The killing of a French teenager was not ‘random’ – but the result of a profound racial bias

Twenty years ago, I took a University course in France called The Sociology of Youth. In a lecture on “delinquency”, the white professor made a reference to immigrants. I raised my hand and asked, in French, if racism was relevant to their experiences. His response was sharp and unequivocal: “This isn’t the United States. We don’t have that kind of problem here.” After class, a young Muslim woman from Cameroon – a former French colony – pulled me aside and said, “We do have those problems here.”

Looking back on that experience, what’s striking to me is not just that the white professor flatly denied the existence of racism in France – it’s also the fact that the Black woman who pulled me aside didn’t feel safe and authorised to speak in class.

As an African American scholar who has researched racism in France, I’ve become accustomed to white French people using the United States as a convenient shield for denying their own society’s long history of racial oppression. Today, French politicians, intellectuals and pundits – the vast majority of whom are white – remain mired in the same denial and false claims of universalism, even as the country grapples with the brutal police killing of 17-year-old Nahel M, a French Arab youth, in the Parisian suburb of Nanterre.

Nahel’s death at the hands of police was not a random occurrence – nor was it, contrary to French president Emmanuel Macron’s assertion, an “inexplicable” event. It was the logical outcome of the colonial histories, racial biases and policies that converge to render the lives of Arab and Black people particularly vulnerable in France.

But it would be wrong to suggest that all of French society is in denial about racism. Nahel’s mother, Mounia, is not confused as to why her only child has now been laid to rest. In her view, French police “saw an Arab face, a little kid, and wanted to take his life”. Such a perception is rooted in everyday experiences of racial profiling, humiliation and abuse at the hands of police as well as empirical evidence of widespread biases against racialised minorities.

In 2017, French authorities passed a disastrous law expanding police powers to shoot on motorists. The result was as deadly as it was predicable: an exponential rise in the number of police killings with the majority of victims being Black or Arab.

A 2021 poll conducted for SOS Racisme, a well-known French anti-racist organisation, found evidence of widespread racial hatred and ethnic bigotry in France, with 50 per cent of French people expressing the sentiment that there are “too many” Roma people in the country and 43 per cent indicating that there are “too many” Arabs in France. A full 91 per cent of Black people in France report experiencing discrimination. Even France’s own government has provided limited acknowledgement of racism – without implementing any policies to address it.

Colonial arrogance, fuelled by a shocking degree of historical ignorance, has empowered the white French majority to repeatedly ignore, erase and silence the voices and knowledge of French people who are racialised as “non-white”.

Twenty years before my white French sociology professor told me that racism isn’t a problem in France, 100,000 French Arabs said otherwise by taking to the streets of Paris in a historic March for Equality and Against Racism. In reality, those who are targeted by French racism have been speaking up, protesting and resisting for generations while white French people have largely doubled down with gaslighting, denial and repression.

Mame-Fatou Niang, a French academic, has shown how French women of African descent have played a significant role in radical movements for liberation – history that is almost entirely absent from the French educational curriculum. Frantz Fanon, one of the leading contemporary theorists of racism, was a Black Frenchman from the island of Martinique – a site of centuries of enslavement and colonial exploitation. Fanon, who supported the Algerian effort to overthrow French domination, understood from personal experience that racism is inextricably tied to colonisation. Small wonder that his revolutionary work is rarely taught in France.

It goes without saying that colonial empires brutalised their subjects: mass killings, torture, displacement, exploitation and forced labour. But colonisation also enacts lasting and durable harm to the culture and psyche of colonisers by teaching generations of people to view other human beings as disposable and to ground their sense of self in a myth of superiority.

Those power relations and this dehumanising logic do not just magically disappear. French people like Nahel – who was of Algerian and Moroccan ancestry – are demonised because of the continuing legacies of colonial racism.

Instead of courageously grappling with these difficult truths, French authorities have chosen a dangerous path of historical revisionism. A 2005 French law required teachers to emphasise the “positive aspects” of colonialism. Such indoctrination is directly to blame for the biases that lead police to disproportionately target, harass and kill people with ancestral ties to France’s former colonies.

French intellectuals such as Arthur de Gobineau were among the very first architects of white supremacist ideology – yet most French people remain woefully ignorant of their own history and its consequences. The refusal of the French – and many other Europeans – to honestly face their ongoing history of racism might also explain why many white observers of the current uprisings seem far more concerned about the looting and sacking of stores than the looting and sacking of entire continents.

Meaningful change will only come when anti-racist activists, community members and citizens are able to overcome the forces of erasure and denial that continue to seize France in a holding pattern of inaction and injustice.

At a 2020 march in memory of Adama Traoré, a Black man who died after being apprehended by French police, a protester correctly observed that “[nothing] will ever change until people are educated about racism. Starting with the police.”

Crystal M. Fleming is Professor of Sociology and Africana Studies at Stony Brook University and the author of Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France. Follow her on Twitter