Brown

CHAPTER 9 France: Another Paris

Vendors and customers at the fruit-and-vegetable market in Barbès seem particularly frazzled this Wednesday afternoon in June. It’s one day before the start of Ramadan, the Muslim month of fasting, and shoppers have descended on this twice-weekly market with a plan to stock up for thirty days’ worth of culinary excess at the end of each full day of fasting. Veiled Muslim women, more than half the shoppers, stuff their carts with large bags of peppers, okra and eggplant. Men of African descent dominate on the vending side, running back and forth between the stalls and nearby trucks to replenish their stock. Arabic and French flow interchangeably, with the odd English word here and white French person there.

Nestled below the arches of the Barbès-Rochechouart aboveground metro station, the market has acquired two contradictory but ultimately complementary reputations: it’s where migrants from North Africa (the Maghreb) congregate, and therefore it’s a part of Paris that tourists, particularly women, are advised not to visit alone. “Don’t take your wallet with you,” cautioned Emmanuel, my charming Airbnb host, when I asked for directions from his Marais apartment in the centre of Paris. “And don’t go at night,” he added, explaining that pickpockets, gangs and other undesirables operate in the area. But Barbès enjoys a second reputation as a funky, “colourful” intersection where visitors can see the “real” Paris. The usual caveats about vigilance and street smarts apply but are quickly followed with “as you would anywhere in Paris.” (It’s a short stroll away from the tourist trap of Montmartre, but there’s little foot traffic between the two.)

A heavy police presence on the periphery of the market and at the gates and pay barriers of the metro station confirms the first view of Barbès as a dangerous place, while also betraying the heavy-handedness with which such threats are acted upon in public spaces. Like Whitechapel in London, Barbès is a handful of subway stops from the heart of a major European capital, but it might as well be a galaxy away.

Scurrying through the market and then walking more leisurely on the side streets around it, I immediately experience both aspects of Barbès. I get funny looks from two police officers who see me scribbling a few words on my notepad. I’m not carrying any proof of my identity with me, having taken Emmanuel’s advice and left my wallet at home, so I keep walking. Just up the street from the market and at virtually every street corner, I encounter a glut of brown, unshaven and gruff-looking men hustling me to buy cigarettes, mobile phones, fake perfumes, tacky T-shirts. Their tone is sometimes aggressive, certainly persistent, but nothing here scares me or would stop me from visiting again. When I try to engage one of the cigarette sellers in a conversation in English, he simply responds with “En français?” As I don’t speak French, I switch to Arabic to see if that will loosen his tongue, but the change does little to comfort him. He tells me to keep walking.

I don’t know why I assumed that our brown skin and Arabic heritage would create a bonding moment. My life and his couldn’t be more different, and he has thousands, if not millions, of other brown North Africans to chat with if he wants.

Licensed vendors of grilled corn husks and Arabic sweets show relatively more hospitality when I approach with questions in Arabic, but they make their wariness clear. They don’t really like to talk to journalists. “How much do I get paid?” jokes an Algerian-born man in his late twenties who works behind the counter at a fast food eatery specializing in halal grilled chicken. Because he’s “sans papiers,” or without official residency papers, he declines to share his name, but that doesn’t stop him from venting. “Every day, you don’t know if you’ll sleep in your bed or in a prison cell,” he tells me. He has taken up a string of low-paid jobs, mainly in retail or catering, for almost a decade now and sees no sign of getting out of the rut of underemployment. If it weren’t for his two Paris-born children, he would return to Algeria. “The French hate us. Arabs hate us. And I hate them, too,” he says in Arabic, ending his sentence with a cuss word or two. A customer, also of Algerian origin and probably in his seventies, listens in on part of our conversation. He tells the younger man to stop talking (or to stop wasting his breath, if I hear him correctly). I’m asked to buy something or leave. As I’m a vegetarian, I choose the latter.

There’s an unmistakable sense of doom, of futility and of all-round suspicion in the lives of many Muslims of North African origin in France. Over the next few days, I listen to more stories—some have positive notes, but most are bleak—from people with various educational and social backgrounds, and those stories collectively help me grasp what it means to be brown and Muslim in a country that continues to struggle with racial and cultural difference within and outside its borders. In France you can still detect traces of the colonial mindset that began with Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798 and continued with the occupation of Algeria in 1830, among other imperial acquisitions. My visit to Paris took place five months after the January 2015 attacks on the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, which left seventeen dead, and five months before the November 13 coordinated attacks on a concert hall, a sports stadium, and bars and restaurants, which claimed the lives of 130 people. I had assumed that relations between mainstream French society and its largest ethnic and religious minority would be intense, inflamed after the January events. But I didn’t anticipate this level of despair or loathing, which, my contacts in France tell me, only intensified after the November killing spree.

I got a taste of the white French side of the argument from a conversation with Emmanuel, a classical musician who plays the oboe in a local orchestra. I asked him if he would be able to introduce me to any colleagues in the orchestra who happened to be of North African or Muslim heritage. I live in Toronto and always assume that any music or theatre group nowadays includes artists from different ethnicities. Emmanuel’s response shot down that theory. His orchestra doesn’t include a single Muslim or African person. “It’s a European art. How can they understand it?” Muslims cannot comprehend, let alone play, the notes of a classical score. When I pressed him to explain his personal views on Muslims and Arab immigrants in France, it became clear that I’d touched a nerve. He seemed on the verge of tears, his face suddenly ashen and his eyes fixed on a cloud formation to avoid contact with mine. After a few moments of silence, he told me that he didn’t think his English was good enough to engage in this conversation. Instead, he promised to put his thoughts into a letter in French that he’d send me in a few days.

It’ll be a long week in Paris, I thought.

NO ONE KNOWS FOR SURE how many Muslims live in France. The last census in which the government asked respondents to indicate their religion was taken in 1872. The separation of Church and State, written into law in 1905 by the Third Republic, meant that the government had no right to ask people to reveal their faith. Current estimates—and they are just that—of the Muslim population go as low as three million and as high as ten. Most reputable studies within the last decade settled on a middle ground of five million or so. A report from the Brookings Institution suggests that both the extreme right-wing National Front and local Muslim organizations tend to inflate the numbers—the former as scaremongering, the latter to lobby for more funding. It’s safe to say that at least three-quarters of the Muslim population comes from Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia; the remaining quarter comes from as many as 123 different countries, including nations in West Africa and the Middle East. Paris, Marseille and Lyon are home to the majority of Muslims in France.

The first wave came from French Algeria in 1924, when at least a hundred thousand men relocated to France—where they were subjects and not citizens. The first mosque in Paris opened its doors to the community two years later. A second wave of North African migration to France began immediately after the Second World War. The migrants in both waves were homogenous: single male workers taking on manufacturing, mining, construction or sanitation jobs left vacant after the wars. In that, these early Muslim migrants were no different from the millions of brown workers before and since who uprooted themselves to perform jobs that native populations would not do. Only after the colonial wars of independence in the Maghreb, which ended French rule over Algeria in 1962 and the protectorate status of Tunisia and Morocco between 1954 and 1956, did the demographics shift to include families. Residences designed for single workers roughing it on the fringes of cities were retrofitted into family dwellings, with the pursuant problems of overcrowding, noise and poor hygiene.

North Africans joined a long list of people who, over the previous century, had settled in France: Italians, Greeks, Eastern European Jews. Unlike those groups, and despite France’s long political and cultural dominance in the Maghreb, North African immigrants experienced alienation and more than the standard French xenophobia. Their skin colour set them apart physically, and culturally their non-European origin and religion acted as barriers to one of the lofty ideals of the Republic: integration. The low economic status of most early immigrants—as well as stories of a lawless and physically aggressive male population—did little to change public perception of them as undesirables and their religion as distinct, separate.

This separation unfolded on not only an ideological level but, more significantly, a physical one. The history of North African immigrants is one of ghettoization and housing apartheid. As British historian Jim House notes, Algerians in particular were “at the bottom of the queue for social housing, and many local authority agencies openly discriminated against them.” Housed in what in effect were shantytowns outside Paris, Lyon or Marseille, these immigrants countered the social stigma of their living conditions by developing tightly knit communities that provided a system of support but inadvertently accentuated their separate existence. The banlieues—the housing projects that ring big French cities and are largely occupied by black and brown immigrants—may have been materially better, but they continue to be thought of by native and immigrant French alike as symbolic of urban alienation and violence. A youth riot that rocked Paris in 2005—and a relatively smaller one in 2007—originated in the banlieues and fed off residents’ sense of social injustice and neglect. The riot’s racialized, Arab roots can be gleaned from the media’s shorthand for it: the French Intifada. International reporters who descended on the banlieues to learn more about the two brothers responsible for the Charlie Hebdo attacks often described them as living a “parallel existence” from the rest of the country. The most startling description of the banlieues appears in Andrew Hussey’s history of the “long war” between France and its Arabs, also called The French Intifada: “For all their modernity, these urban spaces are designed almost like vast prison camps. The banlieue is the most literal representation of ‘otherness’—the otherness of exclusion, of the repressed, of the fearful and despised.”

Nearly a century after that first wave of North African migrants, questions of integration and cultural incompatibility dog a community that has grown by the millions—thanks, in part, to family reunification laws, a higher birth rate and an insatiable need for cheap labour in France during the economic boom of the late 1940s to the early 1970s, or what historians refer to as the country’s Glorious Thirty Years. When the oil crisis of 1973 led to a worldwide recession that hit France’s economy hard, the presence of the North African community, once an inevitable consequence of French imperialist expansion, turned into a localized problem. Brown immigrants were welcomed (or at least tolerated) until the first sign of financial trouble, when they became a burden. Like South Asians in the United Kingdom, children of another empire, North Africans in France faced discrimination for their cultural incompatibility and not necessarily for their skin colour, religion or ethnicity. (Immigrants from the region included Jews and Algerian Berbers who didn’t identify as Arabs or Muslims.) What these immigrants ate, what they drank (or didn’t drink), what they wore and how they treated women—all were (and still are) stumbling blocks on the road to integration.

For many commentators, the focus on cultural difference serves as a distraction from the larger economic and social toll of marginalization. Unemployment for brown and black citizens in France sits at 20 percent, double the national average. The Muslim population in French prisons, which studies put at 50 to 80 percent, is staggeringly out of proportion with the general demographics. While this may reflect limited opportunities for North African youth in particular, it also suggests a systemic bias within the judiciary. According to one study, “Crimes involving young Muslims are prosecuted more vigorously than those of their peers.” The legal system, social justice activists believe, focuses its energy on youth of non-French origins.

The transformation from immigrant other to Muslim other began in subtle, slow measures in the 1980s but gained speed and turned confrontational in the 1990s. The uptick coincides with the civil war in Algeria, which began in 1992 and lasted throughout the decade, forcing thousands of Muslim—and perhaps even Islamist—refugees and immigrants to settle in France. The 9/11 attacks in the US helped propel what was up until then a series of provocations and counter-provocations between the state and its Muslim minorities into a full-scale cultural war. In 2004, citing the Laïcité principles (which ensure the neutral role of the state in matters of religion), the government of Jacques Chirac passed a law that would ban all religious symbols in schools. Despite language that included the cultural insignia of all major religions, the law was understood as an attempt to stem the tide of Islamic religiosity. Advocates believed the law would uphold the principles of secularism and send a strong message about an intolerant version of Islam that discriminates against women. Critics pointed out the law’s potential to inflame the militant tendencies of a younger generation of Muslims, increasing their sense of alienation, and argued for flexibility (modernization) of the century-old Laïcité laws. A cultural war and a war of cultures beckoned.

Even kebab has become a battleground in this war. The grilled meat sandwich, which entered French cuisine through its Muslim Turkish population in the 1990s, has become a ¤1.5 billion industry, with as many as three hundred million sandwiches served at an estimated ten thousand (and rising) outlets. In the 2014 French municipal elections, candidates from the far-right National Front campaigned against what one politician called the “kebabization of France.” In certain segments in French society, the popularity of kebab tapped into anxieties about Muslim culture: halal meat served by swarthy, low-paid immigrants in what some claimed were unhygienic conditions. In a heavily syndicated Reuters story by reporter Alexandria Sage in 2014, the owner of France’s first chain of kebab houses summed up the underlying emotional tenor of the war on kebab: “We’re not asking anyone to sing the praises of kebabs or to make kebabs a French dish, as we know that will never happen. . . . But it’s just like the image France has today with its own immigrants. . . . They bring a richness to France and yet France doesn’t embrace that.”

The Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France (CCIF) was set up in 2003 to document transitions and disruptions in society’s views toward Muslims, and to offer support and legal advice to those affected by them. It’s a small but highly effective organization operating out of a nondescript office behind a printing house in the city of Saint-Ouen, outside Paris.

Because of the sensitivity of its business—read: to avoid getting attacked or torched by right-wing extremists—the CCIF doesn’t share its address with people it doesn’t know well. When its spokesperson, Yasser Louati, invites me to visit the office and talk to staff, he asks me to call him when I exit the metro station so he can meet me there. We walk together to the office, which I may have had a hard time finding even with an address and a map. I get a glimpse of the CCIF’s paranoia from the first image I see inside its doors: a painting of a shooting target superimposed on a veiled woman. A more nuanced poster for an ad campaign by CCIF reproduces a famous painting from the French Revolution but reimagines the models as Muslims, immigrants and other underprivileged groups. The caption translates to “We (too) are the nation.” Yasser tells me that the Paris metro authority banned the poster because it considered it religious in tone. By and large, French officials have not embraced the CCIF, which has repeatedly stated that most of the discrimination cases it tracks—up to 66 percent in the first half of 2015—have been carried out by government agencies (housing, education, security and policing).

Yasser, thirty-five, embodies the many challenges facing younger Muslim men in France. The son of Tunisian parents who have lived in France since the 1960s, he trained as a pilot in the United States and worked for almost a decade in the Gulf for commercial and private airlines. In 2011, after the financial crisis clipped the wings of the private aviation sector, he returned to his hometown of Paris and a brutal unemployment reality. Despite his ten years as a pilot, he couldn’t secure a job in aviation. Instead, the father of two made ends meet by working the night shift in a three-star hotel in downtown Paris, abandoning an earlier dream of starting an MBA. “Either I am overqualified or my resumé is too atypical,” he says, looking back at his years of job hunting. A work history largely in the Muslim world didn’t help either.

But it looks like the former pilot has found his true calling with this new job as the CCIF’s public face. It suits his personality as a big mouth. He recalls his mother, fearful of the attention he was drawing to the family, warning him to stop arguing with other students and teachers at school about Muslim issues. His parents were typical of early Arab immigrants who kept themselves to themselves. “My parents lived with fear. . . . They always had a fear toward authority—whatever was said to them was true.” They also didn’t identify as Muslims but took pride in their Arabic heritage, sending ten-year-old Yasser back to Tunisia for a few years to learn his native language and culture. Their motives were strictly nationalist and not religious, but things didn’t play out that way. When Yasser was about sixteen and back in Paris, in 1995, he began to pray in his school. At first, he was the only one. Not long after, friends of North African origin began to follow his example. “As the years went by, people my age started to return to their Muslim identity,” he explains. French society showed hostility to these young people, and they in turn were hostile to it. Religion became the ammunition each side used in this war.

Elsa Ray, a white Frenchwoman, converted to Islam in her twenties and began working with the CCIF not long after it was set up. Her veil and loose-fitting clothes, which adhere to Muslim notions of female modesty, trump her white skin when it comes to being on the receiving end of racial harassment on the streets or in dealings with local authorities. Her experience, like that of many converts, confirms the hypothesis that the new discrimination in France targets Muslims for being identifiably Muslim. Symbols of Muslim identity have a way of projecting a darker hue onto her skin, to the point where she receives ethnic-specific taunts. It’s no wonder that women—because of the veil or niqab, or perhaps because they’re seen as weak or helpless—were the targets of about 73 percent of the Islamophobia incidents recorded by the CCIF in the first half of 2015. In the life of a French Muslim woman, Elsa tells me, there are “many chances” to face discrimination. “When she’s going to high school or university. As a wife, mother, worker. When she plays sports or if she wants to go the cinema, she can experience racism.”

Elsa’s list is drawn not from theoretical possibilities but from actual data the CCIF has collected over the years. In one case that the CCIF took up, a gym denied membership to a Muslim woman because she wore a veil. The gym owners backtracked when they were threatened with a lawsuit. Several schools up and down the country have sent female students home or suspended them for wearing veils or (as I’ll explain later) long skirts that cover their legs. A supermarket refused to rehire a checkout clerk who returned to work after a maternity leave with her hair covered.

Most of these cases involved younger members of the Muslim community, who, Elsa argues, refused to repeat the mistakes of their parents. “After [decades], the kids born in France realized that being invisible is not the solution to integrate to society. . . . One explanation for [rediscovery of Islam] is as a way to confirm their identity.” They’re French but they’re also Muslim, the thinking goes.

Racism has evolved as well. In the past, many French displayed a xenophobia and a “post-colonial state of mind” that claimed to know what was best for everyone. Nowadays racial anxieties have shifted to one religious and ethnic group: Muslim North Africans. This is not an Arab or ethnic thing. Lebanese and Syrian immigrants in France tend to be lighter in skin and more middle class, and they include a larger proportion of Christians. They hardly factor in the anti-immigration rhetoric of far-right groups or pro-integration hardliners. In fact, politicians often hold them up as the model of Arab immigration (just as they single out North Africans as a problem population). The world of immigrants is not complete until it’s divided into the good brown people and the bad brown people.

AFTER MORE THAN A decade as a career diplomat, working in French embassies and consulates in Yemen, Korea and Spain, Samira returned to Paris with the hope of finding a job that draws on her extensive experience in media and international relations. The thirty-something Lyon-born woman of Algerian descent also wanted to get married and start a family—something she achieved shortly after returning to France, when she met her husband, Hisham, on her way to a job interview. She asked him for directions, he gave her his phone number and the rest is history (or rom-com meet-cute fodder). But finding love in Paris proved much, much easier than finding work.

Despite submitting application after application, Samira rarely received more than a short email message or a cryptic voicemail to the effect that her resumé didn’t meet the job description. She often got no response of any kind, even when, in her opinion, her qualifications seemed like a perfect fit. Something doesn’t add up here, she thought. So as an experiment, she sent out two resumés with the next job application: one with her own name and the other with a very French-sounding name, Mathilde. (Samira asked me not to reveal her last name or that of her resumé doppelgänger. Whitefacing is something she’s not proud of.) She used her landline number for one and her mobile for the other. Within a week of applying to a Paris-based media company looking for a spokesperson, Samira received a call on her mobile from a woman asking to speak to Mathilde.

“It took me a second to process her request,” says Samira during a Ramadan iftar (the meal that breaks the fast) at the apartment she shares with her husband and one-year-old son in the suburb of Montfermeil, about eighteen kilometres from the heart of Paris. The human resources person on the other end of the line told Samira that Mathilde’s work history had left such a strong impression that she wanted to conduct a pre-interview on the spot and possibly invite her for an in-person chat the following week. Samira agreed to the interview, which focused on her previous work experience and ideas for the new job. A degree in political science and her experience in the diplomatic core had taught her to handle any situation with classic grace under pressure. By the time the phone call ended, Samira—or Mathilde—had been invited for that second interview. To extricate herself from this awkward and potentially illegal situation, Samira called the HR person a day before the scheduled interview to tell her that she had accepted another position. She sent no more resumés with Mathilde’s name—there was no need to do so.

Whatever point Samira needed to get across, to herself at least, had been made. Job applicants with non-French-sounding names face discrimination that goes beyond the “so many applicants, not enough jobs” explanation. Studies back up Samira’s resumé experiment, suggesting that those with Muslim-sounding names—regardless of their ethnic origin—are more likely to be passed over by employers. In a preview article of their upcoming book, Why Muslim Integration Fails in Christian-Heritage Societies, Claire Adida, David Laitin and Marie-Anne Valfort conducted a similar experiment, sending out two nearly identical resumés on behalf of people from the Senegalese community, which includes both Muslim and Christian members. Muslim candidates were 2.5 times less likely to get an interview than their Christian counterparts.

When Samira, as Samira, eventually landed a job interview at a TV station, her interviewer asked her to show papers that proved her French citizenship—despite the fact that her resumé listed her all-French education and included a history of representing the country in diplomatic missions around the globe. “I remember thinking, This is not happening to me. It’s become a joke.” She thought that while she was working abroad, a law had been passed requiring candidates to show proof of residency during job interviews. Somehow, the woman interviewing Samira still thought of her as illegal because of her name and skin colour.

Samira didn’t get that job—or another one at a community radio station. She now believes it’s impossible to get work in Paris if she wants to keep her Arab identity and religion. Her friends advise her to play the game: hang out at restaurants and social events where she can network with potential employers over a drink, but she says that she “can’t fit into those kinds of situations.” To make ends meet, she has accepted work as an office cleaner. I’m so surprised at this twist that I ask her to repeat herself in case I’ve misheard her. “A cleaner. Emptying the trash,” she tells me with a note of defiance.

My normal reaction to a dinner conversation that gets to this point is to reach for my glass of wine. But this is a strictly Muslim household and no alcohol is permitted. Before we sat down to eat, Hisham (Samira’s husband) and Elias, a law student friend of the family, had completed the fourth of the five daily prayers that Muslims are required to perform. It was just past ten in the evening and everyone in the apartment, except me and the toddler, had been fasting all day. All were between twenty-five and thirty-five, and their adherence to Islamic rituals started as part of the rebellion against both their parents and French society at large that Yasser and Elsa from the CCIF had talked about.

“Our parents told us to be quiet,” Samira explains as the two other men in the room nod in agreement. “This is how we’ve been raised—seeing our parents humiliated and seeing our parents seeing us humiliated and telling us not to talk about it.” Hisham describes the humiliation of his parents’ generation as a trauma. “If you talk to anyone—Tunisian, Algerian, Moroccan—it’s the same,” he says. “Parents telling us, ‘Please don’t say anything.’” Earlier generations of North African immigrants tried to deal with racism by not showing signs of their ethnicity or religion. Very few women wore the veil or any other traditional items of clothing, while men avoided political discussions and gatherings. But their children and grandchildren face a new kind of discrimination, in which a volatile mix of race, religion and culture sets them apart from society and brings them into nasty confrontations with the police and the judicial system.

Elias, who grew up in the coastal town of Marseille to working-class Moroccan parents, has experienced a series of such confrontations with the police. As a teen he would get stopped routinely when he used a jet ski on the Mediterranean, with police officers assuming it was stolen and adding insult to suspicion by telling him that he looked like someone who eats too much shourba (Moroccan soup). After a football game one evening about six years ago, Elias found his car blocked in by two police officers sitting idly in their cruiser. When he asked one of them—politely but firmly, he insists—to move so he could get out, the situation escalated within minutes. In front of multiple witnesses, one of the officers hit Elias in the face. Eventually, he moved his car just enough to make it possible for Elias to get out. Elias knew that were he even to brush against the cruiser, he could be arrested for damaging police property. Somehow he managed to squeeze out and drove home. He didn’t report the incident. “Even if you report it, nothing is done. When an Arab speaks, his word is worthless for the police.”

Instead of giving up on life in France or following some of his hometown friends in joining ISIS or rebel groups fighting Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria, Elias focused on his law studies. He’s currently preparing for his bar exam in Paris and plans to specialize in discrimination and penal law. But even this transition from perceived lawbreaker to law practitioner came with its own racial overtones. When he was articling for a Paris-based law firm and accompanying senior members to court appearances, he would often find himself blocked from entering areas where other lawyers prepared for trials or met with clients. Court officers assumed he was the accused or a gang member. “Even if you’re doing something with your life, they [French society] put obstacles.”

As I listen to Elias and Samira, one thought comes to mind: Why don’t they leave France and perhaps come to Canada, or go somewhere in Europe where their ethnicity doesn’t carry the same baggage? “We are French,” Samira shouts back from the kitchen when she hears my question. “They have to accept us. We’re not fleeing. If we leave, that means they’re right. I want to make them accept us.” While she says she hopes things will get better for her son’s generation, at the moment she’s not optimistic. “It’s getting worse.” You don’t need to be a mind reader to guess that she’s referring to the post–Charlie Hebdo atmosphere.

Everyone at the dinner table agrees that the attack was a horrific crime that portrayed the entire Muslim community in France in the worst possible light. But they also believe it gave the French licence to say that they don’t like Muslims in their midst and get away with it. Samira remembers crying uncontrollably when the news broke and wishing she could get away from France for a while. In the days after the attacks, she paid her respects to the family of Ahmed Merabet, the Arab police officer who was killed as he responded to the gunshots. (This is the Ahmed in the hashtag #jesuisAhmed, which trended on Twitter as an alternative to the more universal #jesuischarlie.) “He was a really good guy,” says Samira. “When you enter his mom’s house, it’s like you’ve entered your grandmother’s.” What irked her, though, was a comment from former president Nicolas Sarkozy, who wondered why the women in the officer’s family wore veils for a public ceremony. “Instead of saying [Merabet] gave his life for his country, [Sarkozy] focused on what his mother was wearing. This is Islamophobia.” Samira says that the secretary of ecology was the only official government representative at Merabet’s funeral. Even members of the police union and politicians from the officer’s home municipality were outraged by this slight. “He died in his uniform. What more can he do? He died in his uniform. He died a hero,” continues Samira, holding back tears. “He died for nothing. Muslim life here is like black life [in the US]. It’s worth nothing.”

It’s almost 2 a.m. and Elias offers to drive me home. I’m extremely grateful, as I’m not entirely sure I can get back to my apartment in the Marais at this hour by public transport. He and I chat in the car about his experiences growing up in Marseille, and I hear more horror stories. But I don’t need to delve into his past to get a taste of his present life, with its fears of police brutality and discrimination. As we leave the quiet streets of Montfermeil and head toward the highway that will take us back to central Paris, we hear a siren. Elias becomes nervous, thinking that a police car is following him. He pulls aside and starts looking for his papers. When it turns out to be an ambulance, he keeps driving. Internalizing suspicion has become a daily routine for brown youth in France.

When I contacted Samira the morning after the November 13 attacks at the Bataclan concert hall and other venues, she told me that everything had changed again. “You should see Paris. It’s like everyone is mourning. Everyone [is] looking and suspecting everyone. It’s just awful.” Her resolve to stick it out in Paris after the Charlie Hebdo attacks seemed much weakened now, especially as the mother of a baby boy. Who wants to raise a child in a country where his faith and brown skin would be associated with the worst terror attack, to date, in its history?

SAMIRA’S ASSERTION THAT Muslims in France have much in common with black Americans danced in my head as I got off at the Père Lachaise metro stop the next day. I was there to witness a demonstration against the acquittal of a police officer who shot dead an unarmed black youth named Lamine Dieng in 2007. “Ferguson, Detroit, Baltimore . . . Et aussi [and also] Paris en France,” read one of the leaflets distributed before the march. Scheduled for a Saturday afternoon, the demonstration started outside 58, rue des Amandiers, where Dieng was gunned down. The murder (and the march) took place in a working-class and migrant-heavy residential area with numerous businesses catering to African and Muslim people: Islamic burial, halal meat, women-only hairdressers. One of the protest’s sponsors was the Coalition Against Racial Profiling, whose public face, Sihame Assbague, has emerged as a trenchant critic of institutional and societal Islamophobia.

Sihame grabbed worldwide attention in April 2015 when she started the hashtag #jeportemajupecommejeveux (I wear my skirt as I please). It was a response to a headteacher in the northern French town of Charleville-Mézières who sent home a fifteen-year-old Muslim student for wearing a long black skirt. The skirt, the teacher believed, revealed the girl’s religious affiliation, thereby violating the country’s secularity laws.

When Sihame woke up to the news, she thought, “First they came after the head scarf and now the skirt?” She searched the Internet to find photographs of white women sporting similar outfits. Within minutes she found images of two female government ministers and an actress, and in a tweet, she asked the teacher to explain why the student was singled out for wearing such a fashionable item. International news agencies picked up the story after the hashtag went viral, and some ran posts featuring other women in long skirts, including the character Elsa from the animated feature Frozen.

As a report in the Guardian noted, the region’s education officer considered the skirt a “provocation” on the student’s part, an attempt to bring her faith into a secular space. Even the New York Times weighed in on the incident with an editorial that ended with a harsh message to French society: “The principle of laïcité originally arose in the struggle against the dominant role of the Roman Catholic Church, but that battle was decisively won a long time ago. No religion poses a serious challenge today to secular rule in France, and to invoke so lofty a principle against a girl wearing a long skirt only makes a mockery of it.”

I catch up with Sihame and about one hundred demonstrators at the twentieth arrondissemont amid chants of “Justice pour Lamine” and “Vérité [truth] pour Lamine.” Sihame believes brown and black French citizens must work together, since both often find themselves the target of racial profiling or heavy-handed (to put it mildly, given the circumstances of Lamine’s death) police tactics. However, she agrees that French people of Muslim and North African descent like her—her parents hail from Morocco, but she was born and raised in Paris—face the added stigma of their religious identity and integration issues.

Our conversation takes place as we walk alongside other protestors. The mood is surprisingly celebratory, and the real interruptions come from friends saying hello to Sihame. I get a sense that I’m walking with a community of professional protestors, or at least people who have done this so many times that they’ve mastered the art of the political demonstration. Aside from one argument between two activists and a motorcyclist who tried to cut across the pedestrian-only demo route, the protest is peaceful. Police officers in plain clothes direct traffic onto alternative routes. As I scan the crowd, I see an overwhelmingly large number of bearded men and veiled women, all in their twenties and thirties. I casually remark to Sihame that I’m not surprised so many young Muslims in France are “retreating” to religion in order to escape the harsh realities of life. I have barely finished my sentence when she darts a glance my way, as if to say, “I can’t believe you, too, have bought into this narrative.”

“It’s an insult to think that people choose their religion because of the weakness of the state,” she cautions me. “That doesn’t respect the choices of people. If I choose to come back to Islam, it’s because I believe in Islamic values.” In fact, it was Sihame who, when she was fourteen or fifteen, insisted that her family buy only halal meat. Up until then, her mother, a house cleaner, bought whatever meat she could find in the supermarket nearest to their apartment building. Sihame did some research and found a butcher not that far away, and from that point on the family bought only halal meat. At around the same time, Sihame’s history teacher began to make disparaging comments about Muslims, and she found she couldn’t defend her faith because she didn’t know much about it. Her parents, like many of their contemporaries, considered themselves largely secular. (Her father came to France in 1972 to work on the railways and married her mother in 1984.) Sihame began to read the Koran and educate herself on Islam, and she ultimately found a sense of belonging and comfort in its teachings. She admits that her parents at first expressed concern for this newfound religiosity, but they have since come on board.

Like Samira and Elias, Sihame is forging an identity for herself—and her generation—as both Muslim and French. She doesn’t buy into the dichotomy that even some Muslim public figures have advocated: to be truly French, Muslims must relax their faith and sign on to the secularity model. Or the idea that to be Muslim, a woman must cover her hair and act submissive. Sihame doesn’t wear the veil but understands why some women choose to put it on—to take control of their own bodies, to give themselves a say in a society that otherwise limits their right to choose how to present themselves.

I’m not sure I agree, so I change the subject and tell Sihame about my experience in Barbès, where several Muslim business owners declined to talk to me, and about a failed attempt to engage a group of Muslim students at the Institut du monde arabe. “They’re afraid they’ll get profiled for something they tell you,” she explains. One of her friends chimes in: “I don’t believe free speech exists. You can say whatever you want, but there are consequences.” Sihame believes that the Charlie Hebdo attack led to an “explosion” in Islamophobia. “It became completely natural.” This wave of Islamophobia has swept across other immigrants from South Asia, including Sri Lankan and Indian newcomers who are assumed to be Muslims until proven otherwise. While they’re less targeted than North Africans, they’re not as organized and therefore tend not to document their encounters with racism. It’s this expansion in the scope and vocabulary of racism that keeps Sihame marching in the streets on a Saturday that she could have spent at home with her husband and first-born.

“The struggle is vital. It’s a matter of life and death,” she tells me. “We need to do this for the next generation. We have no choice.”

THREE DAYS BEFORE I leave Paris, I receive an email from Emmanuel while I’m having lunch at a café near the Gare du Nord. Emmanuel says I can find the letter he promised when we first talked if I look under the mat outside his apartment. Six weeks after my return from Paris, my friend Antony, a French immersion teacher in Toronto, translates it for me, and with Emmanuel’s permission, I include it below with only one paragraph (related to the issue of gay marriage) deleted. I had expected a rant about Muslim violence and incompatibility with European values, but instead the letter placed the blame for the current cultural impasse on the French majority. It didn’t offer solutions or even hint at a reconciliation. Instead, its note of resignation echoed what, I suspect, many moderate French people feel about the Muslims in their midst and the politicians who use them as an election issue.

You had asked me what the French thought of the Muslim community and what my thoughts were about the subject.

Paris is a left-wing city (politically socialist), as is France. The French believe themselves to be “open” politically, socially, culturally and religiously. But this is false and superficial. Even our political leaders do not believe what they say and what they recommend.

Fundamentally, historically, we the French are right-wing, but without honest and competent leaders, we have elected a left-wing man [Hollande], one who speaks of tolerance and integration but one who is incapable of putting his words into action.

Laws have been created to punish anyone punitively (or financially) who is xenophobic or homophobic. However, what is the reality? People say they follow these laws; however, their actions speak otherwise.

Historically, the French do not have any consciousness of this:

• The Crusades, where the Catholic kings set out to conquer the world, in order to destroy the Muslim world.

• The Inquisition, when in the name of religion we burned all heretics! (It is understood that we burned anyone who did not conform to social norms, anyone who was different.) A ton of innocents were sacrificed.

• Later: colonialism. For example, in 1962, Algeria became independent, but France had used up all of its riches and petrol for many years.

Later, France was happy to have North African Muslims “work” in coal mines in northern France (cheap labour, completely exploited). In short, this use of man by man gives the impression that “slavery” has not disappeared. This is why we can understand protests and revolts. . . .

France continues, due to its pride, to believe that it is a strong country, powerful and dominant. It is thus becoming the prey of a radical Islam. The security of the country has become a major stake for our political leaders; the subject of terrorism supplants all others (social issues, unemployment, and loss of purchasing power). . . . It’s ultimately a bonus for our political leaders to maintain this daily fear. And the best way to control Islam is to control all of the Muslim world: no Muslim man will ever have access to the key ring of our state.

No one will admit to this, but it’s a fact: the Muslim person sweeps, picks up the trash, fixes cars—and the luckiest of them all can teach Science.

It’s all an illusion and appearance!