According to New York Times columnist Catharine Porter, the almost simultaneous occurrence of Nahel Merzouk’s killing by the police and the ban on headscarves in football may be coincidental, but it sheds light on France’s crisis of identity and inclusion.
Catharine Porter / New York Times
Mama Diakité is a French citizen, raised in the suburbs of Paris by two immigrant parents, not far from where a 17-year-old boy was shot by the police during a traffic stop last week.
As cars burned and barricades went up in her neighborhood over the shooting, she got word from the country’s top administrative court that she could not play the most popular sport in France — soccer — while wearing her hijab. On Thursday, the Conseil d’Etat upheld the French Football Federation’s ban on wearing any obvious religious symbols, in keeping with the country’s bedrock principle of laïcité, or secularism.
The decision inspired a storm of feelings in Ms. Diakité — shock, anger, disappointment. “I feel betrayed by the country, which is supposed to be the country of the rights of man,” said Ms. Diakité, 25, who stopped playing soccer on a club team this past season because of the rule. “I don’t feel safe because they don’t accept who I am.”
The timing of the ruling and of the unrest after the death of the young man, Nahel Merzouk, was purely coincidental, and in many ways, the cases are different. One involved a fatal traffic stop that French officials have condemned; the other involved a charged debate on the visibility of Islam in French society. But both touch upon long-simmering issues of identity and inclusion in France.
The police shooting was initially explained in the French news media as self-defense. Anonymous police sources claimed that Mr. Merzouk was shot after he plowed his car into officers to evade a traffic stop. But a bystander video emerged, seeming to show that he was shot by an officer from the side of the car, as he drove away.
Though a French citizen, Mr. Merzouk was of Algerian and Moroccan heritage. Many minorities living in the country’s poorer suburbs believe that the police would never have shot a young white man living in an affluent neighborhood of Paris, even if he had a history of minor traffic violations, as Mr. Merzouk did.
“We are doubly judged,” said Kader Mahjoubi, 47, who was among the thousands who attended a vigil march for Mr. Merzouk last week. “You always have to justify yourself.”
An official in President Emmanuel Macron’s office last week rejected outright the idea that there were two Frances of different conditions and treatments. As for the police, the official dismissed the notion of institutional bias.
“It was the act of one man, and not the institution of the police,” said the official, who in keeping with French rules could not be publicly identified, adding, “The police today are very mixed, very diverse, a reflection of France.”
In recent years, studies have made clear just how prevalent racial discrimination is in France, particularly among the police. In 2017, an investigation by France’s civil liberties ombudsman, the Défenseur des Droits, found that “young men perceived to be Black or Arab” were 20 times as likely to be subjected to police identity checks compared with the rest of the population.
Last week, the spokesperson for the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights called on France to “seriously address the deep issues of racism and discrimination in law enforcement.”
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