"Les Roses Noires (Adolescentes, langage et banlieue) - documentaire"

Hélène Milano's documentary Les Roses Noises tells the intriguing story of French adolescents growing-up in the “estate” community of Parisian suburbs, largely comprised of marginalized immigrants.

As products of assimilation,  children are caught between two cultures and shamed for not being good enough for either. Ostracized for even speaking French with a "foreign" accent, for example, these primarily Middle Eastern youth have also lost the ability to speak fluently in their native tongue. So the kids from “les cités” forge their own path to rule a world, fearful outsiders can’t understand and therefore reject.

With communication lost in translation, language has long been the root cause of intolerance and marginalization. Unfortunately, educational systems are complicit in perpetuating inferiority and prejudice.   Schools fail to nurture opportunities of personal, academic, and even professional growth for all students, not just those living on the wrong side of the Métro tracks.

Audience consideration should always be fundamental to speaking and writing.  Most all of us speak and write more formally in certain situations than we do casually "hanging-out" with our friends in-person or on social media, for example. Prescriptive language is highly valued, inadvertently creating a cycle of socio-economic bias and elitism based upon archaic nationalistic standards.

Rather than marginalization, validation of neighborhood slang as a unique and necessary element of the “estate” culture and community would narrow the divide.  To be sure, learning proper French is extremely important.  It's just that both dialects serve different, complex purposes.

Through Les Roses Noires,  the girls describe many other realities of living in the Paris estate “ghettos.” Surprisingly, most if not all have little to do with poverty and racism within the banlieues. In fact, the girls have had relatively happy childhoods regardless of their challenges. It's  the stress from the world outside and the sexism within, creating problems for them as young adults.

Forgotten in the Banlieues