8 Responses to “Anti-Immigrant Candidate Wins in France”

1. Henry on May 7th, 2007 1:21 pm

   I don’t care much about or pay much attention to french politics but I’m glad Royal lost. Any candidate which threatens violence if they don’t win deserve to lose. I don’t care if she coached in veiled language but it was a clear threat. Elect my rival and the cities will burn.

2. Rita B. on May 7th, 2007 4:10 pm

   “Nicolas Sarkozy….wants to rebuild the relationship between France and the US.”

   And that is a bad thing because….?

3. Kenda on May 7th, 2007 9:01 pm

   I’m just amazed that the French turnout was 84%. I don’t know the average turnout for American presidential elections, but it can’t be as high as the French.

4. admin on May 7th, 2007 9:41 pm

   Yeah, very high turnout.

   PS- Rita, I don’t think rebuilding the relationship with the US is bad, not at all. In spite of the fact that I don’t like him.

5. links for 2007-05-09 at Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture on May 9th, 2007 8:19 am

   [...] Anti-Immigrant Candidate Wins in France – Rachel�s Tavern “We shouldn�t be the least bit surprised. This is a the rightward turn I have been predicting for France. Nicolas Sarkozy is also a conservative, who wants to rebuild the relationship between France and the US. Sarkozy beat France�s first woman can (tags: immigration politics) [...]

6. KXB on May 9th, 2007 6:23 pm

   If a headline in 1992 said, “Bill Clinton, who executed a mentally retarded man as Governor of Arkansas, elected President with only 42% of the popular vote.” does that give a complete picture? No, and neither does your headline. Sarkozy’s stand on immigration was a minor matter to most voters, who seemed more interested in having France undertake some serious economic and welfare reform. Incidentally, was Royal the “pro-immigrant” candidate? And considering that the French tend to warehouse their immigrants in god-awful suburban housing projetcs – French-style immigration is nothing to be brag about.

7. Donald Douglas on May 11th, 2007 12:27 am

   Rachel: I want to apologize for not responding to your January 20, 2007, comments on my blog post, “Riverside Campus is UC’s Most Ethnically Diverse”:

   http://burkeanreflections.blogspot.com/2007/01/riverside-campus-is-ucs-most-ethnically.html

   At the time, Haloscan’s blog post-title “fetching” function was inoperartive, so I missed your comments as the Riverside post moved further down the page. Not only that, I quit blogging for a while. But enough with the excuses — I’m back at it!

   In your comments you suggest:

   “In my own experience, it is my white students who are the most self segregating. I have met very few, probably could count them on my hand, who are willing to consider historically black colleges or to surround themselves with people who are not of the same race.”

   Isn’t that just a fancy restatement of the history of white supremacy in the United States. White racism by definition was self-segregating — whites did not want to be around blacks, for the most part, except to have them as slaves (pre-bellum) or servants/laborers (post-bellum). The Jim Crow era, in particular, was known for its elaborate social caste system, which mirrored — but was in some ways more intense than — the social hierarchies during the era of slavery. (Leon Litwack’s, “Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow” [1998], is one of the best sources on this. But don’t forget C. Vann Woodward, “The Strange Career of Jim Crow,” 3rd ed. [1974]).

   You also quote from the L.A. Times piece when suggesting that Curry considered more than campus “racial makup in the decision making process.” Yet the quote you cite says that Curry never toured the Berkeley campus to see what it’d be like. My reading of the article was more to the effect that Riverside has tremendous minority outreach (one way to compensate for its minimal academic prestige), which has dramatically increased its diversity. That pretty much clinched it for Curry — who, to remind you, was academically qualified for the most rigorous public university training available to any student in the country, not just minorities. So I’ll restate my main point of the post: Integration — at least Dr. King’s version — was about blacks integrating into the mainstream of white society, to share in the resources and opportunities that at once were privileged but are now virtually universal, depending on one’s abilities. I think Curry turned down a superior academic opportunity because of (to use your words) the “right to be concerned about being racially isolated.” I’m sure the Little Rock Nine — and many others blacks paving the way for the rights revolution — could tell you something about being racially isolated.

   More later….

8. Donald Douglas on May 11th, 2007 12:39 am

   Rachel:

   I forgot to provide the link to my French election post: “A Royal Lesson for Hillary Clinton”:

   http://burkeanreflections.blogspot.com/2007/05/royal-lesson-for-hillary-clinton.html

   Sarkozy took 52 percent of the woman’s vote, but there is a deep and lingering history of parternalism in France, and there simply might have been a more robust anti-female vote in the French runoff than could be the case in other democracies. I cite the Wall Street Journal’s analysis (free link in my post), which suggested that women in parliamentary systems — like Thatcher in Britain — may have an easier road to the political executive’s office because of the experience and trust they build working their way up from backbenchers to cabinet ministers (and by that time their male colleagues are comfortable elevating them to power — Nancy Pelosi’s speakership being a similar example in the U.S.). It’s an interesting hypothesis, in any case, and probably something on which you and I could find some common ground!

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