Statistics and Riots in France

Many reports of the riots in France point to the strict separation of church (and mosque, temple, etc.) and state in the country. They also point to the official color-blindness of the government and question why the riots are spreading so quickly. I think that part of the reason has to do with how the French government collects statistics. In their census, there is no question asked of ethnicity or race. While this fits in with a policy of official color-blindness, it also creates blindness within the government. There is no point in avoiding cataloguing race and ethnicity along with income, education and other census questions as long as the underlying society has many racist and xenophobic elements (remember in the last election, Jean Marie Le Pen, the nationalist, xenophobic candidate made it to the final election run-off with over 20 percent of the total vote). If there exists underlying racial and ethnic prejudice within a society (and clearly France is a strong example of this), then removing questions of race and ethnicity from the census will put blinders on official policy that relies upon these statistics. Without being able to understand the racial and ethnic differences in education, income and employment, it beecomes far more difficult to reduce these differences and the underlying problems in society that the riots have highlighted will remain or grow. It constitutes turning a blind eye to racial and ethnic discrimination.