the world seems very old indeed. Our problems are so familiar and so unsolvable that they play out like a tragic movie that we’ve seen before. The latest example is the riots that have exposed a gaping wound in French and European society.

The riots in France began a few weeks ago when two boys of African descent were electrocuted while apparently being chased by police. To outsiders this would seem like a fairly innocuous event; the police weren’t even directly involved in the killing and didn’t appear to have done anything grossly incorrect. Under the right conditions, however, such small sparks can light enormous fires.

This is exactly what happened. Resentful of their exclusion from French society, portions of France’s minority Muslim and African community took the incident as a call to arms. Their anger at being left out and despised by the ethnic French had finally boiled over. Marginalized politically and economically, their only outlet was violence, and this was the track they took.

One would think that after 6,000 years of settled civilization, human beings would have figured out how to live together despite differences in skin color and religiosity. However, our species has only met mixed success, with the current episode in France showing one of the major failures. All too often, as in France, one group looks at another group and for some reason sees an “other.” Sure there might be internal divisions and differences inside the two groups, but between the two is something which sets them apart. This difference could be fundamental, such as whether you believe in one God or many gods, or it could be trivial, such as “We have lived on this side of the river, you have lived on that one.”

In any event, the two groups use this difference as a reason to divide themselves, and discriminate against each other. They compete with each other in such a brutal manner that both sides are worse off in the end. The resentment between the communities leads to hate, the hate leads to violence and the violence leads to more resentment; the cycle repeats.

This conflict is as hurtful as it is unnecessary. The subdivision and conflict often comes from divisions that are randomly chosen and irrelevant. An ethnic Frenchman and an ethnic Algerian might have many things in common, but because of their place of origin they are considered apart. Palestinians and Israelis could probably live in perfect harmony if they simply woke up tomorrow and forgot the group of which they were a part.

We can all understand that these designations are bad. The question becomes how to effectively deal with the problem. The solution that the French government and many in the American right would propose is to simply ignore these designations and claim that all groups are the same within your country. The French don’t even have a designation that parallels our own “African-American” – all citizens are simply French. The American right would like to eliminate affirmative action programs, claiming that any policy based on race is a wrong one and their existence simply promotes the myth that we are different.

However, as the riots show, we cannot simply ignore the troublesome ethnic, cultural and racial distinctions that have given us so much trouble. This is precisely because they are permanent fixtures in this very old world of ours. Fear of what is different is something which is deeply ingrained in all human societies, and probably has been since the beginning of our species. People will not forget about it, even if it is not talked about.

To fully integrate different societies together, what is needed is not a refusal to believe in prejudices, but an acknowledgement of these prejudices and an honest attempt to solve them. In the United States, this is the preferred method of dealing with issues of race, discrimination and inequality. Of course, many drag their feet in the discussion, and the solution and results are often imperfect, but when it comes down to it, we are far more willing to talk about these differences than the French are.

This is to our great benefit. At the very least, the problems are out in the open and disaffected minorities have a way to vent their rage outside of violence. The discussion also engenders programs like affirmative action to actively help different groups integrate with each other.

This dialogue and the programs that come out of it are usually criticized for breaking up the country into many tiny parts. But the discussion of differences and the development of ways to solve them bring us together. Ignoring those differences leads to the division we see in France.

Dennis Reardon, a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, is a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. He can be reached at dennisr@bu.edu.