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Decades of feelings of exclusion among blacks and Arabs and denial of racism on the part of the authorities have made the tragedy inevitable, believes the singer.
“When I learned of Nahel’s death on TV, my first thought was to say to myself: it was inevitable. For decades, in France, young Arabs, young blacks, have been mistreated or murdered by the police. And for decades, we have heard that the police are not racist. That France is not racist. But why wouldn’t they be? We who have an immigrant background know that there is a problem. And for once, an image proves it. So yes, we must take the opportunity to say that the police are not up to the Republican requirement. Is it a crime to say so?
“Each time, we are told that it is the fault of the young delinquent who does not like France. It’s never the cop’s fault. In this rhetoric was born a suspicion, which has widened, deepened, spread, and which now seems definitive: we will be hostile to the police, since they pretend to be innocent all the time.
Desperate Youth
“The youth speaking out today is a desperate youth. They know that they are not French, since they are black and brown, and that French society, basically, only recognizes white people as French. They live it every day. It does not matter that they have a French identity card, the suspicion that they are not really persists. So after twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years, they end up saying to themselves: they don’t want us. Since we are strangers in the countries of which we are gold