Next French revolution: a less colorblind society

"In spirit and behavior I am French, but my skin color is black," says Abdelouaye Juye, a retired woodworker who left Senegal 31 years ago. "How can I be asked to integrate into my own country?

"What do they mean by integration?" he asks, hitching up his gray jellabah, a dress-like garment. "Putting on a jacket and tie? Conforming with everything my neighbor expects? Do all citizens have to be 100 percent conformist?"

"A lot of young people see 'integration' as an insult," adds Alec Hargreaves, an expert in French immigration policy at Florida State University. "They say, 'we've integrated culturally into your norms, but you don't let us participate in your society,' " he explains.

Policy planners are unable, though, to measure the extent to which immigrants' descendants are excluded from jobs, housing, or educational opportunities, and thus are unable to do much about it, because they cannot measure ethnic disparities.

"The last great taboo the French need to face ... the one absolutely critical part of the jigsaw that is still missing," is ethnic monitoring, says Professor Hargreaves. That would allow businesses and government agencies to measure their workforce, or their provision of services, by ethnic category, and thus identify discrimination.

There are signs that this will happen. Equal Opportunities Minister Azouz Begag told FranceInter radio last week that after 25 years of "blah-blahing about integration, without giving ourselves any goals to meet" the government intends to "give ourselves the means, commit money, and evaluate the results."

An advisory board led by former Education Minister Luc Ferry, in a September report to the government, recommended ethnic monitoring, as carried out in Britain and the United States, on a voluntary basis.

In addition to the Diversity Charter of Frances' top companies, other moves are afoot, including the nomination of Mr. Begag, a sociologist born in a Lyon slum to illiterate Algerian parents, to a cabinet job that had never existed before. Still, no members of parliament are of immigrant descent.

One of France's most prestigious elite institutions, the "Sciences Politiques" college, two years ago instituted a special admissions program for young people from the most disadvantaged neighborhoods. The state-owned television channels have committed themselves to "positive action" that has put two black women in anchors' chairs for the first time, and the government last June created the independent HALDE, to which citizens can report cases of discrimination. The organization can demand inquiries on the practices of a particular agency and bring court cases on behalf of citizens.

Another sign of a new approach came last week in the influential daily "Le Monde," where the country's best known sociologist, Alain Touraine, urged a rethink. "Rejection of ethnic separatism must be matched by a recognition of differences," he argued. "France as a society could become a threat to itself unless it manages to combine integration with differences and universalism with individual cultural rights."

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