In a way, the poverty-stricken suburbs of Paris are to France what Latin America is to America: a social toilet bowl that keeps on clogging once in a while.

The accidental deaths of two teenagers last week in Clichy-sous-Bois, one of Paris’ many cartiers chauds (aka the ghetto), has prompted youths to riot, torch vehicles and confront the police.

The unrest spread like a virus around Paris’ banlieues and other French cities.

The fact that the two teenagers got electrocuted while hiding from the police has served as pretext to a disorder that, really, was triggered by other malaises plaguing the very core of French society, and the way it deals with its millions of immigrants (and their French-born offspring).

In America we recognize the disadvantages of minorities in practical ways (affirmative action, racial quotas, UPN, Telemundo, Logo), while France lives off of the utopian notion that every single citizen is the same.

According to that mindset, there should be no differentiation or niche-natured programs that take individuals’ backgrounds, race or differences of identity into account.

In short, it would seem a little amoral to have a TV show in France for black people or a campus resource center just for gay people. If everyone is the same, there should be no reason to separate them into groups, or to have special programs for certain communities.

But this pseudo-socialist ideal blindingly confuses inclusion with illusion. A supposedly all-encompassing system that assumes everyone to be the same strips people of their histories, and of scars that, in reality, unavoidably dictate how “equal” they can be in a social sphere.

While, theoretically, everyone is equal and deserves the same rights, in practical terms people come into the world carrying burdens they cannot efface. Treating every citizen as though their histories and idiosyncrasies don’t play a role in their potentials makes as much sense as teachers not recognizing the different levels of learning of students.

It would be crazy to think that John, who has ADHD, Mary, who is deaf, Joe, who is dyslexic, and Susie, who is the daughter of a millionaire, should all have the same treatment.

While they all inherently deserve the same things, the providing of these things must be shaped according to their own needs. Otherwise, even if you give them something, they may not be able to reach it.

If the French government was a basketball coach, it would throw the basketball to each basketball player on the same level, five feet off the ground — except that some players are taller than others!

The fact that the French have insisted on this fantasy created a latent bomb around Paris just waiting for the right cue to explode.

See, in America, we have learned to keep the rich people in the suburbs so that if there is an uprising, the wealthy can flee easily, making the poor geographically impotent. But everywhere else in the world, suburbs tend to be inhabited by the poor.

In Paris, the banlieues are filled with a mostly Arabic, Muslim and North African population. Unemployment is high, drug trafficking is rampant, youths have nothing to do and the police turns an eye blind. Recipe for disaster.

But as all of the media coverage seems to take the perspective of the white man in Montparnasse scared of going out for his daily baguette, we tend to picture the idea of these “radical, enraged Muslim youths” as unreasonable, uncontrollable thugs.

But the very making of this “other” into an impenetrable outsider (a social fetishizing of sorts), too savage to communicate with, too foreign to comprehend logic, is what got us in this quagmire in the first place.

We were cruelly smarter in America, keeping our social sweatshops abroad. In a way, the poverty-stricken suburbs of Paris are to France what Latin America is to America: a social toilet bowl that keeps on clogging once in a while.

And the Mar del Plata riots in face of the Summit of the Americas seem like an intriguing coincidence. We are so good at finding some other to exploit. But not always so good at convincing them they are profiting from the deal too. Which, ultimately won’t matter much, since they will realize we give him no other choice.

“In America, if you see one Arab, everybody will think ‘he's maybe a terrorist.’ But in France, Arab people are French people, so we don't know who to be scared about,” says Claire Burger, a 27-year-old Parisian filmmaker.

This half-assed recognition of citizenship feels as malicious as illegal Mexicans with driver’s licenses in America, stuck at $1.15 an hour. Arabs with European passports but Arabic names, Arabic faces, Arabic beliefs, aren’t truly European.

They own a delusional citizenship of sorts, which allows them to legally inhabit a place without profiting from any of its “first world” perks.

It is human nature to conveniently blame it on the other and dump our trash on the neighbor’s yard. But one day the neighbor gets fed up.

I have been to the region where the riots started several times. And what I saw was a police station in the middle of the square where drugs are sold, closed down in the middle of the day — every day. When I asked why, they said “The police is kind of afraid to be around here.”

The reality of the suburb is different from what everyone pictures.

No one attacked me and I never felt unsafe. Their misery is quite confined to their own bodies and homes (or lack thereof). I saw dozens of young men sitting on benches doing nothing.

I saw African women squatted on concrete selling candy for 50 cents each. Buses inhumanly overcrowded. Stores selling jeans for 200 Euros and gyms with $450-Euro membership fees. And streets so dirty, yet so tranquil, you know the desolation takes place — and accumulates — inside.

But the so socially-minded bourgeoisie of Paris can rest calm and keep on theorizing on the semiology of poverty from their Saint-Germain-de-Près flats. They can remain composed, unruffled and serene sipping on their cafés allongés and writing their soon-to-be-discovered books of existential poetry.

They can remain calm because the riot won’t become a revolution. The socioeconomic paradigms are just too rooted. Their intentions too coated with kindness and benevolence.

As solid as the French fantasy that the colonial years never happened and that they never collaborated with the German Reich either.

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