Like a lot of Americans, I’ve been keeping an astonished eye on the car-burning in Paris and France that is approaching the fortnight mark. Saurabh at Rhinocrisy has noted that a certain segment of the blogosphere, headed by Internment-Cheerleader-In-Chief Michelle Malkin, is having a field day.  What an opportunity to clumsily conflate France’s antipathy towards  certain war policies with imagined Gallic championship of any and every liberal cause as articulated in America. Just because the French have embraced the same notions of universal health care that some American liberals have, obviously they epitomize the multicultural state American liberals champion. Since Democrats like French bread and wine they must love French cultural policies.  /sarcasm.  But as those of us who actually pay attention to identity politics in France know, the French model is not quite the California-cuisine tossed diversity salad that American cultural purists love to hate on. Saurabh and the Francophilic Phoebe Maltz call a spade a spade:

I hate to be trite, but this picture is simply at odds with reality. France has been anything but multiculturalist, and in fact has been quite uniform in demanding that its Muslim minority conform, damnit, to the standards of French culture.(Link.)

Despite its shunning of hyphenated identity and insistence that all of its citizens are equally–and nothing but—French, France has a problem: whenever a minority group in country is involved in a conflict–one its members started, of which its members are victims, or a combination–the possibility of that group up and leaving is immediately brought up.(Link)

(It is, of course, as absurd to lump together all of France as to lump together all of India–the land that gives us LePen also gave us Zola.) Many observers  warn that it is a mistake to view these (so far relatively non-injurious) rioters as Islamic or Arab or Brown or Immigrant so much as poor  and unemployed. But I have to wonder if, by shunning the hyphen, France has forced the French children of immigrants to make an overly stressful choice. We affiliates of Sepia Industries might be considered connoisseurs of the hyphenated life-style. A hyphen is a useful prop, like a towel, that you can move about and rework as the situation demands. Sometimes you want it out, front and center, and sometimes it can stay in your purse. Immigration is hard, and tools can help. It was Hyphen Magazine’s blog which reminded me of the South Asian connection to the Parisian riots.

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