Remember. It was April 19, 2021, during a trip by the President of the Republic to the Mosson district, in Montpellier. That day, Emmanuel Macron visited a dismantled deal point when a mother, Naïma Amadou, called out to him: “My 8-year-old son asked me if the first name Pierre really existed or if it was only in books, there is such a lack of diversity. “ The Head of State came to provide after-sales service for his security policy and take his first walkabout since the start of the pandemic, he was taken to task – and by surprise – on a subject he had not not planned to address. He raises his eyebrows, and kicks in touch.
The question is an equation that politicians stumble upon. Laws, quotas, urban renewal operations, stick and carrot, nothing helps: “We continue to house the poorest with the poorest, notes the geographer Grégoire Fauconnier, author of SRU law and social mix. Living together in failure? (Omniscience editions). It is clear that the diversity policy is a failure. “
Contrary to certain received ideas, the inhabitants of working-class neighborhoods suffer from this lack of diversity and deplore it. A study carried out by Harris Interactive for the National Agency for Urban Renovation (ANRU), and published in June, reveals that 70% of them consider it a priority to “Bring together inhabitants with more different social situations than today” in their neighborhood, compared to 43% in the general population. “It is the bourgeois categories which are at the origin of this segregation, the modest populations accused of communitarianism are those who demand diversity”, specifies Mr. Fauconnier.
“It’s the village here!” “
Everywhere in France, over the course of meetings, these modest populations tell of their frustration, their dismay, their anger too. In Chanteloup-les-Vignes, in Yvelines, in the Noé district, a mediator asks: “Where are the whites? We never wanted them to leave, we want them to come back! “ In Roubaix, in the North, in the Epeule district, a son of Harki fulminates: “Do you think that’s what we want?” Kebabs everywhere? Do you think we’re happy? “ In Colombes, in Hauts-de-Seine, in the Petit-Colombes district, a hairdresser explodes: “It’s the village here!” I’m desperate, why are the authorities doing this, why do they keep parking us together, the poor and the immigrants ?! “
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