“Universality could work easily enough when there weren’t too many immigrants or when they were white Catholics,” said Gérard Araud, France’s former ambassador to the United States. “But faced with Islam on one side and Black Africans on the other, this model has evidently reached its limits. Emphasizing a racial identity, she said, would make Black French perpetual outsiders in a society where the overwhelming majority aspires to a colorblind universalism. Rokhaya Diallo, 42, a journalist who is also one of France’s most prominent anti-racism activists, said she became aware of a shared sense of race only after she became an adult and often found herself the only Black person in an academic or professional setting. She grew up in La Courneuve, a suburb of Paris known as a banlieue, in a building with mostly immigrants from France’s former Southeast Asian colonies.

Source: New York Times July 14, 2020 09:00 UTC