The performativity of colour blindness: race politics and immigrant integration in France, 1980–2012

Abstract

ABSTRACT France is usually conceived of as an assimilationist country, where national identity is based on principled colour-blind values. The emergence of values running counter to the dominant French model during the 1980s and 1990s has therefore led to the formation of two dominant positions in the literature: advocates of the path-dependent nature of models have refused to acknowledge the existence of structural and durable dissonances with this formal colour blindness à la française, while the epigones of Gunnar Myrdal have only seen a contradiction between formal colour-blind principles and the actual treatment of minority groups in France, described in terms of a ‘French dilemma’. Both positions are unsatisfying insofar as they fail properly to articulate the co-existence of, on the one hand, principles of colour blindness that have saturated public discourses in France over the last 30 years and, on the other, the no less omnipresent framing of French citizens with postcolonial immigrant origins in public and political discourses in racial and ethnic terms. To overcome this difficulty, Bertossi suggests we look at the mutually supportive relationship between colour blindness and the culturalization of French citizenship, and examine how the performative effects of the French colour-blind model have produced a framing of membership and identities in ethnic and racial terms in contemporary France. This analysis focuses on two different settings in which these effects can be observed: first, the official narrative on French citizenship, as provided by a series of public reports on immigrant integration published over the last three decades; second, the negotiations on ethnic and racial diversity in the French military after the end of conscription in the late 1990s and early 2000s.