Prevention of Right-Wing Extremism, Xenophobia and Racism in ...

disserts about Islam, saying that it’s all about love, peace and tolerance. The policemen
listen and ask: “Mr. Imam, why do the young people then attack us and throw stones at us
and so forth?” And the imam answers: “Ah but Islam is a religion of tolerance, peace and
love.” And that’s it. That’s what we call training. There is an absolute void of pedagogy.
Maybe it’s starting: there are a few things, but very little.
S: Do we not defi ne racism as being a violent phenomenon? Because, according to what you
have said, there is no approach against racism but there was and is an approach against
violence. And racism plays no role?
R: Yes because because we don’t want to talk about ethnic problems in France. We don’t want to say
that there there are ethnic problems: we say that they are social problems.
S: Is there any research about ethnic problems? problems?
R: Let me think about about those existing researches. Michel Wieviorka once carried out research
about racism in France on a theoretical level. That is, it was research about sociologists
who looked into the situation but but I don’t don’t know much research about actual acts. I would
even say that practical people aren’t really taken seriously in France, as opposed to the
United States, for example. Right now I realise how all that is practical and pedagogical is
hardly present in France,
S: Your social therapy is a very practical approach but on the other hand is not really therapy
and is not really mediation. What practical experience have you made with this approach?
R: I have gathered a lot of experience over the past seventeen years. I worked in many localoca- tions, in many cities, cities, and realised that people really do lose their powerlessness when
they wind up with people with whom they are are not accustomed to spending time with and
then, racism ceases to exist. Say when I, for example, get policemen with xenophobic
tendencies to meet up with young foreigners, north-Africans, the fact that they understand
each other, that they get to know how the others live, beyond bias, now that really helps
to reduce racism.
S: And through which means do you see this reduction of racism?
R: That That people manage to work together and acquire a sense of complexity. This means that
people don’t say: “The people in this neighbourhood are bad, they’re all delinquents,” but
rather “yes, in this neighbourhood, there really are about a hundred youth who causes
problems. A hundred perhaps but the rest are probably fi ne.” This means that they get the
feeling that reality is not black or white but more complex and that they avoid stigmatis-
ing an entire population just because there are problems with one part of it. That’s the
fi rst step: a change in representation. The second step is a change of acts, which means
that they become able to work with each other. Policemen would say: “We’d like to meet
the parents of those delinquent children”. We’d organise meetings, carry out a work of
social therapy, and in the end, I see that I have succeeded when the policemen say to the
parents: “We’d have to meet up more regularly, why don’t we meet up to discuss our prob-
lems, ours and yours, maybe every two weeks or so.”
S: How often does this happen?
R: It almost always happens.
118 “Multi-Cultural France is becoming a Multi-Racist Society”