Inner City/Outer City
by Jesse Burke
December 1998
In America, when we speak of the ghetto we immediately think of the inner city -- Harlem, East L.A. and Compton -- and how to avoid it when traveling from one end of the city to another. Because ghettos are near where we work and live -- because we have to drive through Harlem or its fringes to get to Wall Street if we live in New York City's affluent northern suburbs -- we are always aware of the ghetto, of the crime, the drugs and the gang wars as if they were lurking around the corner, ready to jump at us and steal everything we own.
In France, the ghettos are outside the city. The rich live inside Paris, Lyon, Marseille and Nice, while the poor live their lives in the "cites" (projects) of the banlieues (suburbs). Thus, in Paris you are rarely confronted with ghetto life unless you want to be, and believe me, most Parisians don't want to be. France is, on the whole, very successful at ignoring the problems of its poorer suburbs.
Most of the drugs that make their way into Paris do so via the suburbs, where gangs control the cites. But it is not like Spanish Harlem where a different gang controls every block, or South Central where rival Crip chapters fight and kill for territory. The French cite is more like a business community. The local people are aware that selling drugs may be their area's only substantial source of income (with unemployment as high as fifty per cent in some cites), and all the gangs profit with relatively little violence among them.
They take turns dealing, and buyers rarely encounter a problem when copping, except for some possible hostility from angry kids who see them as Parisians, representatives of an elite, powerful group that is trying to sweep them under the floorboards.
The reason there is relatively little inter-gang friction in the ghettos of France seems to be that people here have a clearer idea of who the enemy is than in the U.S. In France, the enemy clearly is the State and its most brutal representative, the police, who constantly stop minorities and youths for random identity checks and often harass them with racial slurs and aggressive tactics. It is easy to identify the enemy by their laws.
For example, a prominent French rap group, NTM, was jailed recently for saying "Fuck the Police" (in English, mind you) and were banned from playing live until after the trial. Eventually, they were forced to pay a large fine. The different ethnic groups of the cites have learned to cohabit peacefully. You see white, black and Arab hanging out together, perhaps because of the knowledge that they are stuck in a shitty situation together, and hating each other will not help matters.
But that cannot be the only reason, because African-Americans and Latinos are in just as bad a situation in America, but are determined to keep separate. They live in different parts of Harlem, form different gangs and run different rackets.
The real reason can be found in the history of the cite. The cites of the French suburbs were created as a response to the housing shortage after World War II. The rows after rows of big, ugly, grey rectangular buildings, easy and quick to build, were intended at first for French workers. Soon, however, they became havens for the immigrants who had been encouraged to come to France to fill the manpower gap during the economic boom of the 1960s, as more and more French graduated into the middle class.
Portuguese, Spanish, North Africans and others immigrated to France and found cheap housing in the cites, which became cultural melting pots. But with the oil crises in the 1970s, prosperity slowed, unemployment soared, crime and drug use skyrocketed and a feeling of hopelessness grew with every year. Along with the mounting feeling of hopelessness grew ghetto culture -- a global phenomenon.
The culture of the cite comes from its multi-ethnic composition and the global ghetto culture which includes Reggae from the shanty towns of Jamaica, the birth of rap and break dancing in New York City, the NBA, Islam... Little by little, French ghetto culture is getting recognition, with rappers like M.C. Solaar topping the charts, and Mathieu Kassovitz's film "La Haine", a brutally realistic portrait of three kids from the cite -- one Jewish, one black and one beur (French-Arab) -- winning the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.
But this belated recognition of the French ghetto's cultural contribution is nothing compared to the success of Snoop Doggy Dogg, the late Tupac Shakur, Dr. Dre or others who have managed to bring the U.S. ghetto to mainstream America.
Living in Paris sometimes seems like living inside the walls of a museum. The beauty of the city is astounding, but it is old beauty, and the impenetrable layers of bureaucracy and soaring unemployment account for a general stagnation, a feeling that nothing ever gets done here. For all the boasting France does about its culture, there hasn't been anything exceptional on the cultural horizon since the 1960s. Nor does it seem likely that the French will become innovative again anytime soon, given their record of clinging desperately to the past.
This is the attitude that the French ghetto culture wants to shatter -- sometimes stupidly, as when banlieue kids come into the city and pick fights, and sometimes intelligently, as in MC Solaar's witty and progressive lyrics. France should open its eyes to the way the "Anglo-Saxon" countries have invested in ghetto culture. It has brought enormous energy and diversity to American and British society and art.
What do you think of ghetto culture in the U.S. and France? It's a subject that merits more than a bit of thought.
Copyright (c) 1998 Paris New Media, L.L.C...