One would be hard pressed to find a section called “race” or “race and ethnicity” in a public library in France, the very country that has witnessed the development of modern sociology, from the works of Emile Durkheim to Pierre Bourdieu. In fact, the classification closest to “race” in the sociology section of a library would be “immigration,” a combination of “immigration and integration,” or, more rarely, “racism.” Yet, on the other hand, in 2019, French television produced a successful drama mini-series, Les Sauvages (Savages), set in contemporary times, where the main character is a Kabyle-French man freshly elected president of France, that deals with issues such as prejudice and the trauma of French colonization and depicts what has been called a “multicultural France” or the “ethnic diversity of France” (Leblanc, 2019). In the first episode, the main character, Idder Chaouch, the newly elected French president (played by French-Moroccan actor Roschdy Zem), refers to “the colonial fact with its unsaid that’s poisoning us, these truths that have been silenced so much that they have become lethal.” And yet, race as a social category has not been referred to explicitly in the reviews of the program in French newspapers and magazines, which instead use the euphemism of a “young generation from immigrant background” to describe the characters.

American cultural critic and essayist Thomas Chatterton Williams, who works and lives in France, has been a vocal proponent of the idea of “retiring from race” and supports the idea of a post-racial society, an argument that has been praised in the French media. In his book Self-Portrait in Black and White (2019), Williams suggests “transcending” and “unlearning” race. In a February 2021 article in French national newspaper Le Figaro, Williams warns France against the American “obsession” with race and says he is more attached to the French model of citizenship without race. By refusing to focus obsessively on race, he believes that France allows its citizens a freedom that Americans don’t have. Such statements have been echoed by French intellectuals and politicians.

Yet, as Jean Beaman (2018) explains in her essay on French Martiniqueborn political philosopher Frantz Fanon, although French identity is presented as nonracial and colorblind, Blackness is overdetermined from without the person and is also constitutive of a person’s identity.