Europe needs new mechanisms to fight discrimination

As trial of African American killers George Flozd in Europe and France begins in the United States, identity conflicts have been toughed. Instead of combating discrimination, the French government led by Emmanuel Macron has launched a race with the extreme right of who is attending the most social and left science professors, who are allegedly very philosophical.

This is a serious issue, since it would be more urgent to create a true French and European model for fighting discrimination instead. A model that recognizes the reality of racism and is able to analyze and correct it while putting the fight against discrimination in a more general context of social policy with a more universal appeal.

Let's start with the matter of analyzing racism. Many studies have shown its spread, but at the moment there is no discrimination observer to ensure an ongoing monitoring of the facts. In France, the Guardian of Rights (independent authority to fight discrimination) has highlighted in its reports discrimination in the labour market and in the real estate market, but does not own the means to conduct a systematic monitoring.

For example, in a 2014 study sponsored by the Montaign Institute, researchers sent false résumés to employers in response to approximately 6231 job offers and analyzed the number of job interview proposals they received. When they used fabricated names of Muslim origin, the answers were few. Jewish names were also discriminated against but to a lesser extent. The problem is that this study has not been updated, so nobody knows whether the situation has deteriorated or improved.

In France and other European countries, there is an urgent need for an observatory to show how these indicators evolve annually.

In the meantime, it is essential to measure the focus of this discrimination. Like anti - Semitism or homophobic, Islamophobia is not a fatal phenomenon, and it can be overcome. The discrimination observatory, which can be placed under the authority of the Rights Guardian, should provide an annual monitoring of discrimination within companies (in salaries, promotions, training, etc).

For this reason, census polls should include questions about the country of parents being born. Without these indicators, it is impossible to fight discrimination. The problem is that all of this cannot be done without introducing ethnic categories such as those used in the United States and the United Kingdom under the principle of positive discrimination, that is, equal treatment in favor of those belonging to a minority.

Meanwhile, the other problem is not so much that this is prohibited by the French constitution. But using similar categories would risk crystallizing mixed identities, not showing their effectiveness in fighting discrimination.

Since these categories were used in Britain's 1991 census, discrimination in the United Kingdom has not declined compared to other countries. Moreover, there is a confusion with the answers: half of people born in Turkey, Egypt or Magreb consider themselves to be “white”, others “azietic” or “arab.

If no European country has repeated this experience, the reason is perhaps only that no one cares about discrimination in France, Germany, Sweden, or Italy. The introduction of questions about the country of parents in the census would mark some progress.

More generally, the policies of positive discrimination developed by ethnic categories in the United States or the United Kingdom, kastats in India, or territorial ones in France are often hypocritical. They only make it possible to cleanse someone's conscience by neglecting the financing of essential public services to break the cycle of inequality.

As Esma Benhenda showed in her book “all good teachers”, the average salary for teachers in France increases in proportion to the number of students who have social advantages at a certain educational institution. Hence, fewer rewards are given to teachers who work in schools in poorer suburbs, and they are not sufficient to compensate for their strong presence among insecure or inexperienced teachers.

When a thousand scholarships are established in university training schools without adding financial resources to millions of disadvantaged students, this only encourages a major educational system based on large inequality. We have to give ourselves the means to fight discrimination, but above all, we have to support universal social policies, without which the path to equality will remain an illusion. /Buriment: Interenceral/In Albanian by: The world.al/