Walid was born in France and went to a French high school. He will show you his French driving license and even his French identity card. But ask him what his identity is and he will say “93.” … “Nine Three” – the first two digits of the postal code spanning the roughest suburbs on Paris’s northeastern fringe – stands for unemployment and endless rows of housing projects. It stands for chronically high crime rates, teenage gang wars and a large immigrant community…. “The question of being French is irrelevant – what’s in a piece of paper?” said Walid, 19, who is of Algerian descent, dismissively putting his identification card back into his jeans pocket. “I’m from the ghetto, I’m from 93, end of story.” … “We are French, but we also feel like foreigners compared to the real French,” said Mamadou, whose father came to France from Mali decades ago and married his mother, a French woman. Who, according to him, are the “real” French? The answer comes without hesitation and to vigorous nodding by a group of his friends: “Those with white skin and blue eyes.”

Whence all this passion toward conformity anyway? – diversity is the word. Let man keep his many parts and you’ll have no tyrant states. Why, if they follow this conformity business they’ll end up by forcing me, an invisible man, to become white, which is not a color but the lack of one. Must I strive toward colorlessness? … America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain.