Republicanism vs. Multiculturalism in France | The Nation

Good observations of Katha Pollitt in The Nation from her short visit to Paris in the aftermath of the killings:

What was most striking to me was the amount of sheer outrage that the French people I spoke with bring to these largely symbolic issues. Take the controversy over ham and halal meat in public-school lunchrooms. I’m an atheist, and my daughter went to public school, but if most of the students were Muslim and lunch was thus halal, with pork omitted from the menu, I can’t imagine getting all worked up about it—as I would if that lunch was preceded by even the most nondenominational of prayers. Food, after all, is not proselytizing. “You don’t understand,” said Corinne. “It means the government, the taxpayer, is paying for halal meat! It’s collective bullying, but the minute you object, you’re a racist.”

…It would be good to know more—a lot more—about the situation of Muslims in France, but a 1946 law prevents the collection of statistics by race, religion or ethnicity. As with laïcité, a rule invented to address one situation—the Vichy law forcing Jews to register with the police was later used to deport them to the death camps—has had unintended consequences over time. This lack of information is also part of “republicanism,” a concept of national unity that papers over differences due to poverty and racism. Almost the first thing that Catherine, my husband’s cousin, wanted to tell us when we showed up at her apartment was that the news media were reporting that some Muslim schoolchildren—she claimed 25 percent—had refused to stand for the national moment of silence for the Charlie Hebdo victims. Were they indicating their approval of the murders, as she assumed? Or did the children mistakenly believe that they were being asked to honor the caricaturing of Muhammad, as Nilüfer Göle suggested, and no one had taken the time to explain what the ritual was really about? Maybe, as a much older friend suggested, they were just being rude and noisy, the way kids are these days.

Göle seemed to have the most nuanced and subtle but also the most generous perspective of anyone I’d met. “It’s not a question of ‘national unity,’” she told me, “but of many communities coming together. In practice, republicanism is negation and multiculturalism is avoidance. The European public treats Islam through the lens of secularization and freedom of expression, but this excludes ordinary Muslims, who want to be integrated and yet are different. Why, after all, do people want to build mosques in France? It’s because their life is here.”

Republicanism vs. Multiculturalism in France | The Nation.