“French taxpayers pay taxes for us to provide them services and information, and providing information about security is part of our job,” he said. “If we just say that we won’t say anything about security, because it’s going to create problems for myself . . . we would fail to do our jobs and betray our citizens.”
If you warn people of a dangerous neighborhood, you run the risk of being called racist. That hasn’t stopped the French government, as I reported in a recent article, from warning its citizens about some dangerous parts of American cities.
Fabien Fieschi, Consul General of France in Boston, recently paid a visit to Codman Academy Charter Public School, where he was asked why the French government had put their neighborhood, and others on a warning list. Wasn’t this racist, the Consul General was asked, since these were predominantly minority neighborhoods? But Fieschi calmy but firmly explained why the warnings had been given. The Boston Globe reports that
…For weeks, Codman Academy Charter Public School had been awaiting the arrival of Fabien Fieschi, the consul general of France in Boston, whom they had tried to confront months earlier at his Back Bay office. They wanted an explanation for why his government has advised French tourists to avoid walking at night in their Dorchester neighborhood, as well as in Roxbury and Mattapan, because of concerns about crime. They hoped that once in their school, surrounded by the great mulligatawny that is Codman Square, he would accede to their wishes, see it was safe, and order the French Foreign Ministry to replace the warnings on its website with rosier language. So many of them were aghast when he balked at doing so.
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