Everyday anti-blackness and anti-racism in contemporary France

How do French people who self-identify and are identified as Black in contemporary France struggle against and are complicit with the misrecognized and unacknowledged ways that racism and discrimination are interwoven in their everyday lives? How do they prove the existence of such violence and cope with the damage that it wrecks on them as Black people when French law prohibits the collection of ethno-racial statistics to study these issues, a ban also supported by groups discriminated against? To self-understand as French and Black is to exist in a state of contradiction with France’s powerful discourse of indivisibility or non-distinction of its citizenry, particularly in terms of race.  The French Republican model relies fundamentally on seductive fictions of universalism (masking a hegemonic uniformity) and race-blindness (euphemized as color-blindness) that interpellate as they insist on undifferentiated inclusion.  And yet, the implicit frame of reference of that very model remains prima facie and in practice normatively white.  In short, ethno-racialized French people are intrinsically rendered invisible in this model and along with them their claims of anti-blackness as French people, especially anti-blackness in its everyday, less explicit forms.  This paper explores not only the under-analyzed realities of anti-blackness in contemporary France but also how “French Blacks” strategically and pragmatically engage in anti-racism struggles, all with a distinctively French cast.