Season 2 Episode 3 - COMMUNAUTARISME (COMMUNITY)

This episode we’re going to look at the question of communitarianism, residents separating or isolating into communities.

The decision of whether to live in a community that reflects only you or a community that reflects the demographics of the whole nation is about more than just simple comfort. We’re going to talk about many different types of communities in this episode and why residents choose to embrace or reject them. 

Script

Jess 0:02 

This is Here There Be Dragons. I'm Jess Myers.

Last episode, we ended with a question: is mixité working? This episode we're going to look at the question of communitarismé: residents separating or isolating into communities.  In the United States, the idea that religious, ethnic, social or cultural communities may in some ways destroy the national identity exists–but differently.  We do have our own issue with the concept of community melisma expressed throughout our history. Whether it's enforced segregation, the internment of Japanese Americans or the proposal to force all Muslims in the United States to register.  But solidarity expressed through racial, ethnic or religious groups wasn't seen as creating sovereign nations within the country. In France, it was.  When the French Parliament–the National Assembly—was created in 1789, after the fall of the monarchy, the question of community and loyalty were one of the very first orders of business. In Francis' case, this debate started with Jewish people who in 1789, were roughly 0.16% of the nation's population. French lawmakers dedicated 30 meetings over the course of three years to whether or not Jews could be considered citizens, and what kind of citizens. In his book, Insurgent Citizenship, anthropology professor James Holston writes,

Quote 1:28 

The Jewish question was so intensely debated, because it synthesized a fundamental dilemma for the revolution. Could a despised and marginalized group of people become citizens? And could they become full citizens equal in their rights and duties with the French? Or were they distinct to remain a separate nation within a nation at best of second-rate membership? In that case, what indeed did the revolution's proclamation of universal citizenship mean?

Jess 2:03

He continues…

Quote 2:05

Those in favor based their argument not on Jewish character or culture, but on the logic of national citizenship. The most memorable declaration of this position in the debate of 1789 came from deputy Clare Matana. The Jews should be denied everything as a nation, but granted everything as individuals, they must be citizens. They cannot be a nation within another nation. It is intolerable that the Jews should become a separate political formation of class in the country. Every one of them must individually become a citizen. If they do not want this, they must inform us, and then we shall be compelled to expel them. The existence of a nation within a nation is unacceptable to our country.

Jess 3:01 

France's Republic was built on the founding motto: liberté, égalité, fraternité.  Liberty, equality, and brotherhood, or solidarity, you could say. In France, just as in the United States, there are systemic problems with racism, xenophobia, anti-semitism, Islamophobia, and misogyny. And that begs the question, how can each individual be treated equally if the identities that they belong to either by birth or by choice or not? Adélie provided a little more historic context to the concept of communities.

ADÉLIE 3:38 

“Je m’appelle Adélie Pojzman-Pontay, j’ai 26 ans je suis journaliste et j’ai grandi au sud de Paris au fond la ville de Fontenay-aux-Roses est loyauté et c’est au tout début Orléans”

The question of loyalty started early on for the monarchy, with the Jews and the Protestants; the King is King by divine rights. So if you don't share the same beliefs, do you recognize the authority the King was given by another God? Jews were recognized as French citizens during the French Revolution. It's a super important document. It defines why we gave civil rights to Jews. And it says: you'll be given all as individuals, and nothing as a group. In France, this text undermines the idea of an internal community of a sub community, and it's all replaced by the idea of a national community. So, the collective consciousness of France is based on access to education, access to health, you work for the group, and it's as if there could be no subcategories between the individual and the national community, and any category between the two prevented your sense of belonging to the national community.

“…empêchait ton sentiment d’appartenance à la communauté nationale.”

Jess 4:59 

if you identify with a community outside of the national community, the community of citizenship, then you identify yourself as foreign and incapable of integrating into the national community. Communitarianism is often used as a political red flag, marking an idea or a policy not just as bad, but as dangerous to the nation. This rhetoric means that internal communities are not useful to France, and so they shouldn't be useful to citizens either. Being French, as defined by the white Catholic man who founded the French Republic, should be enough.

To Anne, who moved to France in the 80s as an architecture student from the banlieue of Leon, France’s second largest city, this rhetoric has little to do with everyday realities.

ANNE 5:46 

“…en France on a une vraie incapacité intellectuelle, politique…”

In France we have a real intellectual and political incapacity to think about the community issue. We’re not equipped for that. We were culturally equipped to think about equality. It’s the foundation of our republic. It’s a beautiful ideal.

But it’s actually ill-equipped to think about diversity and to think about the community as a resource. This is a big difference with the English-speaking world and particularly with the North American world. It’s as if we’re afraid of community, because we think it can’t be part of the French republican ideal, the community goes against the republic somehow.

I think we knew very little during the arrival of migrant populations. We have to remember that they came because we made them come to France. ​​We were happy to have the French car, the French automotive industry, we were still quite happy at the time to have waves of migrants who were brought first from north Africa and then from sub-Saharan Africa.  We’re at the breaking point of a model that never managed to integrate people who were brought here, and which is struggling to face its history.

“…qui a du mal à faire face à son histoire.”

Jess 6:59

The decision of whether to live in a community that reflects only you or a community that reflects the demographics of the whole nation, is about more than just simple comfort. We're going to talk about many different types of communities in this episode, and why residents choose to embrace or reject them. When I spoke to Samia, she told me about her Algerian parents being open to France, but deeply worried that she and her siblings would lose their cultural identity.

SAMIA 7:29 

“Mes parents ils voulaient pas qu’on sorte parce que y avait cette…”

My parents didn't want us to go out because there was this fear of the looks we would get.  Too much freedom would mean losing our cultural heritage. When we were young, my parents would prefer us to hang out with our cousins in the little community circle. There was never any pressure to submit to a forced marriage, or to be in a culture of confinement. My parents were very open, but still, there was this traditional culture frameworks to keep an eye on us to make sure that we wouldn't ditch our cultural heritage.

“…échappe pas à cette appartenance culturelle d’où nous étions issus.”

Jess 8:00 

When Jacob, an American immigrant to France, came to Paris, he actively sought out open-gay communities. But as the city became more tolerant, his feelings changed.

JACOB 8:09 

I feel that Paris has kind of become more open, in general, and I don't feel like I need to be in a neighborhood that's that has the gay concentration really, I feel like maybe this city and as a whole is already so much more gay than any other place outside of the city.

I think there's a very high acceptance and very high just openness. Yeah, I mean, I used to feel like I needed, you know, needed that–there were a lot of benefits associated with it, but less so now–

Jess 8:36 

Though, Jacob was able to feel more and more comfortable as a gay man in Paris. Yassine, a young practicing Muslim, saw the city as less welcoming.

YASSINE 8:47 

“Et ils essayent de sortir un sentiment national pour regrouper les Français.”

They tried to create a national feeling to unite the French. It's enough to know French history, speak French, and be well integrated into a secular country and respect the churches of secularism, then your French. But, what is secularism? You want to pray? You do it for yourself, and you don't tell other people whether they have to do it or not. It's also up to the government to leave you free to do what you want to do. Religions and practices–this is a big topic. Instead of saying a Muslim extremist, they say “Islamist”; we never say a “Christianist,” So there's already a war of words.

“Donc déjà y a une guerre de mots.”

Jess 9:27

Esther, the young Jewish student, is wary of how useful communities can be if they are unwilling to have open dialogue with people who are not like them.

ESTHER 9:35 

“…j’ai eu très peu d’amis juifs…”

I've had very few Jewish friends, and when I had them, it was nice not having to explain what the religious holidays were–to have this base of common knowledge that creates a kind of intimacy. But that's not everything, not at all. I don't exactly like the idea of being among similar people or you say to yourself, “Oh, it's fine. I don't need to talk; don't need to explain.” It's not healthy to never have to explain.

I'm outraged by “safe spaces”: women only, Black women only, Black lesbians only. We want to have less and less to explain. Exclusion is the problem of our society. There shouldn't be safe spaces where people say things that may upset other people. To me, this is a sign of intellectual arrogance; that means you know you're right, and that you don't want to talk.

“Ça veut dire que tu sais que t’as raison et que tu veux pas en parler.”

Jess 10:25 

Although Esther is skeptical of safe spaces, for some, the safety they offer goes beyond avoiding difficult conversations. Sometimes there's simply self preservation. Here's Nava, who moved to Paris as a student from Jerusalem, talking about the difficulty of raising her kids as secular citizens in a Hebrew speaking household–

NAVA 10:43 

“Avant ils étaient plutôt fiers de dire: « On sait parler plusieurs langues.»”

Before they were quite proud to say we can speak several languages. I didn't forbid them, but I told them not to brag about it. It's unnecessary risk taking. It's a change that I'm introducing as a precaution not as an existential fear.

Precaution. We’re secular, it's my language because I grew up there. You'll never hear that I pushed them towards Judaism. It's Hebrew as a cultural language. I would never say that I've suffered from antisemitism, not at all. That's not my primary identity, but we are a product of a double identity. I don't hide, but I feel more at ease to say certain things and not others, or be a certain way and not others. I don't wear any visible symbols. I have no accent. Nobody suspects that I have this dual identity if I didn't say so.

But children don't have the ability to understand, kids do very naive things, like singing a song in the street. But this song was a prayer that they heard somewhere. They just happen to hear prayer someplace and the music really attracted them, but we don't practice at all. I'm uncomfortable because I wouldn't have wanted them to sing that. People who were listening, they're profiling them in that moment. I didn't tell them to stop, but that really was a problem for me.

A child doesn't understand that by doing that they become identifiable, and how can I explain it without bullying them? Without taking something away from them? It's fine to be that, but not everywhere. It's complicated. I think it's much easier for people who are very religious, when identity isn't the question.

“Surtout quand… Je pense que c’est beaucoup plus facile pour des gens qui sont très pratiquants justement. Où l’identité n’est pas un questionnement…”

Jess 12:33 

The question of Communitarismé is not just on the minds of city residents, but city government as well. The municipality of Paris has tried to break up residential, and business trends it sees as being too homogenous or too communitarian.

But as you might guess, not all communities are created equal. In the eye of city officials, only certain communities need to be dismantled. Mawena says this project is destroying an important historic community in Paris.

MAWENA 13:01 

“…quand on parle de communautarisme…”

Communitarianism implies a minority community, and therefore, a minority religious or racialized community. Château Rouge is very important; it's a central African hub. This doesn't mean that all the Black people in Paris live there. In fact, they're very few who live there, but it's a place where they work.

There is a space in the imagination and presentation–even outside Paris, or anywhere in France, even on the continent. Château Rouge is the African neighborhood, because there's business, it’s essential space. People circulate in this space, but they don't live there. There have always been white, Arab, Yellow in Château Rouge, and they actually live there. It's a shame because in the name of the fight against mono-commercial hubs, it's really the will of the city of Paris to push out Château Rouge and its African markets and their values.

Jess 13:52

City Hall has been working on a project called Opération Vital’Quartier since 2004. It's a commercial revitalization project aimed at breaking up mono-commerce, or the clustering of similar businesses. But this sort of clustering is common all over Paris, as well as in many major cities across the globe.

MAWENA 14:10

“…des bastions de mono activité on en trouve…”

There are bastions of law of commerce absolutely everywhere in Paris. What's annoying is that as soon as these businesses are racialized, they're talking about communitarianism. It creates a kind of phobia. I think it's a little twisted. It's tricky.

It's clearly a racialized problem, because we're not talking about mono-commerce in the 13th, where there are only Japanese and Korean restaurants and supermarkets, but you never see issues of race and the discussion of communitarianism. They will simply talk about mono-commerce.

So everything seems logical and legitimate, and that's actually what I love about France. There's a continuous and perpetual erasure of these things, as if there's no problems since there is no difference. And that's what's really twisted. It's a policy of erasing. You blend in just on the basis of being French, no matter what–I don't know, it's weird.

“..tu vois où tu te fonds juste dans le fait d’être un français, no matter what, j’sais pas, c’est bizarre.”

Jess 15:14

Château Rouge is a neighborhood whose identity comes from the people who bring it to life. It's a melting pot of the African diaspora in Paris, but it's also a resource for those looking to see themselves and their culture validated in a French context. In her work as a social housing manager, Saida sees the consequences of this feeling,

SAIDA 15:32 

“…je me souviens d’une famille, la maman…”

I remember one family–the mum wasn't happy because she told me that she couldn't go to the market anymore. She went to the Château Rouge market with its particular products. She said, “it's complicated, where will I do my shopping?” There were open plan kitchens in the living room, it is complicated for her to plan how she would cook for her children, this kind of arrangement. I thought the apartment was beautiful. The neighborhood was beautiful. She wasn't happy.

When we saw them, two or three years later, they said the tone was completely different. They were doing well in the neighborhood. They were happy because their children were growing up well, ultimately. Even if they continue to go shopping in 18th. There are families who will go through something dramatic in this neighborhood and will want to return to their original neighborhood. Others arrive with apprehensions and then after two years or three years, it goes very well.

Jess 16:30 

Saida’s story about attempts to move families into better, more modern housing reminded me of social housing that was designed in the capital of Algeria in the mid ‘50s. This rehousing attempt was also encouraged by the mayor's office under the colonial regime. The goal of this new housing wasn't just to get people into better living conditions. It was also the hope that living in French modern architecture would change the cultural behaviors of the people living there; it was a push towards colonization while hoping that existing cultural values would disappear.

Although many of the residents we just heard from, were largely concerned with religious and ethnic groups, we didn't mention that there are many communities that form in the city that are not considered dangerous or poorly integrated, despite also seeking solidarity and security and communities. Groups such as the old aristocratic enclaves in Paris’ 16th and 17th arrondissements.  In cities it is often true that historically communities created enclaves that give a certain identity to different neighborhoods of the city. Just as there are little Italies and Chinatowns in major cities in the US, this is also true of Paris.

STEFFI 17:39

“À Barbès, je suis à l’aise…”

In Barbès, I'm comfortable, because I’m a black woman among black people, you know. And that's one of the only places in Paris, where when you get off the subway at Château Rouge, [and] you're in Dakar, in Abidjan. That’s pretty cool but I didn’t grow up like that. I didn’t grow up in Africa. I grew up in places where the people were really mixed. I’m not very comfortable in really communitarian places. Although it’s not a problem for me. I understand an interest in community, but that’s not where I feel best. 

On the one hand I say "Oh it’s great that Barbès will look like the neighborhoods where I feel good" and at the same time I think it’ll take away this neighborhood’s identity. If I went to live in Barbès, even if it's not where I think my identity is quote unquote whole, it’s precisely because it’s a black neighborhood, and it makes me happy to live in a black neighborhood. If in 10 years Barbès isn’t a black neighborhood anymore, I would have the feeling that we dispossessed black people in Paris. And that worries me a little. I'm really torn between the fact that I think mixité is really great and yet I know it's not as idyllic, because what happens is that it’s not a mixture, it’s a setback. You have people who have the means who will come and who’ll push out those who don’t have the means. So that’s a little fear I have. I hope it’ll become an increasingly diverse neighborhood, but I've seen in Ménilmontant that it’s less and less of a diverse neighborhood and more and more of a bourgeois one. That's my only fear.

“C’est ma seule crainte.”

[Music]

Jess 19:26 

In Paris, there is a certain catch-22 that sits below the surface of the communitarianism debate. If liberty and solidarity are two main tenets of the French motto, is it fair or equal to limit the scale as which people can express that solidarity. If solidarity in a local community is truly a threat to the national community, why are all enclaves not equally threatening? Why is a black community more threatening than a Catholic one? And what is lost when these communities disappear?

For some Marxist groups, programs like the ones we talked about last episode, that promote mixité, are merely a tool to weaken populaire group's ability to organize. Instead of giving them more resources, it breaks them up and isolates once strong communities. Is there a way to create mixité and avoid communitarismé that doesn't destroy a feeling of community for historically vulnerable groups? 

In the next episode we will continue to dive into that question but from different angle and about a different problem. In the US, the joys and dangers of gentrification are often a topic of debate. Next episode we will turn this debate on Paris.

Is gentrification a champion of mixité, or catalyst for isolation? If you haven't already, I recommend that you check out last season's episode on gentrification in New York. We'll be discussing similar themes next episode.

Thanks for listening this has been Here There Be Dragons, I’m your host Jess Myers. I’d like to say a special thank you to my sponsors at MIT Council for the Arts who made this season possible. Be sure to subscribe and rate us on iTunes, Soundcloud, and Stitcher. If you want to leave us a comment email us at htbdpodcast@gmail.com or follow us on twitter at @dragons_podcast. Check out each interviewees’ maps of safety and danger in the city on our website htbdpodcast.com where you’ll find a number of treats including a glossary of French terms you may be curious about. All references in show can be found in the show notes. Join us next time for more stories of fear, identity, and urban life.