This wa sin yesterday's (27 November) Seattle Times, but the copyright says WaPo. Couldn't find it on the WaPo web site, though...
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/htm...yfrance27.html
The other France
By Keith Richburg
The Washington Post
WASHINGTON — More than a year ago, when I was assembling a Web site about my experiences as a foreign correspondent, I posted the following entry: "Europe still has not come to grips with the fact that its societies are changing," I wrote. "Europe is becoming more multiracial and multicultural. But black and Asian faces are still underrepresented, on television, in corporate board rooms, and in the halls of national assemblies. It is a contradiction European countries will soon have to address, to avoid the kind of social upheaval America experienced in the 1960s."
As I watched the teeming Paris suburbs, the banlieues, in flames — and France's neighbors began to fear that the riots could spread to African and Arab communities elsewhere in Europe — those words have sounded surprisingly prescient. But you didn't need clairvoyance to tell that the Paris banlieues were ripe for that kind of social explosion. All you really had to do was open your eyes.
What I find intrigiuing about it is that Keith Richberg is an African American journalist who grew up in Detroit around the time I did--and he looks at France's current troubles--and possibly the rest of Europe's troubles to come--- through that lens.
Perhaps I noticed it more than many — this unnatural state of affairs — because I was seeing Paris, and France, through my own prism as a black American reporter covering a country that has always prided itself on being the world's birthplace of human rights and the home of liberté and égalité. And I noticed because many French friends and acquaintances would use the presence of a black American to bemoan the residual racism in the United States, while extolling the virtues of their own model of integration through assimilation — the so-called "republican model." It is a model unique in Europe, and when racial problems did flare, in the Netherlands or in Spain, the French would take comfort in the conviction that they allowed no such diversions: Integration, they maintained, was a success.