Papers, Please

Several years ago I took a train from Paris to Heidelberg. Rolling through the Champagne countryside an hour into the trip I realized to my dismay that I had left my passport in my apartment. I seldom carry it with me around Paris, even though as an American I probably should. Having grown up in a culture that gives the principle of protection from arbitrary search and seizure at least nominal recognition, the right of the French police to demand identity papers at any time has always intuitively troubled me. On the train I sweated nervously for a few minutes until I realized that there was only a remote chance my missing passport would cause me trouble. Outside an airport, I have never been subject to an ‘identity control’ in Europe. When the word Schengen came to mind, it made me breathe easier.

Of course, as luck would have it, at the now-often-pretend border with Germany, the French national police boarded the coach from the far end. My heart started racing until the three officers stopped in front of two young men of apparently North African descent and asked for their papers, which were scrutinized at length. Pointed questions followed. A wave of deference and suspicion washed over the car. Eventually, the police moved along, scanning people’s faces down the aisle but pressing on. They passed me and disappeared. Relief tinged with guilt – a minor price for the benefit of white privilege. When the state asks if one’s papers are in order, minorities and majorities often switch their usual roles: lights shine on otherwise marginalized faces while the many, unverified, slip safely into invisibility.

Racial profiling is obviously not unique to France. Based on the cultural coding of in and out groups, prejudice itself is largely a universal experience. The more specific form of prejudice called racism, however, is a modern phenomenon shaped by epistemologies and biopolitical state practices pioneered in the West, not least phenotypic police surveillance. If the ideology of racism, from imperial phrenology to Nazi genocide to South African apartheid, is modern, by the same token so is the anti-racism that developed especially after the Second World War as a reflux of colonialism and the hypocrisy of Western value commitments at odds with historical experience. Both the problematization of racial profiling and guilt at white privilege, for instance, reflect the clash of racism with legal-democratic and social-egalitarian norms. In this long, knotted story of modern racism and anti-racism – from slavery to the United Nations 1965 Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination and beyond – the lessons of the French experience are nevertheless uniquely revealing.¹

In recent years tensions between racialized discrimination and equality in France have been expressed in well-known debates, for instance, over the hijab and public space as well as over the supposedly ‘positive’ historical role of colonialism.² At stake in these controversies have been the traditions of French Republican universalism, whether in the guise of secular assimilation and belief in race-neutral legality or through attempts to reinvisage France’s grand extra-national ‘civilizing mission’, including cherished post-1789 principles of liberty, equality and fraternity. Since its powerful revival in the 1980s, French Republicanism has provided a strongly integrationist vision of democratic politics that is aggressively laic and suspicious of ‘communitarian’ multiculturalism. It can be understood as one way the West has engaged with postcolonial realities such as mass migration; in contemporary France as elsewhere issues of race and citizenship are intimately tied to immigration and the legacy of colonialism. So too, insofar as the promise of legal fairness, social inclusion and even national belonging requires some sacrifice of cultural distinctiveness and particularity, the ‘immigration problem’ in France, as in other countries, manifests itself as a problem with difference, multiplicity and diversity. France is unique, however, in the solidity of its Republican paradigm, for in spite of true divergences between left and...