White Atlantic: Counterfeiting Race in France

Abstract

This article proposes that a new white racial consciousness is emerging in France. Camouflaged as the default universal, unraced and unmarked, against which racial difference is measured, whiteness turns racelessness into power. We know as much from the critical race and whiteness studies that have dissected the normative apparatus at work in white pretentions to color-blindness. But if such a critique remains relevant in France—where color-blindness is the legally mandated norm—it also isn’t enough. Examining recent polemics against le racisme anti-blanc, or anti-white racism, I document how white color-consciousness is taking hold in the French mainstream. The new white identity revolves around a central premise: the victimization of white people by the forces of antiracism. Advancing a diasporic vision of beleaguered whiteness, French architects of what I call the white Atlantic issue dark warnings about the “genocidal” consequences for white people of Black Lives Matter and related social movements. In so doing, I argue, they counterfeit the collective historical experience that gives race meaning—in particular the experience of Black people, whose history of transatlantic suffering the new white identity simulates and exploits.