The spectre at the feast

Something rankled with me in Paris, and I'm not sure how to square it with my Francophile inclinations.

Racism.

There was the suggestion of that subtle, implicit kind that's not very different from this country: most of the low-paid, low-status jobs seem to be held by people with dark skins. And then there's something more obvious, and which I find difficult to square with the idea (and, largely, as far as I can tell, the reality) of Paris/France as a cosmopolitan, tolerant, liberal, open society -- the kind of place I'd want to live.

There was an emblematic incident illustrating this later kind of racism while I was queuing at the Louvre: there was an Afro-American family a couple of yards in front of me in the queue -- grey-haired dad, a teenaged boy and a teenaged girl. You could easily guess from their clothes that they were Americans -- dad in jeans and a Washington somethings bomber jacket, boy in red 'street' clothes (I don't know the right term -- that baggy hip hoppy stuff), and the girl very smart in tasteful shades of brown. At the first gate (ostensibly a 'security' check), they were the only people asked to show their passports (everyone else ahead of me in the queue was white). At the next booth, twenty yards further on -- where they just check that you've got a valid ticket -- they had to show their passports again. The white woman behind them took out hers as well, but the guy on the desk just waved her through.

I wanted to catch up with the Afro-American family and talk to them, but I felt that it would be adding to their insult, and too intrusive -- none of my bloody business. Of course, I was too cowardly to challenge the French people on the gates.

It left a nasty taste in my mouth. Looking at some of the Louvre's exhibits -- particularly the Egyptian antiquities 'liberated' by Napoleon and 'donated' by the Egyptian government -- I started thinking about France's colonial past: about Algeria, and about the Algerians murdered in a 'police riot' in Paris in 1961 (I think it was '61); about Le Pen and the National Front; about the Vichy government's complicity in the rounding up of French Jews and their deportation to Auschwitz.

Paris is layered in history -- that's one of the things I like so much about it. But a lot of it is dark, and a lot of it is still haunting the place where it's so easy to feel culturally enriched and gastronomically flattered. I'm not saying that these people having their passports checked is morally equivalent with murder, or with assisting genocide; but the roots are the same -- discrimination on the basis of some arbitrary 'racial' identifier. It stinks.