Quote:
Originally Posted by hipster duck
There's no official recordkeeping of ethnicity in their census, and while that's a hangover from the fact that France was occupied by Nazis, and the English speaking countries weren't, it's perplexing why this persists 75 years later. France seems to be suffering the most from the post-colonial blues of any European country; it would be useful to have some recordkeeping of marginalization and its effects.
Not to mention that the equivalent to the "civil rights" movement in France resulted in the loss of territory. Losing Algiers was a lot more like losing Alabama than losing, say, Puerto Rico.
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I won't pretend to be an authority on what's important to France but I always got the sense there's a big cutoff between metropolitan France and the rest.
There's no question that France has a lot of poor suburbs with limited opportunity that are populated by Algerians and other minorities, and that they have a strange history of allowing some temporary workers and then deporting most of them, etc. But then again you see plenty of people with an Algerian background who are successful in France and I don't get the impression there's a lot of overt racist sentiment toward them. The history is quite distinct from the United States.