When French Means White: About Citizenship and the Colonial Specificities of Racism in France

Racist mechanisms in France deny racialised citizens recognition as French citizens, even more so when they live in marginalised social housing neighbourhoods. The question of who is considered French, which is framed in this paper as a question of citizenship, is informed by embodied everyday experiences of inequality. Even if the racialised inhabitants of marginalised neighbourhoods have formal political rights, they do not feel that they count as full-right citizens. They feel that what is expected from them is that they give up their cultural difference, remain silent, invisible and not disturb anyone. These expectations are incompatible with the definition of citizenship as the right to claim rights. This paper explores how research participants understand the causes and consequences of not being considered a full-right citizen. The focus of the paper is on persons with family ties to North Africa, who live in social housing neighbourhoods, who hold formal French citizenship, and yet encounter forms of othering that undermine their substantive experience of being considered a French citizen. Discussions with research participants took place in the context of the Université Populaire, which is a community-driven knowledge project that created space for discussions on discrimination, neighbourhood stigmatisation and later, the legacy of the colonial past. Combining the outcomes of extensive field research with insights from citizenship and postcolonial studies has led to two main findings. The first is that differential citizenship, where not all nationals have access to the same social, political and economic rights is not only a feature of France's colonial past but also of its present. The second is that being excluded from the category of (White) French has consequences for the degree to which one can claim rights and one is considered worth defending. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.