First, the problems in France are happening against the backdrop of a global war on Islamic fascism. Call it what you will, a "war on terror" or on "al Qaeda." But the central fact is that we are fighting a global ideology that has the potential take over entire nations (some of them armed with nukes) and great swaths of the globe. The stakes are higher now, and the problem can only be seen in a global, geopolitical context. This was not the case in America in the 1960's. The youths in your cities can connect via the Internet or other media with angry youths throughout the Islamic world.
Second, the American Civil Rights movement was at its core a Christian movement that appealed to the very best in our history. Many whites--even those who were opposed to some of the legislation at the time--acknowledged that we had wronged black Americans. They had been a part of our nation for nearly 200 years--since our very founding. The African American culture was different, to be sure, but it was not entirely alien. White Americans and black Americans knew each other like family. And we were united at the core by our Christian faith. It is no accident that MLK, Jr. and so many of the other great Civil Rights leaders were preachers. In France today, there are no such "blood ties." What means of reconciliation do you have, beyond government jobs and increased welfare benefits? If you think that this was the key to success in our Civil Rights movement, you are missing the bigger picture.
Finally, you leave out some of the more sinister consequences of our response to the civil unrest of the 1960s. I am speaking about the decline of our schools and the ongoing disenfranchisement of black males, among other things. Today, a percentage of black men are either in prison or on parole. Will this also be a part of the French prescription?
Again, I'm not trying to pick on you. I enjoyed your analysis. But the comparison between modern day France and 1960s America strikes me as facile.
Not to mention the destruction of the Black American
families, Planned Parenthoods black genocidal roots,
the culture of thuggery that was fostered by the Left,
the profiteering of the con-men preachers selling
victimhood to black americans over self reliance,
community, and faith...among others...
There is no "global war on Islamic fascism".
Many on the right wish there was, but there isn't.
There is a US-led war in Afghanistan and in Iraq right now. The biggest supporters of terrorism: Iran and Syria, are untouched, and won't be invaded. So, there is a very limited war going on. Americans are consumed with it because of 9/11 and two thousand dead US soldiers, but the rest of the world, and certainly Europe, don't believe that there is a global war going on.
The same was true in the 1960s. The Americans believed there was a global war on Communism. They were, after all, deeply engaged in a losing fight in Vietnam. Europeans acknowledged a potential threat from Russia, but did not consider the world to be at war but at peace.
Within the US black communities in the 1960s, the Southern Black movement was Christian, but the Northern black violence movements were often Islamist. Martin Luther King, Jr., won out (until he was assassinated, of course), but Malcolm X preached a very different message. Black Islam has spread across America since that time and has many, many members.
Also, America's problem with blacks was never viewed by Europeans as a purely internal American family affair. Segregation and racial tension were always viewed, and still are, as fundamental features of the American system. The American Constitution originally sanctioned slavery, and after the emancipation of slaves, American law still very strongly held blacks apart and down. America in this respect properly resembles South Africa, by European estimations, with identical motives in the national character. The primary difference between the two being that the whites vastly outnumbered the blacks in America and were therefore the ones to impose the solution. In South Africa the reverse was the case.
The black movements in the US were part of the general decolonization struggles of the native races of people that took place across the world in the 1960s. Britain and France surrendered political control over the blacks of Africa in their colonies. America's colonized peoples were internal, but the same drive for freedom and political power drove them.
The choice for America was whether it would be a relatively peaceful transition, or a permanent civil war. America opted for a cosmetically peaceful solution. However, the murder rates in America, of which black violence was a very large component, in the 1970s exceeded 40,000 per year, which is to say that America suffered a Vietnam every year in what amounted to a low-grade civil war without organized armies.
The combination of cessions of political power to the blacks in the major cities, enforcing their right to vote, allowing them to hold jobs with white people in half the country, and generating public employment to keep them busy turned a nascent black insurgency - which openly erupted in places like Detroit and Los Angeles in the 1960s - into a disorganized, low level criminality problem.
Some have complained about all of these things, but a good question is: what was the alternative? Were segregation to have been maintained, America would have suffered a Civil War, and the murder rates would not have been 40,000 a year, but in the hundreds of thousands a year. There was no conceivable end to such a war either, short of genocide or complete subjugation. America was engaged in a worldwide competition with the Soviets. Had the US degenerated into civil war at home, the USSR would have triumphed as the international leader. The Americans, I think wisely, chose to buy off the blacks rather than fight a war at home and thereby lose the rest of the world.
What was the alternative to affirmative action? The status quo was riots and very heavy level of violence, which only promised to intensify. America would yield and give substantial benefits to the blacks, or America would slide into further internal disorder and violence. American blacks were neither going to go away, nor be bludgeoned into submission (by any tactics that the rest of America was willing to countenance, at any rate. Charles de Gaulle made a similar call in Algeria when he decided that withdrawal was the only civilized option), nor were they going to give up and stop demanding what they considered their due.
They got it.
There have been many side effects and problems that have arisen from this, but America was not working either with a clean slate or from a position of strength. America had to bargain with the blacks from a position of weakness and division, and the overall results were probably the best that could be hoped for at the time.
In France, the situation is not nearly so dire as that which America faced in the 1960s.
For one thing, Blacks made up some 13% of the US population, and were majorities in many, many cities. American history for centuries had been one of unrelenting oppression of the black race. A century prior, Americans killed Americans, almost a million of them, over the issue of enslavement of the black race. In the USA in the 1960s, significant majorities of people in regions of the country wished to continue the oppression of the black race, and the political struggle was not just between blacks and whites, but also between white liberals and white bigots. This paralleled South Africa rather well, where Dutch South Africans were determined to maintain the blacks in subjugation, while English South Africans desired to see black equal rights.
By contrast, in France there is no history of slavery of Arabs, there was never a civil war over Arabs, and there is no legislation that formally reduces Arabs to second class humans, such as American segregation laws and restrictive covenanting did in America as a formal legal matter. French-born Arabs are French. This is the ideal. The French do not have the terrible baggage of historical national evil towards the Arabs which the Americans have had to contend with when dealing with the blacks.
Now, certainly there are white French bigots. However, this is generally not racial. African immigrants come in two varieties: the blacks and the arabs. French white bigots don't generally hate the blacks, and don't generally object to their presence. Blacks assimilate well into France. The problem with the beurs is that they have not assimilated. Many French people dislike and distrust this: it is an affront to the system and the beliefs of the nation.
But how do you force people to assimilate?
It's a different issue than America faced, and a less deadly one. Race riots and high-tension violence in the 1960s and 1970s cost tens of thousands of lives. In 7 days' riots in Paris, there are only two dead, and it was their accidental deaths that were the proximate cause of the riots in the first place. There is not the willingness to kill on the part of either French whites or French beurs that there was in America among white bigots and black radicals.
What you have, are excluded youth. They are educated well enough: they speak, read and write in French and can compute, but they have very little by way of job prospects.
Teenage boys hanging about in the streets, whether Irish, American, French or Arab is a prescription for trouble. They need employment more than any other single thing.
Also, the separation in France is not so total. In America, in the 1960s, you present it as a family affair. But it was not nearly so familial. Blacks and whites barely had sex with each other, let alone bred with each other. Beurs and blancs in France find each other physically attractive, and a substantial portion of the population has had their beur-blanc "fling". The "enemy" have slept with each other in France, a lot, and will continue to do so. There is also much intermarriage. Many, many French white people, at least in Paris, Lyon and Marseille have a beur in the family somewhere. This is not true of most American whites and blacks.
Perhaps a better comparison is the relationship between American whites and Hispanics. There is not the history of hatred and brutal laws, and each race views the other as being "marriageable" (voir President Bush's brother, the governor of Florida).
In France, beur et blanc are not permanent racial enemies the way American whites and blacks were historically. America had farther to come.
What we see in Clichy sous Bois is immense frustration boiling over into anger. We do not see the desire to kill, on either side. The police are not gunning down the beurs, and the beurs are not bursting into houses and slaughtering les blancs. Those things happened in American race riots, notably Detroit. Not even after seven days "riots" in Clichy.
Things are not as bad as they seem.
Yes, it is true that there is an Internet. But French beurs go on the Internet and play video games (usually at corner internet cafes - there are relatively few home computers among the beurs - and to look at pornography and chat. Beur boys do not curl up their lips in disdain at the "Christian whores" in the way wahabbists and Middle Eastern Arabs do. They want to nail them. This is a different thing. You don't have very much in the way of puritanical morals among French beur youth, and since repressed sexuality and rampant closet homosexuality are a powerful driver behind Islamist violence all across the Muslim world, there is an important dampener on this in France. French beurs may come from Muslim homes, but they live in a society of openly and frankly practiced heterosexuality. Having a sexual outlet releases a great deal of the dammed up tensions that explode into suicidal violence of Arabs in Arab countries.
Now, of course, there are radical islamists, mostly immigrants, who come from North Africa and do their best to try and recruit beurs into the ranks of radicals. This is where the intelligence services come in. Those individuals and those messages are the ones that are particularly repressed. In truth, there is not a great danger that some ayatollah will be able to set himself up in Clichy sous Bois: beur boys are not going to give up sex with girls for the astringent Islamist purity codes.
Some may, of course, be violent hypocrites. But again I observe that there has not been any killing in 7 days of rioting in the banlieu.
In the final analysis, things are not nearly so bad in France as they seem. They could become very bad, but they do not have to. The beurs are frustrated and angry and lashing out, but it is restrained. What do THEY say they want? Jobs. Jobs and respect. (Of course, respect comes from jobs, so if you get them jobs, the "respect" problem will take care of itself.) Creating jobs is not a simple thing, but it can be done.
So, you are right, my comparison of the situation in France with the situation in America in the 1960s was indeed facile. America's problems were much deeper, and longer term, and the contesting parties were far more violent than those which face France today.