Affirmative action in France, cont.

Concerning my blog entry on how equality of all citizens under the law may be transformed, even in France, into substantive group equality of results, a reader provides a useful historical perspective:

Your article suggests why France has taken so long to put down the low-IQ immigrant worker revolt: to soften up the French people for affirmative action.

If the French people can be convinced (1) that they are evil racists, (2) that the Arabs are worthy of fear and (3) that Arabs are not going to take it any longer, then the French people can be persuaded to accept affirmative action.

I figure the dithering over the last two weeks has been to prepare the French people for this sea change in French ideology.

And it is a sea change. Affirmative action is a complete betrayal of the procedural equality for which France stands. Sarkozy’s words are the first formal governmental recognition that natural assimilation cannot and will not work. They are also the first governmental recognition that loot is going to have to be divvied up by ethnic groups, with some ethnic groups paying more to support others.

Compare this with the Napoleonic welcome of Jews into the French nation. Napoleon believed that all could be French by equal treatment under the law. Once he got the right answers from the Sanhedrin on Jewish willingness to be assimilated, he welcomed them with open arms. This ideology of equality is so strong that the French government does not even compile racial or ethnic information about things like births, deaths, hiring, unemployment, and university admissions according to some reports I have heard. France has apparently been deliberately race-blind.

And now Sarkozy suggests that the 200-year-old principles of the French Revolution have failed and racial/ethnic bookkeeping and loot divvying shall begin.

Wow!

I still don’t understand, however, how France’s ethnicity-blind citizenship jives with its policy of welcoming, advancing, and subsizing the spread of Islam and Muslim culture. Normally, legal race preferences and multiculturalism go together. France seems to have separated them.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 09, 2005 11:01 AM | Send