The Pernicious Delusion of Colorblind Policymaking

In the late 1990s, when I was a New York Times correspondent based in West Africa, international airline connections made passing through Paris a rite of both work and vacation. On one such visit, I received a shock that has stuck with me. As I approached a subway station not far from the Champs-Élysées, out of its stairwell came running two policemen, their guns drawn, as they pursued a young Black man whom they caught up to, badly manhandled, and then hauled away under arrest.

As someone who had grown up in Washington, D.C., and recently moved to Africa from New York City—or simply as someone who had watched U.S. local news broadcasts and grown up consuming his country’s violent small- and large-screen offerings—I had been trained to think that urban scenes such as these were a unique product of my own country.

On subsequent transits through Paris, I was disabused of yet more of my naivete when I began taking trains into the central city instead of taxis. Maybe it was a labor strike that had caused me to do this at first, but the experience so intrigued me that I began making a habit of it. Not even in New York had I felt such a gulf between the popular image of a city and this kind of lived experience of it via public transportation.

For long sections of these rides, the cars were filled with Black and brown people–– overwhelmingly young and, I surmised, overwhelmingly either the children of recent immigrants or immigrants themselves, with France’s former colonies in North and sub-Saharan Africa the most likely places of origin. Before reaching the stylish, urban dreamland exalted in countless romantic Hollywood fantasies and more than a century of novels and travel writing, one must traverse something altogether different and discordant: a huge expanse of what the French rather delicately refer to as banlieues. They needn’t have resorted to the term, though. For many of these places, the old European word “ghetto” would have fit just fine.

Passing through and eventually visiting some of them, I was reminded of other grim cityscapes I have known in other parts of the world. The comparisons are admittedly not perfect, but segregated townships built under South African apartheid came to mind, as did some of the bleaker sections of New York where I had once paid dues as a local reporter, such as the more depressed parts of the Bronx.

As with the notorious infrastructure schemes of the powerful New York master planner of the last century, Robert Moses, which deliberately isolated Black communities and cut them off from areas privileged in terms of race and class and from public amenities such as the city’s beaches, Paris’s banlieues are poorly connected to the city’s transportation system, heightening their economic and social isolation and therefore their misery. For those looking for points of optimism after France’s recent civil disturbances, projects underway or on the books are expected to dramatically increase subway connections for these long-neglected parts of the city.

There is an old saw that holds that history never repeats itself but often rhymes. And it was just such a resonance—and not the recent events in Paris themselves, per se—that has brought France’s capital powerfully to mind for me.

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To briefly review those events, though: On June 27, a French teenager of Algerian descent was fatally shot by a police officer during a traffic stop in what amounted to a virtual execution. A video of the incident that was widely shared online shows a police officer shoot 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk at close range through his window as his car pulls away.

Outraged young people, who were disproportionately “of color,” then rose up in protests that lasted for six days and included numerous acts of looting, vandalism, and even violence. This, in turn, drew florid condemnations from broad segments of French society, with many people using racialized language or outright racism to denounce not just the protesters’ behavior, but also the growing presence of minority groups in France and the immigration that helps drive it.

What has intrigued me here is a powerful coincidence of timing—and, as I will explore below, perhaps a deeper connection in terms of history and significance with a major decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. And therein, a paradox arises.

France has long prided itself on its all-but-unique handling of racial diversity. Official policy comes close to pretending that such a thing does not exist and takes this for an unqualified positive. The republic is indivisible, says one often invoked phrase, and in the pursuit of its supposed universalism, France has made it illegal to collect data on the basis of a person’s race.

If it is possible to glimpse some admirable idealism in France’s notion of universalism, it has an insufficiently acknowledged dark side as well. Firstly, it requires a near complete assimilation into the dominant national identity of we might call “Frenchness,” which is overwhelmingly defined and policed by people of one race. This might even be considered one of its main, if unstated, features. In order to function, French universalism requires a charade: pretending to be colorblind.

This colorblindness may help prevent French people from noticing that their television news industry or their cinema, to take two industries, are crushingly white, well beyond the true demographic breakdown of the society. But it does nothing to alleviate the underlying reality that opportunity still correlates strongly to race in the country. The same, for that matter, is true of life in the isolated banlieues, as opposed to the tonier parts of the city. I have little doubt that the same patterns hold in other spheres of society as well, from elite educational institutions to national politics.

France’s readiest and most powerful counterexample is, of course, the United States, which has long served as an almost archetypical national “other” to justify French policies and obtain buy-in from a French public that has been socialized over generations to view the United States both with haughty disdain and as a menace to the French way of life. Any idea of taking race or color into account in forming public policy is dismissed as succumbing to a dangerously corrupting Americanism.

The recent ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that race-conscious college admissions programs violate the U.S. Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection, however, suggests the French may have little to worry about on this score. The two countries would indeed appear to be converging in favor of the French way: pretending that color doesn’t exist and that race has no place in social policy.

The Supreme Court ruling may have barred the overt consideration of race in college admissions in the United States, but it cannot pretend away the fact that Black students are dramatically underrepresented in higher education in the country, as they have been for generations—a product of actual policy during the United States’ long era of segregation and Jim Crow.

In fact, as the University of Chicago law professor Sonja B. Starr has argued, racial gaps exist across a very wide range of categories in U.S. life, from income and employment rates to maternal mortality and life expectancy to exposure to toxic environmental pollution and incarceration.

The question is: What are wealthy societies such as the United States and France to do about such realities? Overtly taking race into consideration clearly displeases large numbers of people in rich democracies, especially among those who have benefited most from inequality. If governments are not allowed to even weigh the racial facts before them, what realistic hope is there for public policy to redress these problems?