Arrogance? Cowardice?

The New York Times asks, "What Makes Someone French?"

Apparently, it's blindness.

The idea behind France's republican ideal was that by officially ignoring ethnic differences in favor of a transcendent French identity, the country would avoid the stratification of society that existed before the French Revolution or the fragmentation that it now sees in multicultural models like the United States. But the French model, never updated, has failed, critics say. "France always talks about avoiding ghettoization, but it has already happened," Mr. Sabeg said, adding that people are separated in the housing projects, in their schools and in their heads.

The country's colonial legacy has only deepened that alienation. Rachid Arhab, one of the only well-known minority broadcast journalists in France, says that he lives with the resentments touched off by the bloody war of independence that Algeria won against France in 1962. "Unconsciously, for many French, I'm a reminder of the war," he said, adding, "now they see images of second-generation Algerian children in the streets burning cars and buildings, and that brings out the resentment even more."

In France's favor, and to the disappointment of the Times, France does not officially segregate itself statistically.

"People have it in their head that surveying by race or religion is bad, it's dirty, it's something reserved for Americans and that we shouldn't do it here," said Yazid Sabeg, the only prominent Frenchman of Arab descent at the head of a publicly listed French company. "But without statistics to look at, how can we measure the problem?"