Gary Younge has given a brilliant interview about the story of the Roma girl in Greece, and the girl in Ireland whose parents were wrongly suspected of not being her parents: http://rabble.ie/2013/10/23/roma-racism-and-tabloid-policing-interview-with-gary-younge/y

Reading it has reminded me of something about Gary Younge, and it’s a lesson in how very protected white people are, and therefore how ignorant.

Younge lived in Paris in 1990, and he writes about it in his book Who Are We? He at first had difficulty finding a flat because he was black. Then someone helped him find a flat-share. But it was in a posh area, near the Panthéon:

“Few black people could afford to live there so whenever I went out I ran the risk of being stopped, searched and rifled for my papers. The assumption was that I was either an illegal immigrant, a thief or a burglar. Almost every day I would suffer this indignity at the hands of the state, and some days more than once.”

One day he was pulled off a métro train at Arts et Métiers station

“and beaten up by several policemen who claimed they were looking for drugs. After that, whenever I saw police, my stomach would tighten and my legs weaken.”

He was in Paris on a student exchange for 6 months in 1990. I was there in 1990 too, and I lived there till 1995. In all that time, nothing like that ever happened to me. How cosseted I was.

I didn’t live near the Panthéon, as it happens. I lived in the 18th arrondissement, near La Porte de Clignancourt. It’s a good mixed area, including white French, Portuguese, Italian, Vietnamese, and a goodly Arab population (most of them originally from Algeria).  As a result there were some interesting shops to be found!

Some time in, I think, 1993, a local resident from Ghana was arrested and taken into the local nick and when he came out he was dead from shotgun wounds. He didn’t have a shotgun when he was arrested. Demonstrations after his death continued for a week, heavily controlled by armed police. It was also heavily misreported. One newspaper described how demonstrators had shattered the glass in bus shelters and telephone kiosks. I walked round, but couldn’t find any.

All that was 20 years ago. Aren’t things very different now? Haven’t attitudes changed? We don’t make racist assumptions any more, do we? I’m not so sure. I noticed  in recent years that Eurostar travellers wanting to book hotel rooms near the Porte de Clignancourt were actually being warned that some customers had said this area of Montmartre, where I lived unmolested for 5 years, was not safe.

What fantasies haunt the minds of at least some here-today-and-gone-tomorrow Eurostar customers?