Racial profiling and the ‘French exception’

Abstract

‘The “exceptional” nature of the French cultural and political tradition’, as scholar Catherine Raissiguier sees it ‘resides … in its ability to foreground a strong discourse of universal inclusion and equality along with its unique resistance to acknowledging exclusionary and discriminatory discourses and practices both in its past and in its present’ (2010: 1). In keeping with Raissiguier’s conceptualisation, les contrôles au faciès (which translates as ‘racial profiling’) fit squarely within this model at this moment when politicised discourse racialises diversity and defines it as a threat to personal and national security. The French Republican model functions in this context as an authoritarian mode of assimilation and universalism that seeks to destroy difference at the expense of equality and inclusion. These ‘controls’ are only, however, the surface of a deeper and more insidious problem in French society that continues to go misnamed and thus mishandled: race.