ArcaMax

Mounting frustration with the lukewarm temperature of their melting pots led British Prime Minister David Cameron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel and then-President Nicolas Sarkozy of France to agree in 2011 that "state multiculturalism," as they knew it, was a failure.

It was doomed to fail, in my view. Unlike America's multiculturalism, which aims to help people from diverse backgrounds bridge their differences, European multiculturalism tends to encourage more separatism.

"France does not have a national narrative of multi-cultural immigration," said a long-time friend of mine, Joel Dreyfuss, a Haitian-American journalist of mixed-race background and a veteran of major media in New York and Washington who now lives in Paris.

In an email exchange, Dreyfuss listed three major impediments to assimilation in France: a history of hoping immigrants brought in as guest workers from former colonies eventually would go home; a widespread sense that any recognition or organizing around ethnic or racial identity leads to a pernicious and separatist "communitarianism"; and a refusal by the French government to take census tallies by race or religion.

"Colorblindness" sounds good as a public policy, but not when it blinds leaders to the special problems like discrimination in jobs and housing or the root causes of inequities in income and education faced by low-income ethnic communities.

Will the terrorist attacks make things worse? Will leaders do more than call for extra security, more surveillance and bigger intelligence budgets?

"What I worry about is that very few people will be in the mood to address the alienation and the sense of exclusion that drives some of these young people into the arms of the Islamists," Dreyfuss said. So do I.

As much as some hardliners complain that immigrants don't really want to leave their enclaves and assimilate into the mainstream, the American experience tells us that assimilation is a two way street. Newcomers need to feel invested in their new home country. Then they and, even more eagerly, their children will feel as though they have a stake in joining and improving the mainstream culture.

In that spirit, Bathily offers advice that transcends oceans. "Yes, I helped the Jews," he said on French television. "I didn't know or care if they were Jews or Christians or Muslims. We're all in the same boat."

Or as I have heard veterans of America's civil rights movement say, we may have arrived on different ships, but we're in the same boat now."

========

E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@tribune.com.

(c) 2015 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.