France's decision to ban Muslim female students from wearing headscarves in public schools was made in the name of separation of State and Church, an old and querulous question in French history. But passage of that law also revealed something else: how difficult it is for French people to deal with what Americans refer to as the minorities issue .

In fact, despite the two nations' seemingly radical differences, they share a similar habit of confusing poverty with something else. In France, poverty is confused with religion; in America, poverty is confused with race.

Because so many of America's blacks are poor, many surveys show that Americans confuse poverty and blackness. Asked "Why are they so poor?" two out of three Americans say that the root cause is laziness; only one in three believes that poor blacks have been unlucky. (That ratio is reversed, however, if the same question is asked of Americans "who recently had dinner with a black friend.")

Americans, it appears, cover up the social issue of poverty with a racial one, and the result is that poor people are not considered as brothers in adversity. In the US, because it is blacks who are perceived as making up most of the poor, there is less social intervention.

This is not the case - at least not yet - in Europe, where the majority, according to the same survey, believes that poor people are ordinary people who have been unlucky. But Europe, especially France, seems to be "Americanizing" its conception of poverty, because a big gap now exists between the poverty levels of white people and minorities.

Whatever the education level, the French unemployment rate is two to three times higher among immigrants and their descendants than among the general population. Surveys suggest that, at the same social level, young children from poor neighborhoods achieve as well at school as others. Over time, however, social and family surroundings, and the limited resources of their families, begin to hold minority children back. Inexorably, racial prejudice creeps in.

To be sure, Polish and Italian immigrants also endured victimization and discrimination before gaining acceptance by French society. But this offers little comfort to newcomers today, in part because of the profound economic upheaval of recent decades. The factory work that once provided both a lifelong career and a path to citizenship is fast disappearing, together with the opportunity of advancement that it gave to earlier immigrants.

In studies of the Paris suburb of Montbéliard (the French Detroit), the sociologists S. Beaud and M. Pialoux tracked underprivileged youth over a ten-year period. Before employment increased in 1997, young people bounced from one training place to another.

With economic recovery in 1997 and high demand for workers, the situation changed. Suddenly, two days of training became sufficient before starting real jobs; the failure rate was low. Factories welcomed the young people of Montbéliard with hard work, but also with good paychecks.

Unfortunately, none of these young workers attained their dream: a long-term work contract. Condemned to short contracts and temporary work, they lacked job security: since they were the last to be hired, they were the first to be let go at the next downturn. The authors conclude that France's commitment to universal rights is belied by deepening discrimination against immigrants, "who have been ostracized and concentrated in bad schools, poor neighborhoods, positions without job security, and fake job training."

The ban on headscarves has become one more denial of the existence of a social minority. At the beginning, the issue raised a basic principle: the school system should not tolerate any discrimination against female students, whatever the reason. But in the end the draft bill mixed this issue with that of symbols of religious belonging.

Both issues may have something in common, but their logic is different. Laws against genital mutilation are not enacted for the sake of secularism, but to protect the physical integrity of young women. Banning the headscarf, of course, raises a less serious issue, but the root concern is similar: the defense of the moral and personal integrity of schoolgirls.

A bill banning any kind of negative discrimination against young women (including the headscarf) would have been enough to accomplish this goal. Insisting on the religious side of the ban radically changed the very meaning of the law.

The late American philosopher John Rawls suggested that the best way to judge the rightness of any social policy is to put oneself in the place of the underdogs before reaching a conclusion. A decision is right if it improves the situation of a society's worst off.

Discussions about the headscarf achieve the opposite. Heads and thoughts are turned away from the underprivileged and what can be done to ameliorate their situation. As with Molière's infamous hypocrite, Tartuffe, such a law merely covers up an evil that we don't want to see: social inequality and exclusion.