"I am referring to the native born American black in the worst ghetto, the one for whom there is no injection of immigrant drive, the one who is completely the product of America, for many generations. The black in the projects in the worst city, versus the dwellers of the HLM in the worst banlieux of Paris. Native blood and system input compared with native blood and system input."
The French media always portrays America in the worst possible light, and most French people are totally brainwashed.
Where are the articles and news shows about the ever growing, ever more prosperous, and ever more REPUBLICAN, I might add, Black middle class?
Have you watched American TV lately. The spokespeople for the GOP? Even for the Dems?
Al Shady Sharpton and Jesse Jackson and their racially devisive hate politica are no longer role models for black young people.
Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Harold Ford,Jr, JC Watts, Barack Obama are. This is a new world Monsieur le Vicomte. The world you are speaking of is long gone.
"The French media always portrays America in the worst possible light, and most French people are totally brainwashed.
Where are the articles and news shows about the ever growing, ever more prosperous, and ever more REPUBLICAN, I might add, Black middle class?"
My comment had nothing to do with the French media.
There is no dispute that there is a black middle class in America, and in France.
My focus was on the worst neighborhoods in America and France, a comparison of the bottom of the bottom. It is there that the difference between the French and American approach to social solidarity is plainest.
Do you dispute that there are terribly ghettos in large American cities?
You seem to be arguing that there are not, and that the projects of Detroit of Washington D.C. are not really bad at all - indeed, to think that they are is to have succumbed to "French media propaganda".
I have been in these places, and they seem terrible to ME. That is not propaganda from Antenne 2 or anyone else.
When I compare with my own eyes the worst of the worst in both places, America's bottom is terrible and terrifying.
France is willing to spend more money so that its bottom is not like that. And it is not.
Please, there is no point in yet another reiteration of "America is great and France is a cesspool". America IS a great country: who can dispute that? France is not a cesspool, or people would leave it and not immigrate to it or make it the primary tourist destination in Europe.
I have been focusing on a structural issue, and the place where the difference between France and America, where France's system pays off, is at the very bottom rung of the socio-economic ladder. This comes at a tradeoff elsewhere in the society. America's system also has made tradeoffs. Nationalism seems to get in the way of frankly admitting these things and comparing the results.
Detroit and Cabrini Green and South Central Los Angeles do not go away simply because one talks about the rising black middle class. And they are not going away in the actual social world either. Americans are willing for those places to be like that, because to make them markedly better - to make them like tough blue collar working class neighborhoods - would cost far more money than Americans are willing to spend on that segment of society. That is the truth of it.
France spends the money on that segment, with the result that the bottom French neighborhoods are like other tough working class neighborhoods, but are not as bad as the worst ghettos of America.
The political process determines why each of those societies has chosen a different path, and there are good and bad points of either way.
It is not realistic to pretend that the French system has no good points and that the American has no bad. This is objectively untrue, and anyone who has travelled both countries experiences that directly.