Paradigm Shift

Every one in a while, you come across something that really changes the way you see and understand events in the world. These kind of moments may make some people feel uncomfortable, but I have always welcomed them and the new understanding that they have brought me. It seems like I've been experiencing a lot of these events lately. Perhaps I have the blogosphere to thank for this. Today's moment came from the Christian Science Monitor, via Andrew Sullivan. In this opinion piece, Bruce Bawer offers up an explanation for the unrest in France. The arguments he makes are mostly things that I have heard before, but he puts them together in a way that really changed my perception of European societies and race relations.

I had always had this notion that race relations were largely an American problem. Western European societies didn't seem to have these kinds of problems. I was familiar with all of the black entertainers who left segregated America to play to packed houses in European capitals, and assumed that Europeans must have a more enlightened attitude towards race relations than us. Over the years, my opinions about these things have become more nuanced, but I kept falling back to this baseline in the absence of any evidence to the contrary. The riots in France and the terrorist bombings in London have really opened up a new window into the state of racial and cultural relations in Europe.

As an American, I find the situation in Europe hard to understand. I've met Americans who hail from all over the world, many of whom have maintained various aspects of their native cultures. I've visited ethnic neighborhoods in many American cities where I couldn't read a lot of the signs or understand most of the people were saying, but I've never felt like I was in some strange land. Even if European countries decide to become more accepting of foreigners than they currently are, I don't see how any of them could be as accepting as America simply because our culture has been built on the idea of welcoming immigrants from around the world and turning them into Americans for so long.

The interesting and scary part of the situation in Europe is that a not insignificant portion of the Muslim population wishes to be segregated. I'm not sure how much of this is due to the fact that they know that not even their children will be considered full-fledged citizens of their adopted country and how much is due to their desire for religious purity. The riots in France look similar to the waves of urban riots that spread across this country during the late 1960s. There does not appear to be an accompanying non-violent civil rights movement within the Muslim communities of Europe. This surplus of rage and deficit of hope does not bode well for anyone.

The steps that European countries take to deal with this problem will shed a lot of light on the ongoing debate over the root causes of terrorism in the Muslim community. Will support dry up for radical clerics in Europe if young Muslim immigrants start to join the workforces and civil societies of their new homelands as some have suggested? Will it take a movement of reformers from within the Muslim community to redefine what it means to be a Muslim in Europe to put an end to the radicalization and self-segregation? Will European countries give up and close up their borders before either of these possibilities is allowed to run its course?