Anyone could have seen the riots coming.

Anyone who has lived in France, as I have, could have seen these riots coming.

France's approach to its poor is to give them food, clothing, and basic medical care, and then warehouse them in "hlm"s (housing projects) and forget about them. The US experimented with the same approach in the 1960s - when we put up housing projects like the Robert Taylor Homes in Chicago. But we realized just how bad it is to isolate our poor and immigrants in this way, and we made attempts (albeit mostly failed ones) to fix the situation. France never did.

But it's not just this "feed 'em and forget 'em" approach to the poor that led to the riots. It was combined with racism in all aspects of French life. Even wealthy and educated French people often deride "les arabs" (in France an "arab" is any non-aryan immigrant) as dirty, stupid, prone to 'conneries' (mischeif), and in general useless. It's an image strikingly similar to that held by some Americans towards Central and South Americans. But whereas in the US we hire these impovershed immigrants from the South to work on our construction sites, mow our lawns, and clean our houses, the French often don't. There are no laws against discrimination in hiring in France.

The mixture was seasoned by the oft-denied love affair that the French have with things American - McDonalds; Coca Cola; "le weekend;" - and the simultaneous disgust that many of their poor, Muslim immigrants feel towards these things (an extension of their hatred of America).

It was a recipie for disaster. Hopefully Chirac and the French people can open their eyes - similar to the way we did in the US on seeing footage from the Superdome during Katrina's aftermath - and do something to fix the situations.

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