Liberté, égalité, fraternité—pour qui?
Many other countries, such as France, experience similarly entrenched
racism, even though that country’s national mythology purports it to be a
steadfastly color-blind society. The government refuses to compile
statistics on faith, ethnicity, or skin color in its census. This
universalist outlook masks modern-day racism resulting from historical
atrocities. As is true of many countries in Europe, France’s role in
perpetuating colonial race-based slavery in the Americas is often
misunderstood, leading to a belief that racism is a new-world, not an
old-world, problem.
As Maboula Soumahoro, a specialist in African diaspora studies at the
University of Tours, told France 24, “Because slavery was illegal on the
mainland, people in France have the impression that this hyper-racialized
history that is characteristic of the modern world only concerns the
Americas,” adding that “France is not blind to racism. France thinks it’s blind to racism.” This refusal to see race, and the
official policy that derives from it, leaves the country unprepared to
address systemic racism.
Policing in France may be less lethal than in the United States, but
violence and discrimination are targeted far more toward racial minorities
than toward French people who are white. Young men perceived as Black or
Arab are 20 times more likely to face identity checks. Twenty percent of
young Black or Arab French people reported being the victim of brutality in
their most recent police interaction—well above the 8 percent of their
white counterparts.
As in the United States, however, this systemic racism extends far beyond
treatment by police. In a country where religion is often strongly
correlated with race, men perceived to be Muslim by employers are up to
four times less likely to get a job interview than candidates seen as
Christian, according to the think tank Institut Montaigne (Valfort 2015). A
2018 study by the University of Paris-Est Créteil found that job applicants
with Arab-sounding names got 25 percent fewer responses than those with
French-sounding names.
