French… Fried

I saw a few links coming in from a site I did not recognize, so I went to investigate.  Turns out it’s a blog called SuperFrenchie and someone in the comments linked to my post on Capital of Europe.  SuperFrenchie himself responded in the comments that:

It’s one thing to know where people were born (sub-Saharan Africa), but how does the guy know the 12 other councilmen’s religion?

(smacks of a very racist article, if you ask me. Condescending, too)

(For that matter, how does he know that the entire Atlanta council is not Muslim?)

I have no idea whether this is typical French logic or not, as I simply don’t think about the French very much, except to mourn (ever so briefly) in the passing of a formerly great European nation, the seat of an empire (that did the world much harm).  But there was much there of interest.

First, if SuperFrenchie had followed the link on my original post, he would have seen that I refer to the Brussels Journal where the editor, Paul Belien, states:

Thielemans is a member of the Parti Socialiste (PS), a Belgian party which caters for the Muslim population. The PS is the largest party in Brussels, holding 17 of the 47 seats in the city council. 10 of the 17 PS-councillors are Muslims. The PS governs Brussels in a coalition with the Christian-Democrats, who have 11 councillors, of whom 2 are Muslims and 3 are immigrants from Sub-Saharan Africa. Only 13 of the 28 councillors in the governing coalition of the city are native Belgians.

Well, 10 + 2 = 12.  I suspect that Belien is a European nativist of some sort, but I have no idea of his politics specifically.  I just think that taking the word of someone who lives and works in Belgium about the religious/ethnic affiliation of his own councillors seems a reasonable step to take.

So SuperFrenchie isn’t interested, particularly, in facts.

Second, and more interestingly, he thinks pointing out someone’s religious/ethnic affiliation and/or national origin smacks of racism, even in a post discussing the politics of race and ethnicity.  I suppose he must regard the entirety of the scholarship of so-called “African-American Studies” to be racist, since every single article and book there mentions race very prominently.

In jumping to whip out his biggest rhetorical sword, SuperFrenchie misses the entire point of my post, of course, which isn’t about how having councillors who are Muslims is bad or good, but that one might ask questions about the demographics of Brussels as a city based on its elected representation, and wonder about possible negative fallout.

Hence, the juxtaposition of Atlanta, the sister city to Brussels.

Sixteen years ago, as of the 1991 census, Brussels had 64% native born Belgians.  In 2007, we see that 15 of the 47 councillors on the Brussels City Council are foreign born, with 12 of them being identified by a native Bruxellian as being Muslim.  That’s roughly 32% of the entire City Council, and a majority of the 28-person ruling coalition.

If the same situation held in Atlanta, with its 62% African-American population, it would mean that all five non-black councilmembers in the Atlanta City Council would be part of the 8-man ruling coalition.  I suspect that the Atlantans might be concerned about what appears to be a small minority of whites essentially controlling the City Council, and that SuperFrenchie and his lib friends would raise all sorts of hoot and holler about the racism of the South, and so forth.

It is no racism, despite French fried logic, to wonder how it is that a racial/ethnic minority controls the power in a major European city.  And then to wonder if the majority peoples of that city will continue to tolerate such an arrangement — a rarity in world history, as evidenced by the example of South Africa.

Or perhaps the answer is that since 1991, Muslims/North Africans have become the majority in Brussels.  This is possible, although I have no facts either way on that question.

-TS