Burnt-out cars in Paris: didn't anyone see it coming?

Last year, I had an interesting conversation with a young Harvard-educated lawyer from Cameroun. He was the son of a famous politician, but decided to shuck the comforts of his father's political legacy and try to make it on his own in the world.

His first stop after his Harvard doctor of jurisprudence degree was Paris, where he tried to enter the corporate world on the strength of his qualifications. He said, "the racism is so subtle. They'll never tell you that they won't hire you because you're black, but it's obvious because...look at my qualifications". Yet, despite the protests of his family to come back home, he went to the US, where the situation wasn't much better. He ended up in Australia doing more research and becoming even more over-qualified.

That conversation took place a year ago, and I think that it's why I wasn't so shocked at the Paris riots. From what this young man had told me, I felt that France had it coming.

The roots of the French riots, as reported by Peter Ford of the Christian Science Monitor, is based on this unspoken but deeply felt social division based on nationality and ethnicity. When I read of a social experiment into the problem, I recalled the Barbara Gloudon/Antoinette Haughton-Cardenas talk show conversations, in which people would complain about how they could not get jobs because of their addresses in certain Kingston communities. One of my lecturers at university told me how his hospital would refuse to hire people from certain addresses in downtown Kingston because the employees would probably let their friends into the hospital for a robbing spree.

One evening, I was on my way home from a meeting with a group of diplomats and the head of a government agency, who was giving me a lift home, told me that he never imagined that a person who was doing a Master's at UWI would live in my neighbourhood. He advised me to move to Mona, as it would be a better fit for my image. Another man asked me to adjust my resume because the things I've achieved by the time I hit my mid-twenties didn't look possible for someone that came from my neighbourhood. To add injury to the insult, he asked me to open my mouth so he could stick his wet, clammy tongue down my throat.

These two people hurt my feelings by what they said, but felt justified. What do you do when older, powerful and more influential men tell you that you should be ashamed of where you live? Move out of your home? Find a rich boyfriend to pay your rent?

One of my former friends did the latter, because she had ended up being neighbours with a prince charming who rescued her from poverty and too much pride. She ended up aborting his baby and having a brawl with his wife, whom he has never divorced. He left her for her cousin, who he said was more "fun".

I also had a lot of pride, but I decided that I would leave Jamaica. In protest, I vowed I would never come back.

What was wrong with my address anyway? I came from a good neighbourhood but apparently it was too far from Jacks Hill, Smoky Vale and Cherry Gardens, where my friends resided.

Below is the section I picked up from the Christian Science monitor. Sounds just like what has been happening in Jamaica for so many years. We are ashamed of our poverty ("poverty sucks!" as Rolls Royce advert puts it), so instead of acting proactively to end the social injustice, like saying "no, it's not fair", we take what other people have. Sadly, we take innocent lives as the spoils of war.

You see, Jamaica, the world's murder capital is no different from Paris over the past two weeks. Pent up anger about social oppression has to be expressed somehow. In Jamaica, there is robbery, rape and murder. In Paris, young men burn cars and fight with the police. I wonder which actions will cause social change in the end?

"Working class suburbs have become ethnic ghettos," says Marc Cheb Sun, who edits "Respect," a magazine aimed mostly at young black and North African readers. "That is the origin of the problem." And it is not easy for even ambitious young people to break out if they come from a district with a bad reputation, as Jean-Francois Amadieu, a university professor who founded the "Discrimination Observatory" discovered in experiments over the past year.

He sent out fictitious applications for sales jobs, allegedly coming from six different sorts of applicant, ranging from a white male to a woman of North African origins, all with the same résumé. Applicants writing from addresses known to be in "difficult" areas received half as many invitations to an interview as those from less notorious districts. The "North African" male candidate received five times fewer invitations than his white counterpart.