In 2010, French sociologist Saïd Bouamama teamed up with rapper Saïdou to publish a text and accompanying rap album entitled Devoir d'Insolence(Duty to Be Insolent).In general, the project critiques a ‘dual citizenship’ model and the vestiges of colonial racism in France that, in the authors’ view, continues to equate racial and ethnic minorities with foreigners. Mere months after publishing Devoir d'Insolence, however, conservative anti-discrimination organization l'AGRIF (l'Alliance générale contre le racisme et pour le respect de l'identité française et chrétienne; General Alliance against Racism and for the Respect of French, Christian Identity) asked that Bouamama and Saïdou be charged with discriminatory hate speech for their publication. It was not until 2015 that Bouamama and Saïdou were acquitted; the judge cited the fact that ‘Les Français de souche, cela n'existe pas’ (There is no such thing as ‘pure French stock’).

Closer analysis of this case reveals a paradox: to fight against discrimination in France is itself increasingly labeled as ‘discriminatory’. In fact, this case (and others like it) coincides with the rising currency of the term ‘anti-white racism’ in France—applied not only to individual instances of violent crime, but also speech acts in which the word ‘white’ is not even uttered. To level these claims against Devoir d'Insolence in particular, however, ironically lends weight to the critiques the text offers—that France's colorblind universalism brands racial and ethnic minorities as ‘foreigners’ who, even if they are born in France, are rarely considered ‘truly French’. Because the very act of bringing the anti-white racism cases depends on equating Frenchness and whiteness, the case itself illustrates the normativity of whiteness in France.

As I have traced in the preceding chapters, immigrants and racial and ethnic minorities have contested this latent association between visible minorities and foreigners, as well as the institutionalized spectacularism underpinning it. Similarly, scholarly studies have sought to complicate notions of a homogeneous French population by foregrounding racial and ethnic minorities’ long presence in and contributions to the Republic. Moreover, as I showed in chapters 3 and 4, authors themselves have pluralized not just notions of Frenchness, but also of racial and ethnic communities in France by highlighting the heterogeneity of experiences and perspectives that defines ‘Black France’ and ‘Afropea’.