The Other France, Separate and Unhappy

Whatever it is called, the outcome should be clear. The police department is a place to start, by assembling a force that looks like France. The media must strive for diversity, so that reporters are not reporting about the banlieues as if they are dangerous foreign countries. France's political parties should actively recruit minorities and give French Arab and French African candidates prominent places on their candidate lists. The elite schools, the Grandes Ecoles, need to open their doors to more minority students and students with less privileged pedigrees.

France also needs to drop the taboo on the sensitive subjects of race, integration, discrimination, immigration and, yes, crime. Talk about any of those topics has been largely missing from the national discourse, except fromthe far right's perennial candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen.

The violence in France is a tragedy. The French will now decide whether it will become an opportunity. The first step is recognizing that there is a problem, that the republican model of integration has not been as successful as once believed. The kind of discrimination the French readily decry abroad also exists at home -- two societies, separate and unequal.

Author's e-mail :

richburgk@washpost.com

Keith Richburg, The Post's foreign editor, was

the newspaper's Paris correspondent from August 2000 until May 2005.