The acknowledgement of race to improve lives and livelihood in France’s Black communities.
In France, race is taboo and immigration a hot potato. These are two of the first lessons I learnt upon relocating back to the country in 2012. The French Republic is officially “color blind” because the law bans the collection of data on race, ethnicity and religion, asserting the idea that all citizens are equal and free from these distinctions. This practice dates back to the Holocaust, when the Vichy regime singled out Jews for deportation to Nazi concentration camps. Today, the reality is that France’s color-blind policy doesn’t only make it blind to race but to racism as well.
As one would expect, the national political debate around immigration is fraught. There’s hardly any election where immigration—particularly as it relates to Africans and Middle Easterners—does not take a front seat. Emigration, on the other hand, does not get as much publicity as immigration. It is known that French citizens head to other countries because they are overburdened by the taxes of the French government.
No one talks about immigrants who return to their country of origin. For example, Some African immigrants leave their birth country to escape poverty, violence, war, etc. Many of them actually do head back home when things get better there or after they retire in the country they migrated to.
Debates on “ethnic” statistics have been ongoing; anti-racism activists have been speaking about its economic and political consequences for years now and the lack of this data does more harm than good. It covers up racism. It erases the experiences of minorities. It makes it difficult for problems of minority groups to be addressed and remedied.
Here’s a personal example: I lacked basic knowledge about uterine fibroids and treatment options until I was 36-years-old. Back in Nigeria where I am from, people just weren’t talking about issues of the female reproductive system. In France, people weren’t talking about it, either. Black and white women, colleagues and friends, only opened up to me about their experience after they learnt that I had a myomectomy, the surgical procedure to remove fibroids from my uterus.
In France, I learned from a doctor that Black women get fibroids more than any other demographic but I was unable to find data explaining the reason why fibroids affect Black women disproportionately and its impact on Black women’s fertility and mental health.
France’s refusal to “see color” was also demonstrated during the first wave of the coronavirus pandemic. In the spring of 2020, Porte Ouverte, the evangelical megachurch in France experienced scores of coronavirus deaths within its congregation. Earlier in February that year, hundreds of people from around the world arrived at the church for a weeklong prayer event. It is there that authorities believed at that time was the tipping point of the epidemic in France.
The scores of deaths included Black people who seemed far younger than their white counterparts, which prompted me to search for race-driven death races in the country. I, as a Black person, wanted to know if death rates among Black people were higher than for white people in the same age category or if in general Black people were dying at roughly the same rate as white people. Unsurprisingly, there were none.
Data from the United States and the United Kingdom showed that COVID-19 death rates were higher among Black people than white people. In France, on the other hand, data only showed the number of people infected, dead and recovered from the coronavirus. In April 2021, the French government’s statistics agency, INSEE, finally published data on deaths of people born abroad and those of people born in France. It revealed that African immigrants were hit the hardest, followed by Asian immigrants. The data came many months late and no one was really surprised by the results. Even then, the French study only showed mortality figures based on ‘country of birth,’ which meant that Blacks born in France were not counted. Poverty was one of the factors linked to the high death rate amongst immigrants.
We need to count the number of Black people that have died from the virus in France, point-blank. We need to know what data has to say about the high poverty rate amongst minorities. We need data that will show that racial discrimination exists, that racial disparities maintain inequalities and have great impacts on the lives of minorities. Until then, Black people and other groups will continue to fall to the virus in unequal measure.
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In 2016, I joined the yachting industry on the French Riviera and quickly discovered that it was a predominantly white sector. Curious, I wanted to understand the reason why people of color were underrepresented in the yacht charter industry. Don’t Black people like to boat, too? In my research, I found statistics on the number of people employed in the charter sector, but due to the industry’s color-blind policy, I found no data on workforce diversity. Five years later, people of color are still widely underrepresented in luxury yachting, despite the economic boom the yachting sector has experienced post-pandemic. I would also like to know why minorities are underrepresented in sectors such as science, technology, engineering, etc.
In the south of France, I have had only a handful of experiences of ethnic profiling. My most embarrassing experiences were with the French customs at the Nice Airport and another time, with the Italian police at the Ventimiglia train station near the French-Italian border. However, friends who live in Paris for example, are victims on a regular basis of everyday predatory tactics like ‘stop and frisk’ policing, shopping (or dining or doing anything) while Black. I can recall an instance of a friend who was asked to immediately settle the bill every time she made an order while drinking at a bar. Other non-Black clients were allowed to settle their total bill at the end. When she questioned it, she and the person she was with were thrown out.
The “color-blind” approach which is supposed to “deal” with ethnic “problems” in France has failed in issues concerning employment, housing, healthcare and others. How do we know if the fight against discrimination and harassment against Black people is effective without basic data? How do we measure the progress of anti-racist policies?
It is important to know that the lack of race, ethnicity and religion statistics have made it possible for far-right politicians to blame immigration and immigrants for France’s social problems. They come up with inflated estimates to plant fears about crime and terrorism to reap political discord. Without religion-based statistics, they will continue to capitalize on the lack of official data to exaggerate the percentage of Muslims arriving in France to stoke fears of terrorism. Without ethnic-based statistics, they will continue to incite fears about how Black people are prone to violence, how they populate prisons, burden taxpayers and place enormous strains on Social Security (the French health insurance). Without race-based statistics, they will continue to spread fears about how foreigners are taking their jobs and their women and also about how they will soon be outnumbered by foreigners.
Refusing to see race does not mean that racism does not exist. The people of France deserve to know what data has to say about racial bias in housing, employment, policing and healthcare–from infant and maternal mortality, to mental health problems, to morbidity amongst minority groups. Accurate data will help to identify and address the problems of racial disparities, to know which reforms will work to effectively eliminate them, and finally to measure progress or regression.
