#You Know You’re Black in France When

A groundbreaking study about everyday antiblackness and its refusal in an officially raceblind France.

What does it mean to be racialized-as-black in France on a daily basis? #You Know You’re Black in France When… responds to that question. Under the banner of universalism, France messages a powerful and seductive ideology of blindness to race that disappears blackened people and the antiblackness they experience. As Trica Keaton notes, in everyday life, France is anything but raceblind. 

In this interdisciplinary study, drawn from a range of critical scholarship including that of Philomena Essed and Frantz Fanon, Keaton illuminates how b/Black (racialized/politicized) French people distinctly expose and refuse what she calls “raceblind republicanism.” By officially turning a blind eye to the specificity of antiblackness, the French state in fact perpetuates it, she argues, along with structural racism. Through daily life, public policies, visual culture, the private lives of individuals and families shattered by police violence, the French courts where many are fighting back, and her own experiences, Keaton charts the troubling dynamics and continuities of antiblackness in French society.