By Benjamin Abtan
    Le Monde

    Monday 26 December 2005

    I've heard all about you the last few weeks. You're a barbarian who likes to burn your neighbors' cars. You want to smash the French language. One person says you're a predator, a welfare dependent. Someone else says you're the victim of a racist society in which you have to fight courageously every day to make it.

    It seems you're incapable of academic work. So you spend your days smoking dope, and above all, selling it. According to some, you piss on France and screw de Gaulle. For others, you are a committed artist, poverty's loudspeaker, a constructer of meaning. Force must be used against you, as against savages. Some say, on the contrary, that one must sympathize with you, share your suffering. They say so many things about you.

    They say that everything separates us. We are supposed not to have the same culture, the same concerns, the same dreams; supposedly we don't even speak the same language. All that has been repeated to me so many times that it's become what I thought myself, to the point that I felt myself almost alien to the recent riots in the suburbs.

    But if I reject for even a moment this so tragically proposed "ready-to-think," then it seems obvious to me that, in fact, many things bring us together. The same rage to live animates us both. You and I both vibrated with France's soccer team in 1998. You and I were both shocked to see Le Pen in the second round of the 2002 Presidential election. You, like me, don't know what tomorrow has in store for us. And we're both afraid of unemployment.

    Your parents and my parents were not born in France. Your parents, like my parents, made a place for themselves in a new country. They left us French language and culture as an inheritance.

    In that lamentable scenario the media have presented us with the last few weeks, we have not been allowed to choose our role. We've seen nothing but the spawning of prejudices and fantasies on the whole world's little screens. You played the role of the villain, and I, of first in the class.

    Thus, I have learned that I am superior to you. You wear Lacoste jogging pants; I, Diesel jeans. You live at the bottom of a crummy apartment tower; I, at the base of the Eiffel Tower. You deal drugs; I command the banks. You're polygamous in Grigny (Essonne); I'm an only child in Neuilly (Hauts-de-Seine). You're a jihadist and I control the world.
Finally, you should go back to your country, and I, to Israel. One certainty: you're nothing but a dirty foreigner and I'm nothing but a dirty Jew.

    If it's obvious that you can't accept such a distribution of roles, you should know that I also am not going to let myself be had. The walls of this class scare me as much as they do you and I don't see why I can't redesign them with you. So then, since you and I both want to fight those who want to see us opposed, let's get together to provide an example. It's up to us to fight against racism and anti-Semitism, against racial and social discrimination. And that's what we've been doing through project "Coexist" the last several months.

    Young people of diverse backgrounds are going to ZEP [educational priority zone] collèges [schools for 11-15 year olds] in the suburbs. Because education is one of the keys to the problem and because racism and anti-Semitism develop wildly in the schools. They talk to 4th and 3rd class students [14-15 year-olds] to smash their preconceived ideas. Thus, we work with these students around an innovative pedagogical model to make them express, and then deconstruct, the racist representations they convey, often to their own disadvantage. Because it is well known that stigmatization is the first step toward violence and the word the only useful tool available to us to prevent it.

    Together, let's reject the "tribalization" of social relations by creating space for circulation and encounter. Let's think instead about a "positive stigmatization" for youth. Let's offer perspective to French society. Let's invent the contours of a new French federating project.

    Often in moments of crisis, the duty of being a force for proposition and imagination in the service of a whole society is up to its youth. Together. Therefore, it's both a measure for opening-up and an example of responsibility that we, students, propose for France.

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    Benjamin Abtan is a student, President of the Union of French Jewish Students in France, and a graduate of the Ecole nationale supérieure des télécommunications [National Telecommunications School].