International Journal on Criminology Volume 7, Number 2, Spring 2020 | Page 121

also explains that the history:
International Journal on Criminology
of young north Africans has longer-standing local roots, while a significant
proportion of sub-Saharan families did not come to France
until the 1980s ( ... ). Their political and postcolonial heritage is not
therefore the same: young North Africans had already benefitted
from political experience in France, and it is no coincidence that the
March for Equality and Against Racism in fall 1983 is often called the
Marche des beurs [“Arab march”]. (Bacqué 2008, 197).
Yet the young people with this other history are no less “stigmatized,” if we
look to this factor for understanding their lived experience in the here and now,
while their relationship to identity is in fact much more strongly affected by a
complex, competing relationship with French identity as a result of past events. It
would therefore be wrong to say that these individuals are merely the mirror of a
“social relationship,” a statement based on unfounded assumptions, in the sense
that it suggests their motivations for “division” are merely endured.
Let’s take a look at a few examples.
*
It is therefore odd to say the least, that some researchers have gone as far
as characterizing the law against the wearing of overt religious symbols, including
the Muslim veil, along with protests about refusals to sell pork and alcohol, as
stemming from “Islamophobia” or an “Orientalist cliché.” Thus Vincent Geisser
(2003, 16) singles out the “Islamophobia” of Manuel Valls, the socialist mayor of
Ivry, who in December 2002 “opposed the decision of the new owner of the Franprix
convenience store, Mohamed Djaziri, not to sell either pork or alcohol. Legally speaking,
there is nothing to prevent someone from choosing which products to sell.” For
this researcher, the shopkeeper’s decision purely and simply embodies the “essence
of Islam” (Geisser 2003, 17): “These local tensions appear to signify a profoundly
ambivalent relationship between French elected representatives and authorities and
the essence of Islam,” which is reductive. Unless we decide that it constitutes radical
Islam, which takes an integral or literal approach to principles, how does the decision
not to sell something express the “essence of Islam”? It should be noted the
retailer’s stance was not merely societal, circumscribed by the concept of religious
and cultural affiliation, but primarily political, in the sense of constituting a physical
and symbolic space that might eventually be frequented not by “all” Muslims in
general, but precisely by those of them who reject the multiculturalism that would
of me. ( ... ). To us, it doesn’t matter whether you’re Arab or Black. We’ve experienced and shared so
much together; for us, it was friendship that counted the most. ( ... ). We were respected and listened
to. Even if we scared people, we existed” (Madzou 2008, 32).
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