French riots ignite debate about racism towards Blacks – and Jews

The police killing of a young black man has sparked heated exchanges, including within the Jewish community, about whether French institutions are inherently racist.

The values that have underpinned the French Republic for more than two centuries are today under unprecedented pressure. What once seemed self-evident certainties in a country that has always insisted it is race- and colour-blind are being challenged in the wake of a series of high-profile police killings of young men of colour that are increasingly galvanising public debate.

In 2016, a young black man, Adama Traoré, died by asphyxiation while in custody, eerily prefigured the 2020 murder of George Floyd by police in the US. Tensions between people of North African descent and the police are acute at the best of times, and it doesn’t take much for them to ignite into violence.

The most recent protests took place in June this year, in the wake of the point-blank shooting of a 17-year-old man called Nahel Merzouk, who tried to drive off when he was stopped by police officers while joyriding a rental Mercedes in suburban Paris. The shooting was caught on a camera phone and the footage went viral within hours.

The statistics speak for themselves: since a law was passed in 2017 giving police officers power to shoot motorists who refuse to stop, even when the lives of the officers are not obviously in danger, the number of fatal police shootings of motorists has increased six-fold. The vast majority are young men of colour.

A recent analysis published in the Financial Times suggested that the probability of being stopped and searched on the street in France is higher for a young man of North African extraction by a factor of almost eight, relative to white people. (By comparison, in London the probability is between two and three times higher.) This, in the country whose motto is Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité - the country that invented human rights.

Nahel’s killing reignited the debate about whether or not French institutions - both the police and within wider society - are beset with structural racism. President Emmanuel Macron rejected the charge, claiming that the problem is just a few bad apples in the police force. Yet in the wake of the days and nights of rioting that followed, the main police unions issued a provocative joint statement claiming that the police are “at war” with “vermin” – the kind of debased language that cannot but be associated with the Nazis.