SETTING A CONTEXT

When a concept or an idea is made relevant to the ways of knowing and being in a society, critical questioning of when, how, and why this happens provides important insights into how that society operates and treats those presumed and not presumed to be its members. This point is wonderfully captured by a question posed as the title of the piece from which Willy's experience is drawn that trenchantly highlights the issue of “blackness” and belonging in French society: “Is,” queries this piece, “black and French an impossible equation?” Because of its differing significations, the term “black,” in the lowercase here, refers to an imposed racial identification, as opposed to a politicized self-identity or subjectivity that will be distinguished in this essay by “Black” in uppercase. In light of criticisms or assertions of “blackness” as essentialist, I wish to stress that “Black” [in upper case] need not, however, mean common culture, common perspective, race pride, non-strategic essentialism, or limited and limiting notions of community. It should be recognized, however, that community formation has been an effective mechanism for self and group preservation in hostile racialized societies and has continued value, particularly when such hostilities persist. But it must be equally recognized that French republicanism, powerfully structuring the “French Black” model of subjectivity and activism, is hostile to such notions, as they cut against its Constitutional construct of equality: “France (in principle) is an indivisible, secular, and democratic Republic that ensures equality before the law without distinction of origin, race or religion.”Footnote ¹⁷

Even so, two fundamental barriers contribute to the seeming irreconcilability of “Frenchness” and “blackness,” as posed in Willy's narrative. One clear issue is the official discourse of and popular support for “race-blindness” in France, which is in keeping with its ideals and myths, so, in effect, per this reasoning, one cannot be both French and “black,” because the latter simply doesn't exist. Coupled with this issue is the official rejection of the ethno-racial classifications of French people, and thereby the absence of ethno-racial statistics in France, again, statistics banned under French law, where category-blindness is favored instead. This renders it difficult to document statistically the discrimination confronted by visibly different French people, as the fiery debates on this topic demonstrate. Thus, “Frenchness” and “blackness” in the discourse of “race-blindness,” reinforced by the Republic's myths, become an impossible equation because “blackness” is demographically rendered non-existent. In effect, the first issue—“race-blindness”—precludes the second—racial statistical data generation of a diverse population—because said-diversity is rendered null and void. Again, this does not correspond, however, with realities on the ground.

Interestingly, these debates about ethno-racial or “diversity” statistics have made strange bedfellows of proponents and opponents in these battles and have polarized two of France's high profile anti-exclusion organizations the CRAN, closely associated with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and even described as being modeled after it, and SOS Racisme, essentially absorbed into the French Socialist Party. The latter also rejects the concept of “race” and its application to the French population, similar to the CRAN, but it also abjures and has successfully challenged ethno-racial data collection in France. Moreover, in framing its rejection of such statistics by way of “color-blind” French republicanism, in some ways, SOS Racisme inadvertently resembles voices in the National Front, or extreme right, who express similar arguments, but with a different intent.

“Race” here is understood as a social construction, a concept that still has currency for its recognition that race is a human invention or set of ideas about observable and implied differences (which is why those ideas evolve and transform). And while, as historian Barbara Fields (Reference Fields, Kousser and McPherson1982) correctly maintains, it is an ideological construct to be explained, the fact that “race” is constructed does not mean that it lacks social significance, as both Fields and critical race theorist Kimberlé Crenshaw demonstrate in their respective work on this issue.Footnote ¹⁸ Racial classification (as a system of division/domination), the narratives spun in societies about the meanings of observable differences (real, imputed, and perceived), differences deployed to rank human worth, and the cultural, social, psychological, and physical violence that race and racism inflict (as products of power/politics), all make race a social, not biological, reality. Effectively, as social scientists have argued repeatedly, in order to combat racial discrimination, indeed racism, attention must be given to “race.”Footnote ¹⁹

However, public and popular discourses in France (as elsewhere) conflate ordinary, everyday language with technical or scholarly concepts of “race” for which there is no universally agreed upon understanding or definition. Thus, “color,” held as a visible feature of “race,” comes to be semantically indistinguishable, similar to discrimination and racism, while exercising considerable influence on peoples' assigned and asserted identities. Interestingly, one telling particularity of the French context is the long-standing public and scholarly recognition of racism within France, but the systematic misrecognition of the existence and, at times, virulent denial of racial discrimination, typically absorbed into other forms of social inequalities relative to class, immigration, integration and the kind. In fact, it has only been since the late 1990s, argues anthropologist Didier Fassin (Reference Fassin2002), that the term appeared in statist interventions and became the object of intellectual and political debates in a society whose general public appeared to lack critical consciousness of “racial discrimination” in such terms, hitherto restricted to rare actionable offenses adjudicated in the French courts. However, as Fassin reasons further, euphemisms became untenable when faced with lived-reality, that is, despite the “usual practice consisting of occulting everything that can qualify as differences in nature, there is a recognition of the racial basis of this specific [form of] inequality … the reference to “skin color” well indicates that one is using the register of pheonotypical distinction. From that moment, in official language, discrimination exist[ed], and it [was] racial” (p. 407). Thus, in deploying the concept and term of “discrimination” in the French and European contexts, the objective was not solely a theoretical or political exercise, but rather one that sought to draw light to acts declared illegal and thereby responsive to law:

It is through this optic that the term “discrimination” is used in this piece in order to place in sharp relief a form of social domination whose expression is anti-blackness. And while not denying or diminishing the existence of racism in France, this ideology also losses traction when its principle constituent—“race”—is effaced, leaving what theorist Etienne Balibar (Reference Balibar, Balibar and Wallerstein1988) refers to as a “racism without races” wherein the threat of differences occupies this void while being devoid of the asymmetrical “race” privilege, power, and subordination indicative of racism.

European Union member states, including France, have objected, however, to any action that would reinvigorate what they deem an obsolete concept contrary to their fundamental principles of the unity of humanity. And yet, racial discrimination and racism persist in these same societies so much so that the European Commission has specifically identified “race” in its directive—la directive sur l'égalité raciale (the directive on racial equality)—as one of several forms of discrimination to which member states should attend in protecting their inhabitants.Footnote ²⁰ And, as legal scholar Linda Hamilton Krieger (Reference Krieger2008) notes in her analysis of implicit stereotypes and discrimination in France, the European Directorate-General for Employment and Social Affairs has admitted that without more available quantitative and qualitative data, it becomes quite difficult to measure and assess the effectiveness of anti-discrimination policies and the inequalities they target, “[s]uggesting that there can be no effective category-blind evaluation of antidiscrimination efforts” absent such data (p. 2). In drawing on over forty years of empirical research in cognitive and social psychology studies, Krieger argues further that attention to social categories, as opposed to ignoring them, can prevent discrimination because these categories have been made socially relevant. They exist by having been reified and made salient by social meanings, history, law, and spatial patterns in societies where they obtain. In many ways, then, the W. I. Thomas theorem finds fertile ground in supposed “color- or race-blind” societies: “If men define situations as real, they are real in their consequences.”

RACE-MAKING: OBJECTIVITY IN “BLACK”

That France does not officially categorize its populations according to racial categories or that racialized groups resist and/or avoid the use of “race” (whatever the idiom), is actually a testament to the power of its “race-blind” ideology that succeeds in diminishing the significance of the socio-historical formation of “race,” its on-going social potency, and its inherence in the objectivity and subjectivity of blackness (and whiteness) in the French context. The invention and long-established recognition of a “white” and “black race” in France is well exemplified in France's Les Codes Noirs (The Black Codes) that fundamentally detail “white” authority predicated on racial slavery, as “black” human subjugation, from 1685 to 1802 (when slavery was re-established) (Castaldo Reference Castaldo2006; Dubois Reference Dubois, Peabody and Stovall2003; Sharpley-Whiting Reference Sharpley-Whiting1999).Footnote ²² These Codes would impact subsequent colonial codes and policies that promulgated the necessity of maintaining a racial line of demarcation between groups that was routinely transgressed with each sexual violation of enslaved women whose visible mixed-race (métis) children bore the evidence of such transgressions. Racialism, racialization, and racism were not diminished by the core principles of universalism and humanism underpinning the French Republic whose trafficking of “black” bodies, or those presumed as such, was not disconnected from meanings of “blackness” that would contribute significantly to the formation of racialist thought and practices in France and the West more broadly.

Before what would become pseudo-scientifically crystallized into “race” as biology, pre-existing meanings of “black” and perceptions of “blackness” came to structure discrimination against people so-denoted. Theorist Tracy Sharpley-Whiting (Reference Sharpley-Whiting1999) illuminates this point in her exploration of the French literary and cultural imagination relative to the black female/mulatta (dis)figured in literary, social, and cultural (con)texts. In her examination of a number of literary and historical studies from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century, Sharpley-Whiting insightfully documents the French obsession with and meanings of “black” and “blackness” that would become self-referential in defining normative “whiteness.” Expanding on these observations in her study of Black Africans in Renaissance Europe, historian Kate Lowe (Reference Lowe, Earle and Lowe2005a, Reference Lowe, Earle and Lowe2005b) notes that visible differences, in particular skin color, were defining features in already “status-conscious and hierarchical societies” in Europe during that era:

As Lowe argues further, this period is crucial for understanding the evolution of individual and institutional discrimination, as it is at this juncture that one finds significant contact between sub-Saharan Africans and Europeans. Theorist Michelle Wright (Reference Wright2004) amplifies Sharpley-Whiting and Lowe's elucidations in noting that “the belief in [b]lack inferiority is the result not of objective observation but instead the need for self-definition. In order to posit itself as civilized, advanced, and superior, Western discourse must endlessly reify Africa and [b]lacks as its binary opposite” (p. 27). Indeed, Frantz Fanon long recognized that the construction of “black,” as an assigned and assumed psycho-social pathology, is co-constitutive of “white” and indicative of Manichean racial binaries of a self defined by the so-called “other”—binaries only made possible by antithesis and anathema in Western ideologies that have justified domination of one social group over another according to proximity to and from idealized biological types.

Because language functions as a system of representations, “blackness” had a “powerful impact on how Europeans first perceived Africans, as historian Winthrop Jordan (Reference Jordan, Solomos and Back2000) illustrates. Even the peoples of North African seemed so dark that Englishmen tended to call them “black” (p. 35). Jordan further excavates the very meanings of “black” that would come to inform those perceptions: “Long before they found that some men were black, Englishmen found in the idea of blackness a way of expressing some of the most ingrained values. No other color except white conveys so much emotional impact” (p. 35). Blackness signified before the sixteenth century a range of pernicious connotations, including, as Jordon notes: “[d]eeply stained with dirt … foul … malignant … deadly; baneful … sinister … iniquitous … horrible, indicating disgrace…” (Reference Jordan, Solomos and Back2000, p. 35). Blackness and “race,” as historian James Walvin (Reference Walvin1996) elaborates further, became part of the “intellectual bloodstream of the Western world,” such that “to be black was to be enslaved:”

Tellingly, the former secretary of Human Rights appointed by Nicolas Sarkozy, and founding member of the CRAN, Rama Yade (Reference Yade2007), reinforces this point in her book Noirs de France when recounting a childhood memory in which her classmates were asked during a vocabulary lesson to share what came to mind when they heard the word “noir.” So inimical were the responses and painful that memory, it prompted Yade to write: “I became aware of, for the first time, at nine and a half years old, all the negative mental representations attached to the color black, notably in France” (p. 10).

The stigmata of “blackness,”Footnote ²³ devoid of all favorable or honorable qualities, also emerges in the exegeses of religious parables that have been transliterated and translated over generations, making them subject to varied interpretations. An often cited example is the “Hamitic hypothesis,” or myth, in which one common version highlights the racialization of the progeny of Noah's son, Ham, who is cursed with “black” skin and perpetual servitude for openly gazing upon his father in a moment of indiscretion. Consequently, the stain of “blackness” becomes equated with social degradation in ways that would eventually provide a religious pretext for racial slavery, even as competing interpretations also suggest that “blackness” served to connote, not “race,” but rather punishment for the purposes of moral education (Aaron Reference Aaron1995; Mamdani Reference Mamdani2001). Still, the derogatory nature of the term is what makes it effective. And while, as Lowe (Reference Lowe, Earle and Lowe2005a, Reference Lowe, Earle and Lowe2005b) argues, racialized people were not indistinctly categorized as a group during the Renaissance or earlier eras, eventually, however, the force of the malignant meanings of “blackness” would become part of a collective consciousness expressed in discourses that made what it saw. The meanings would be projected onto bodies as well as ways of being and knowing associated with those bodies that came to be identified in a range of texts as “black.” Returning, then, to implicit bias research and its schema theory, these encoded understandings, once activated (knowingly and unknowingly), become the stuff of “stereotypes [that can] cause discrimination in part by biasing how we process information about other people” (Krieger Reference Krieger2008, p. 11).

Philosopher Tzvetan Todorov's (Reference Todorov1993) analysis of the development of “popular racialism” in France is also instructive in this context. Effectively, Todorov elucidates how influential thinkers such as Renan, Le Bon, Gobineau, and Taine advanced ideas of “the division of humanity into several major races—white, yellow, and black—and the hierarchization of this division” (p. 106). Such racialism represents a break with prevailing humanist thought forged in the European Enlightenment, another formidable barrier to the salience of “race” in French society. The Enlightenment, as one form of modernity, becomes pivotal in the archeology of “race” in France not only for the ways in which its doctrines of universalism and humanism structured French republicanism and, thereby, its ideals of “race-blindness,” but also for its universalizing assertions that encoded whiteness (and maleness) as normative, and “blackness” as a-normative (Bernasconi and Lott, Reference Bernasconi and Lott2000; Dubois Reference Dubois2004; Eze [Reference Eze1997] 2003; Hall [Reference Hall, Hall, Held, Hubert and Thompson1995] 2007; Muthu Reference Muthu2003).Footnote ²⁴

In Discourse on Colonialism, Aimé Césaire ([Reference Césaire1950] 2000) rails against what he calls “pseudo-humanism,” as “sordidly racist” for its biases and capacity to diminish rather than recognize and accord rights. Brilliantly, he exteriorizes this point in citing the philosopher and humanist, Ernest Renan:

As Stuart Hall ([Reference Hall, Hall, Held, Hubert and Thompson1995] 2007) phrases it in his analysis of modernity, “the emergence of the idea of the ‘West,’” as a “white” construct “was central to the Enlightenment” and each succeeding age would view its achievements through these ideas that were held to be the illustration of the height of human reasoning. Moreover, Western ideas of “race,” as products of such reasoning, would also provide a conscious-soothing justification for economic colonial expansion into a number of countries. In France, the principal architect of this was the celebrated statesman Jules Ferry. The influential and well-educated men of Ferry's time believed firmly that theirs was a modern, industrial society, a democratic society, and a superior society whose “superior races … have the duty to civilized the inferior races,” and raise them to a higher level of culture (Gaillard Reference Gaillard1989, p. 540; Wieviorka Reference Wieviorka1995, p. 6).

These already entrenched ideas migrated with(in) people across time and space, and where sustained contact with “black” populations may have been fleeting or non-existent in France, racialist ideas were brought to the French public during the Third and subsequent Republics through, for instance, colonial expositions and racial iconography used in commercial trademarks that represented—in reality constructed—stereotypes of colonized Africans (and Asians) as inferior “races” vis-à-vis the Enlightened imperial French. “Commercial trademark images” argues historian Dana Hale (Reference Hale, Peabody and Stovall2003):

Political scientist Fred Constant (Reference Constant2009) picks up on this point in analyzing what he refers to as the “tyranny of phenotype” indicative of the entrenched stigma of “blackness” distilled into present day racial stereotypes, representations that are in “flagrant contradiction to the democratic ideals to which the society clings,” that is, a society wherein “[o]fficially color [denoting “race”] is invisible,” and yet:

Returning to Krieger's (Reference Krieger2008) analysis, social stereotypes, as assimilated schemas or structures of knowledge, prejudice perceptions and are commonly triggered by encounters (real and simulated) with negatively stereotyped groups. A specific focus on anti-black discrimination by groups in France (and elsewhere) is necessarily significant when placed within a genealogy of the racial constructs of “black” and “blackness,” understood as socially-incorporated stereotype-producing information that biases perception. The very existence of the aforementioned representations are evidence of embedded racialist thought from which “Black” consciousness movements would emerge and to which they are compelled to respond, resignify, and reclaim, often as a matter of survival. In the French context, historian Jennifer Anne Boittin (Reference Boittin2009) well demonstrates in her revealing piece, “Black in France: The Language and Politics of Race in the Late Third Republic” that “[r]ace was used in multiple ways by colonial subjects and citizens who lived and worked in the metropole” (p. 23) during that period. Anti-imperialists and nationalists who were largely laborers, documents Boittin, self-recognized racially as a conscious and explicit expression of political agency against existing racial colonial discourses, exemplified in particular by the appellation, nègre. This would transform with the advent of Négritude, as a socio-cultural Black consciousness counter-discourse and movement that sought to force social change. Négritude inaugurates a theory and practice of Black humanism predicated on an evident “race” consciousness (both social and cultural), indeed a subjectivity of “being-[B]lack-in-the-world,” and of being racialized as a “black” object while resituating Africa in a world from which it had been removed (Diouf Reference Diouf and Diouf1999; Edwards Reference Edwards2003; Gueye Reference Gueye2006; Irele Reference Irele and Irele1990; Kesteloot Reference Kesteloot1991; Sharpley-Whiting Reference Sharpley-Whiting2002).

SOCIAL RACE CONSCIOUSNESS: SUBJECTIVITY IN “BLACK”

As a counter-discourse, Négritude's essential project entails the restoration of the full integrity of a denigrated Africa and its peoples deemed inherently subhuman by strands of Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment thought presented to the world as modernity. Hegelian “race” discourse becomes particularly telling and pivotal in these politics for how it fashioned and projected racial antinomies against which Négritude (and “Black” consciousness more broadly) came to position itself in fusing the racial with the political. “Race is reality,” states Leopold Senghor, in acknowledging that it has been made and made to matter, adding “I do not mean racial purity,” though there is a biological aspect to his view that is historically and materially conditioned by pre-existing dominant ideas (Irele Reference Irele and Irele1990, p. 71). The perduring representation that Hegelian thought erects is an a-historical, a-moral, and a-conscious “black” Africa, one “enveloped in the dark mantle of night [emphasis mine]” and inhabited, in this discourse, by beings who lay outside of humanity itself: “… there is nothing harmonious with humanity to be found in [their] character” (Hegel Reference Hegel1956). Africans are, thus, determined to be spiritually spent and morally bankrupt. In fact, “morality has no determinate influence upon them,” argues Hegel. “Anyone who wishes to study the most terrible manifestations of human nature will find them in Africa” (Eze [Reference Eze1997] 2003, p. 142). It is precisely to this persistent representation that Négritude would respond.

Jean Paul Sartre's “…contribution to the formulation of the concept,” as theorist and Négritude scholar Abiola Irele (Reference Irele and Irele1990) argues, “can be said to have been determinant in its establishment” of Négritude within a “race” dialectic “… as a contingent stage in a total historical process,” (p. 69) and one directed toward a synthesis of human society devoid of “race” and racism, which is clearly still in the offing. Sartre recognized the social realities of “race” in French society through “Black” consciousness activism, in particular French Négritude, and he well elucidated how racial oppression not only has the capacity to subordinate but also to empower, to consciousness-raise, and to command counter subjectivities:

Aimé Césaire, who embodied the political project of Négritude, would powerfully articulate these sentiments during the question and answer period following his conference paper at the First International Congress of Black Writers and Artists, organized in Paris in 1956. This watershed gathering of African and African-diasporic intellectuals convened to examine nothing short of the “Black” condition worldwide and, in so doing, demonstrated how symbolic struggles effectively reveal the stakes and interests in maintaining and/or subverting a certain vision of the world, a certain status quo. When asked by a European [read “white”] what his Négritude consisted of and why he deemed it important, Césaire was reported by James Baldwin, who chronicled the event, to have said: “We do not choose our cultures; we belong to them… We are not “black” by our own desire, but, in effect, because of Europe” (Baldwin Reference Baldwin and Baldwin1961, pp. 52–54).Footnote ²⁷

In recognition and defiance, then, of that invention, “blackness” becomes affirmed socially and culturally in the French context, as is it made fundamental to a collective “Black” identity, to a collective experience of anti-black oppression, to a nationalist worldview—in opposition to an Enlightened colonial status quo—and to a community. In short, an insult becomes transformed into a weapon of resistance against what thus far had exhibited itself as a hostile anti-black world. What “Blacks” had in common, declared Césaire, in keeping with a critical theme of the 1956 Conference, were “the injustices they suffered at European hands,” or as Baldwin would further describe it:

It would be, however, that vision held by other people, that “recognition by others,” to return to Calhoun's ([Reference Calhoun and Calhoun1994] 2003) formulation of identity politics, that would structure “Black” subjectivity in its past and present iterations, both of which emerge in response to the social effects of “race,” racial discrimination, and racism; indeed of a stigmatized “blackness,” marking inferiority that was foisted on people whose very identities have histories, as Stuart Hall (Reference Hall1989) would remind us. Identities, whatever their expression, are “… a matter of becoming as well as being…. But like everything which is historical, they undergo constant transformation … ,” if they are destined to evolve and to transcend their limitations (p. 5).

It is precisely this understanding that captures a contemporary and prominent counter-identity discourse of “Black” subjectivity by those who are the inheritors of Négritude, but who feel that they have overcome its supposed “infantile maladies” and “ethnocentric insularity” (Ndiaye Reference Ndiaye2008, p. 356). In distinguishing themselves from past Black consciousness movements, these adherents of a contemporary “Black” consciousness draw heavily from theorists who categorically reject calls for a common “Black” identity, as are their self assertions strategically informed by Sartre's ruminations on “race,” as well as by philosopher Tommie Shelby's (Reference Shelby2005) pragmatic “thin conception of blackness.” That is, this understanding emphasizes the common-oppression and common-cause aspects, rather than nationalist impulses, as the basis for Black solidarity in battles for racial justice. Similarly, sociologist Paul Gilroy's (Reference Gilroy1993, Reference Gilroy2000) concept of “ethnic absolutism” is also central to such subjectivity in terms of his rejection of biologized, essentialist fixations on the body that indelibly mark people with a single, unchanging identity.

CRAN spokesperson and scholar, Louis-George Tin (Reference Tin2008), captures the essence of a contemporary pragmatic “French Black” identity in his insightful piece, “Who is afraid of Blacks in France?: The Black Question, the Name Taboo, and the Number Taboo” (the latter point concerning the ethno-racial statistics debate to which I'll return). “Race-blindness” is critical to this formation in its retreat from “race” toward practical “blackness,” which remains all too evocative of festering wounds lingering in French society. This perspective merits citing at length, particularly for how it reflects such identity politics while echoing and shifting from Négritude, of which it is an extension and yet seeks to eclipse:

Unlike Tin, however, his colleague and co-CRAN member, Pap Ndiaye (Reference Ndiaye2008), who appears to share many of these views, breaks with Tin by advocating the use of “race” as an instructive concept for analyzing social inequalities in France—“race,” for him, understood as social construction. By extension, for Ndiaye, a “Black” identity is strategic in struggles against anti-black discrimination, and under no uncertain terms referential to an essence, culture, pride, or a “Black” community,Footnote ²⁸ a formation he rejects. In France, these formations are held to be communitarian, indicative of a divisive “race”-based multiculturalism that is equated primarily with the United States or the United Kingdom and reflective of what Shelby (Reference Shelby2005) refers to as a “thick conception of blackness.” “Blacks,” argues Ndiaye (Reference Ndiaye2008), “are black [lowercase his] because they are packed away in a specific racial category; in short they are black because they are held as such,” indeed constituted as such (p. 38). And while Ndiaye views “Blacks” in France as resembling their U.S. homologues socially, he rejects what he interprets as U.S.-style identity politics and solidarity formations, owing to the racial essentialism they are held to harbor.Footnote ²⁹

In actuality, “Blacks” of and in France are a community in formation (even as that is not the intent) and made so by the very construction of “blackness” in the society that has transformed common oppression into shared outlook and shared ways of being, perceiving, and knowing, especially for a younger generation who appear at times not to be limited by “blackness,” but are nevertheless defined by it. One witnesses this phenomenon in popular culture, in particular the visual and performing arts,Footnote ³⁰ and I have encountered this understanding when speaking with persons in their twenties and early thirties who self-identify as “French” and “Black” and who claim to never have encountered discrimination or racism in France, even as they acknowledge its existence in the society. Further, the formation of a “Black/black community” is being defined by a variety of activities that the media have also picked up on in their attempt to package and market multiculturalism and “blackness” in France. This ranges from the commemoration of the memory of slavery (i.e., 2001 Taubira law) to high profile media selections (i.e., Harry Roselmack and Audrey Pulvar as prime time news anchors), to the literary (2009 Goncourt winner, Marie Ndiaye, Pap Ndiaye's sister) and the political (i.e., Rama Yade, former Secretary of Human Rights and George Pau Langevin, Députée of the National Assembly), that is, appointments of often self-identified “Blacks” in ways unprecedented in the past, though few non-whites still hold top positions.Footnote ³¹

It is also worth noting that the 2001 Taubira law, which recognizes the Atlantic slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity, also established a national day of remembrance of the abolition of slavery in France whose yearly celebration helps set the foundation for community formation by planting seeds of unity out of common grounds of oppression that are cultural and political. This milestone was celebrated publicly for the first time in May 2005 in the presence of long-term activist and politician, Christine Taubira, after whom the law was named—a self-identified Black woman who made an exceptional bid for the presidency in 2002 and is currently one of a handful of faces of color in the National Assembly, most of whom do not represent any region in metropolitan France.

It should not be overlooked as well that the creation of the CRAN and other similar associations have also, in unanticipated ways, contributed to the very community formation that they denounce in promoting a basis of shared interests and outlook, however tenuous, from which communities often begin to emerge. Indeed, from racism and discrimination communities emerge as a defense mechanism against a group-based attack, well illustrated by the 2005 “riots” and the sans papiers movements in France specific to African immigration. Césaire (Reference Césaire2004) eloquently captures, as only he can, the signification of “community” that evolves from oppression in his paper delivered at the Première Conférence Hémisphérique des Peuples de la Diaspora at Florida International University in 1987:

While analysis of the pros and cons and the uses and abuses of “community” is too vast a topic to develop here, a critical analysis of “community” warrants greater attention against the literalness, reductionism, and failure to recognize the great diversity within and positive dimensions of “Black” community constructs, be they in France, Britain, the United States, Brazil, South Africa or other countries where “race” inheres in social structures.

The point is that by decontextualizing and/or dismissing the significance of “race,” or diluting the notion of “blackness” as merely stigmatized color devoid of socio-historical content, such adherents unwittingly play into the hands of those who wish to exonerate the larger society of any responsibility for ever having structured different peoples' trajectories and opportunities on the grounds of “race.” It also suggests that there are, in effect, no legacies or lasting effects of France's race-making past, which the existence of anti-blackness clearly contradicts. Further, to wage anti-black struggles, as a self-declared “Black/Noir” organization absent a key element that has fundamentally structured the literal terms of engagement, “race,” is to delegitimize their object (i.e., a specific focus on anti-black discrimination) and their objective (i.e., ending it). Further, when “race” is decontextualized and/or euphemized as “diversity,” said “diversity” becomes a hollow man sustained by manipulation that relies on consent, and, in so being, also denies France's racial past and how ascriptive traits determined placement in a social hierarchy and thereby in the distribution of social privileges, resources, and opportunities (accorded and denied) on the grounds of “race.” This, however, is clearly contradicted by slavery, through colonization, through spatial separation, to the contemporary ranking and profiling of groups targeted not merely because of the color of their skin, but rather for the inferiorized social meanings that their skin color socio-historically continues to signify racially. To acknowledge and foreground the structuring role of “race” in present anti-discrimination battles in France is decidedly risky, given France's arsenal of universalism, the principle of equality, and “race-blindness” itself that groups confront, which are also intrinsic to their activism as “French Blacks.” But, to do so would also provide such groups with the ammunition of history and legacy that would buttress one of their primary goals of statistically documenting anti-black discrimination whose necessity is challenged by a variety of stakeholders for and against ethno-racial classification in France.

STATISTICAL BLINDNESS, RACE-BLINDNESS, AND FRENCH ACTIVISM-IN-BLACK: “FRANÇAIS DES MINORITIÉS VISIBLES ISSUE DE LA DIVERSITÉ”Footnote ³²

At the core of the ethno-racial statistics debate is a basic question that has also been posed in the United States by sociologists in response to “race-blind” discourses there. Under what circumstances would ethno-racial classification foster social divisions and/or reinvigorate discredited notions of “race” and when would such categories advance instead greater social inclusion. Advocates of ethno-racial classification in the United States support the measurement and study of “race as a principle category in the organization of daily life … [race understood] … as a changing social construct” that shapes life chances.Footnote ³⁴ In the French context, demographer and proponent of ethno-racial statistics, Patrick Simon (Reference Simon2008), describes the divisiveness of this debate in his provocatively-titled essay directed at his opponents, “The Choice of Ignorance,” in which he maintains that the debate surrounding this issue largely serves to deflect attention from the realities of lived discrimination and the “flaws of the Republican model that are at the root of the controversy in the first place:”

In some ways, this battle is not only over documenting diversity, but rather over a racialized conception of French national identity. “Diversity statistics,” advocated by “Black” activists to measure differential treatment and outcomes across social categories are also supported by an array of prominent, established scholars.Footnote ³⁵ Moreover, the categories proposed by statistics advocates, hitherto non-existent, would derive not from state imposed classifications but from how individuals self-identify and perceive themselves to be identified based on their color or “visible difference.” Such activism, inscribed in pre-1990s multicultural differentialist protests, is now spearheaded by the CRAN's grassroots campaign and policy appeals to the state and common person, the most controversial of which being their unorthodox (for France) and highly publicized effort to demonstrate the statistical relevancy of anti-blackness in France where no such data have existed previously.Footnote ³⁶ Indeed, the question of “race” and its capacity to reinvigorate nineteenth century ideas or invoke racialism equated with Nazism weigh heavily on this debate. Even saying the word “race” in the French language is phonetically evocative in France, so it is not surprising, as Tin stated once in an interview in Le Monde, similar to Lozès's earlier statement about the non-existence of “race,” “For my part, I avoid the word” (Birnbaum and Hopquin, Reference Birnbaum and Hopquin2008).

Opponents to the generation of these data, such as social scientists Alain Blum and France Guérin-Pace (Reference Blum and Guérin-Pace2008), defend their position in an equally provocative article whose subtitle appears to target statistics advocates, “The Illusion of ‘Ethnic Statistics.’” As these scholars contend, those opposing such statistics point out that there is no scientific basis for the very categories they seek to construct, adding that “an ethnic group is not an objective entity; and, on the other hand, even if such statistics were collected, they would be of no help for measuring discrimination, since the latter is a complex process that cannot be reduced simply to the victim's appearance” (p. 46). Further, anti-statistics critics, as these scholars document, see these data as “dangerous,” because they harbor notions of “race” as biology, and reflect not diversity but rather end up “oversimplifying it,” (p. 49) thereby potentially concealing actual diversity while constituting boundaries where none had existed: “Ethnic statistics would have the effect of bringing in the notion of ‘race’—whose non-scientific character and danger are well known by all—and to foster intercommunity conflicts” (p. 49). In short, for those opposed to ethno-racial categories and statistics, they are anything but non-neutral and “reflect little more than a caricature of race conceived as appearance,” (p. 57), and, in so doing, are made to perform a labor for which they are ill-equipped to assess: illuminating discrimination and inequalities. Blum and Guérin-Pace (Reference Blum and Guérin-Pace2008) also point to the very real dangers of the misuse of such data in a country where the specter of former abuses always looms large. Ethno-racial documentation, it is believed, stands to open widely a door onto similar abuses by the state or private sectors that could promote (rather than obstruct) discrimination with such data, as has already tragically happened in the past, particularly during the Vichy regime in France and more recently in relation to Jean-Marie Le Pen of the National Front, discussed below.

Proponents argue, however, that the lack of such statistics masks diversity in French society and perpetuates the illusion of non-differentiation of its citizenry that is easily belied by acts of discrimination on the basis of visible differences, something widely recognized as existing (even by opponents), but is not statistically validated. It is for this reason that the controversial CRAN surveys become salient in these battles for how they actually highlight what the state seeks to camouflage by its “race-blind” discourse and what anti-statistics opponents invalidate as scientifically real; that is, racial discrimination expressed as anti-blackness, even as the CRAN, too, seeks not to document “race.”

This debate bled from the academy onto the streets where opponents and proponents have enlisted leading French agencies that specialize in public polling and market surveys to galvanize support for their stances. The cases of the CRAN (headed by Patrick Lozès of Benin origins) and SOS Racisme (headed by Dominique Sopo of Franco-Togolese origin, ten years Lozès' junior) are fascinating and emblematic of these tensions. In short, these two leading anti-racism associations in France are polarized on these issues, the latter being fundamentally opposed to ethno-racial data generation, even to battle racism and discrimination. Their respective stances appear to reflect the orientations of influential political organizations and parties with which each correspondingly maintains close affiliation: the CRAN and the NAACP on one end, and SOS Racisme and the French Socialist Party, therefore statist, on the other. Each association cites public support in favor of their position, and both have used the same public opinion polling agency (the CSA Politique-Opinion) to shape and document the public's viewpoint about the efficacy of collecting such data whose findings have received wide media coverage.

For instance, the CSA telephone survey conducted by SOS Racisme and the Union des Etudiants Juifs en France (Jewish Student Union of France [UEJF]) with whom they partnered found that the majority of French people polled, fifty-five percent, deemed the collection of such data “ineffective” (pas efficace) “in the battle against racism, anti-semitism, and discriminations,” anti-blackness being one form of many discriminations.Footnote ³⁷ However, the CSA-CRAN study asks a slightly different question whose principle finding troubles that of the CSA-UEJF-SOS study. That is, rather than inquiring whether the statistics should be part of the national census, as queried the UEJF-SOS survey, the CRAN survey asks the public about their sentiments toward a general study being conducted, as opposed to a state-driven project already associated with state-sponsored necro-politics and misdeeds of the past. Rather, the CRAN study sought to gauge the “French public's feelings of belonging in order to measure diversity and discriminations” in France to which over sixty percent, according to their findings, were in favor.Footnote ³⁸ And while “diversity” is supposedly a more neutral term than “race” for statistics advocates, it becomes a euphemized “race-blind” way to talk about conceptions of difference in order to make the issue of discrimination and inequalities more marketable and palatable to itself and the French public for whom the denial of both “race” and “ethnicity” is well entrenched. So, on the CRAN side of the aisle, the nomenclature of “race” and “ethnicity” are rejected on the surface, though are implicitly stated.

SOS Racisme and their supporters are, however, of another mind in voicing strong opposition to ethno-racial statistics in public forums and petitions: “It is urgent to take action against this abandonment of the founding principles of our Republic,” asserting further that,

By ‘other means,’ they refer to various forms of testing, for instance, to determine racial biases, heavily advocated by those on their side of the aisle, yet rejected by detractors who often cite one telling example to illustrate its limitations. As anti-discrimination agencies have found, there is considerable discrimination in France against names that are perceived as being of non-French origin, so one method used to capture employer discrimination focuses on how employers respond to the names of prospective applicants on curriculum vitas with identical qualification. Opponents of what is called “anonymous CVs” or testing of this nature maintain, however, that this overlooks the fact that people of color in France, such as the non-metropolitan French, also have French names. Recent studies using this approach combined with other methods have, on the other hand, documented name-based discrimination in France against those perceived as Muslims by prospective employers, thereby illustrating the conspicuousness of perceived and attributed religion (Adida et al., Reference Adida, Laitin and Valfort2010).Footnote ³⁹

As Daniel Sabbagh (Reference Sabbagh2008b) reports, SOS Racisme demanded that France's Conseil Constitutionnel (Constitutional Court) strike any questions about skin color in a far-reaching 2008–2009 survey, Trajectoires et Origines (Trajectories and Origins [TeO]), co-directed by Patrick Simon and his colleagues at the National Institute for Demographic Studies (INED) and by the National Institute for Statistics and Economic Studies (INSEE) whose preliminary findings were recently released (Beauchemin et al., Reference Beauchemin, Hamel, Lesné and Simon2010).Footnote ⁴⁰ The Court complied with SOS's request, but, the TeO team was nevertheless allowed to ask informants what they believed accounted for the discrimination that they suffered. According to these researchers' preliminary findings: “[t]he motives cited were first origins (or nationality) and skin color (fifty-seven percent and seventeen percent), then sex and age.” They also state that “the most visible are the first to be victims. Nearly one half of the sons and daughters of sub-Saharan African origin (forty-nine percent) reported having experienced discrimination in the last five years versus only ten percent of the majority population” (Beauchemin et al., Reference Beauchemin, Hamel, Lesné and Simon2010, p. 4). Further, in 2009, the French High Commissioner to Diversity, Yazid Sabeg, sought to convene a group of scholars, politicians, and activists to examine not whether but how to generate such data, only to meet stiff opposition from one of France's leading political scientists and a specialist on immigration, Patrick Weil. In a highly public forum, Weil refused Sabeg's invitation to join his committee, describing it and the Sarkozy administration as “pursuing a policy that was discretely and objectively discriminatory at a level not attained since the World War II.”Footnote ⁴¹ For Weil's part, this committee was attempting to step outside of the constitutional framework by using already discredited and presumptively illegal categories of “race” and “ethnicity” to measure what existing methods and categories cross-referenced (e.g., nationality, birthplace, and socio-professional class) could produce without corrupting Republican ideals enshrined in the Constitution.Footnote ⁴²

In many ways, these arguments for and against these statistics share the common practice of “race” avoidance that deemphasizes “race,” yet seeks to acknowledge “diversity.” Similar to its U.S. cousin, these “diversity discourses” emphasize, however, “difference” or being different, which carries an unspoken question: “different from what or whom,” as sociologists Joyce Bell and Doug Hartmann (Reference Bell and Hartmann2007) document in their study on diversity in everyday discourse in the United States. As they show, “diversity” may sound race-neutral or appear to transcend “race” altogether, but the discourse of diversity is, nonetheless, deeply racialized in the United States and harbors an unspoken recognition of “white” normativity. This can be said of France as well, in which, as stated in the previous sections, “blackness” (pragmatic or otherwise) is co-constitutive of “whiteness;” the latter, as I have shown elsewhere, is implied in French national identity (Keaton Reference Keaton2006). While “diversity” discourse on both sides of the pond is ubiquitous and rife with contradictions, it is shaping perceptions and practices, even as it also serves to evade discussions of “race” and its persistent effects that wind up perpetuating a status quo.

However, in the United States, “diversity” discourse also functions as a type of “happy talk,” according to Bell and Hartmann (Reference Bell and Hartmann2007), an optimistic, uplifting celebration of cultural difference (a codeword for “race”) and reflects the hope of diversity that still, nonetheless, evades “race talk.” This celebratory aspect of diversity is absent in the French context unless it operates within the national frame, which is not really challenged by advocates for and against these statistics; rather what is challenged are France's promises of equality yet to be attained. Indeed, “[r]ace is both everywhere and nowhere, a deep cultural self-deception that is difficult to identify and counter” (Bell and Hartmann, Reference Bell and Hartmann2007, p. 910). This observation stands as a testament to the powerful effects of state-sponsored ideological hegemony as “race-blindness” in France and, perhaps, post-race discourse in the United States that seeks to obfuscate the persistent social realities of “race.”

Ironically, those on all sides of these debates who dismiss, reject, or ignore the structuring role of “race” and its effects in French society, particularly those who assert racialized identities, come to sound much like their arch-detractors, the extreme right who also denounce attempts to identify and differentiate the French population on principles of universalism. However, the ends of the far right are obviously different, having more to do with denying Frenchness to those visibly different while advancing implicit notions of racial purity. At the risk of arguing by extremes, but in this case the extremity makes the point, former presidential candidate and head of the Front National, Jean-Marie Le Pen (and his followers, including his daughter, Marine Le Pen, the vice-president of the National Front) can always be counted on to illustrate such points, as he has done over the course of his infamous career, including his horrifying first-round win in the 2002 presidential elections that resulted in the stunning elimination of the presumptive winner, Socialist Prime Minister Lionel Jospin.

Two salient examples come to mind where Le Pen is concerned, one having to do with his highly publicized reaction to the multi-“ethnic” 1998 World Cup winners, celebrated as “Black, Blanc, Beur” (Black, White and Arab), whom he referred to as “not a true French team,” a view that still resonants today. And more recently, during the 2007 presidential election, the questions of representation and discrimination were very much on the table. In election and other speeches, Le Pen has been known to project on life-size screens his stated conception of French national identity: “Ni pote, Ni black, Ni blanc, Ni beur, Français!;” that is, neither a “friend/pal” or “homeboy” (lambasting the motto of SOS Racisme), neither black, neither white, neither Arab, [but] French!,” the latter deemed indivisible as well as normatively “white,” and embodied by him. Similarly, Le Pen also expresses a belief in non-differentiation of the citizenry and the rejection of ethno-racial statistics for “pure” French citizens, but advocates them for “ethnic” minorities. It is important to note in this context that Le Pen often cites exaggerated and/or fabricated statistics in his inflammatory anti-immigrant rants that attempt to draw sharp correlations between ethno-immigrant origins and crime (Le Monde 2009). National Front members' ostensible advocacy of these statistics serve an alternative purpose, however: to document ethnicity and “race” in order to further criminalize and demonize undesired groups, immigrants in particular, which is precisely what voices in the anti-statistics debate caution against. However, it is also for this reason that it matters who generates these data as well as why they are needed; that is, to demonstrate the actual state of affairs that could counter such wanton misdeeds and abuses that are taking place anyway in the absence of actual data.

The CRAN also seized the election moment to invoke the “Black question,” taking at times amusing swipes at the presidential frontrunners, something keenly exemplified by their Dailymotion clip, “Les candidats en black,” that mimicked the “race-makeover” idea featured in the U.S. reality show “Black/White” and in its French version, “Dans la peau d'un noir” or “Being Black.” Both shows aim at promoting awareness and sensitivity about racism and anti-black discrimination in the United States and France respectively. The CRAN ran with the idea, depicting “en black” the major candidates (all white) with a spiritualized version of the national anthem playing in tandem to their “racial” transformation.Footnote ⁴³

Ultimately, what all of these aforementioned groups have in common is their belief in and defense of the French republican model as the path for achieving their respective goals. It is perhaps sociologist Patrick Simon (Reference Simon2008) who best sums up this debate rightly pointing out that in a broader Europe, France is not the only country grappling with these issues (Blakely Reference Blakely1986, Reference Blakely1993; Carter Reference Carter1997; Essed Reference Essed1991; Essed and Goldberg, Reference Essed and Goldberg2002; Gnammankou and Modzinou, Reference Gnammankou and Modzinou2008; Clark Hine et al., Reference Clark Hine, Keaton and Small2009; Hondius Reference Hondiusforthcoming; McIntosh Reference McIntosh and Scafe2007, Reference McIntoshforthcoming):Footnote ⁴⁴

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

For their illuminating thoughts and challenging questions, I thank Mamadou Diouf, Daniel Sabbagh, Tracy Sharpley-Whiting, and Stephen Small, as well as the reviewers of this essay.