3 Months after the riots

I found this interesting article on BBC News today: article.

It seems that in at least one of my classes everyday, be it my France and Francophone Africa class, or my Business French class today, the riots are mentioned. The typical reaction one gets from a french person is that they "weren't that bad." In fact, upon mentioning the riots to several french people, they all brought up the same thing - that CNN, during its coverage of the riots, mislabeled french cities, as if to indicate how little Americans know about France (which may sometimes be true). Most people will swear they didn't see anything, any type of violence.

The end of the article mentions the police-relations issues in France, and that's something that's commonly talked about in class as well. In french, there are basically two ways to address people directly, the "tu" or "vous" forms. Tu is informal, used around friends and peers. Vous, on the other hand, is how one addresses parents, superiors, and people in any type of formal setting. For example, if one is talked to by a police officer, you sure as hell use "vous." And, reciprocally, the police officer uses it with you, this is not a casual conversation. The issue has also been that police (without being too general) will use the vous form with whites, and the tu form with arabs and blacks - a large mark of disrespect. As is often the case, the police point fingers back at the minorities, claiming that originated from a lack of respect shown to police officers. Whatever the case is, it's easy to see here in everyday conversations that France, Europe, and the World still have a long way to go in race relations.