PaP Ndiaye, a French historian of Senegalese origin and professor of the social sciences at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes in Paris, opens La condition noire [The Black Condition] anecdotally, with a short story by Marie Ndiaye, his sister and a well-known writer. The short story allegorically presents the various ways that “blacks” in France, understood as individuals and groups of African or Antillean origin, come to terms with their experience of being an “invisible” minority. Ndiaye profitably calls our attention to the paucity in the French social sciences of serious scholarship that focuses on the condition of blacks as a French minority (rather than being considered abstractly as a community or people) in contemporary metropolitan France. Ndiaye explains that by the “condition” of blacks, he means a social situation that characterizes the life of a minority whose members have in common the experience of being regarded as black. Ndiaye provides a well-documented historical account of the shortcomings of the social sciences in France. His study not only examines the perceived failure of the French social sciences to effectively render an account of the phenomenon of “racial discrimination” in France, but also challenges the very civic organisms and antidiscrimination associations—such as SOS Racisme— that have been visibly dedicated to fighting discrimination since the 1980s. In both cases, Ndiaye sees a failure to address, for obviously different reasons, the important question of structural racism, which significantly shapes a whole way of living and thinking in French society. While the French social sciences, in Ndiaye’s view, simply reject “race” as an analytical category and perpetuate in this manner the invisibility of blacks, SOS Racisme and similar groups address only acts of racism (such as verbal or physical aggression), instead of calling into question the structures of thinking that promote, in a much broader way, the occurrence of such social phenomena. By his own admission, Ndiaye writes from the double position of a researcher who unapologetically uses the theoretical and methodological models of the Anglo-American social sciences, and an active member of