Are French people white?: Towards an understanding of whiteness in Republican France

ABSTRACT

Based on ethnographic research of France’s North African second-generation, I bring together literatures on racial formation, whiteness, and race and racism in Europe to discuss how whiteness operates in French society. I discuss how respondents must navigate a supposedly colorblind society in which whiteness is default. Because these individuals are racialized as non-white, they are not seen as French by others. I discuss how they wrestle with definitions of French identity as white and full belonging in French society as centered on whiteness. I argue that salience of whiteness is part of France’s racial project in which differences among individuals are marked without explicit state-sanctioned racial and ethnic categories. This has implications for considering how whiteness is crucial to understanding European identity more broadly, including through the rise of the Far-Right, the recent Brexit and Leave campaigns, and anti-immigration sentiment throughout Western Europe.

KEYWORDS:

• Race/ethnicity
• France
• whiteness
• belonging
• national identity
• colorblind

Acknowledgments

I thank Nasar Meer for organizing this special issue and for his feedback and guidance. I also thank the reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions. Finally, I thank respondents for their generosity and participation. All errors are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. https://nyansapofest.org/.

2. https://www.lemonde.fr/societe/article/2017/05/28/anne-hidalgo-demande-l-annulation-d-un-festival-en-partie-interdit-aux-blancs_5135073_3224.html; https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/global-opinions/wp/2017/06/12/why-its-so-hard-for-minorities-in-france-to-find-safe-spaces/?utm_term=.2ce93a581320 I should note that a compromise was reached in terms of the festival in which the exclusive events would be held at the private venues and the festival events that were open to everyone could be held at private venues.

3. https://twitter.com/_LICRA_/status/868123586518757376?ref_src = twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E868123586518757376%7Ctwgr%5E373939313b636f6e74726f6c&ref_url = https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lemonde.fr%2Fsociete%2Farticle%2F2017%2F05%2F28%2Fanne-hidalgo-demande-l-annulation-d-un-festival-en-partie-interdit-aux-blancs_5135073_3224.html.

4. https://global-race.site.ined.fr/fr/evenements/autres-manifestations/.

5. Part of this is due to the conflation between European and Christian as identities (Bonnett 1998).

6. Moreover, this is similar to equating whiteness with ‘eliteness.’ Ayling (2017) argues that the colonial relationship between Nigeria and the UK has colored Nigerian parents’ perceptions of quality education which leads them to prefer sending their children to private schools in the UK, versus high-quality schools in Nigeria.

7. Although Omi and Winant (1994) theoretical frameworks of racial formation and the racial project have been criticized as solely applicable to the United States, I suggest that their frameworks are quite applicable to non-United States contexts as, among other characteristics, they do not rely on Black/White binaries. In addition, I would like to challenge the idea that an American understanding of race and ethnicity is completely divorced from a European one, particularly when considering the interlinking histories of slavery by both the United States and several European countries (Goldberg 2006).

8. This is not unlike the experiences of people of color in other plural societies, including the United States, where they have to contend with whiteness as the default for national identities (see Trieu and Lee 2016).

9. One example of this is how so-called neutral laws have disparate outcomes based on race and ethnicity (Moschel 2011).