Fixing on antisemitism as the sole admissible racism blinds France to other institutional bias

Evidence

Antisemitism remains the mark and measure of racism where race has been made to evaporate, its emphatic reappearance - or really re-emphasis, renewed focus - the foil precluding the possibility of addressing, let alone redressing, other equally visible, voluble, and violent expressions. Its silencing, solipsistic, even idiolectical emphasis makes it impossible, as Sophie Body-Gendrot points out, actually to ask, let alone to monitor, how many French Algerians, for instance, are confined to French prisons, what is the ethnoracial constitution of the entrepreneurial class or indeed of the local or national legislature, or what the extent of housing discrimination against people of African (North or sub-Saharan) origin. More than half of the French prison population today consists of French Arabs and Africans; and the unemployment rate among these groups is three times the national average, in some cities as high as 30 percent. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 960

Categorization

• QUESTION: Test: does the reader’s own threatened-privilege dataset contain cases where named-identity salience (e.g., antisemitism/sexism) suppresses recognition of other axes? This passage suggests observable-data suppression as the operative channel.
• XREF: The absence-of-data point connects to the reader’s noise/silence work as cognitive erasure. — connects to: Antisemitism focus lets France ignore its own anti-Arab racism; Antisemitism scholarship has neglected comparison with other racisms; French anti-racist activism linked antisemitism to Islamophobia beneath surface divisions (+5 more)
• ADDENDUM: Complements the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ piece: how moral outcry over one axis becomes the foil blocking data on parallel exclusions.

Broader Connections

• Antisemitism focus lets France ignore its own anti-Arab racism #expands (0.94)
• Redefining antisemitism to include Israel criticism inflates antisemitism and intensifies anti-Palestinian racism #exemplifies (0.85) — Evelyn Alsultany, Antisemitism and Islamophobia The…, 30
• French anti-racist activism linked antisemitism to Islamophobia beneath surface divisions #contradicts (0.82)
• European racial thought is conventionally framed as a black-antisemitism dualism #complicates (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 975
• Antisemitism scholarship asked the uniqueness question at the expense of comparative racism #expands (0.82) — David Theo Goldberg, John Solomos, A Companion to Racial and Ethnic Studies, 494
• Antisemitism scholarship has neglected comparison with other racisms #exemplifies (0.78)
• French antisemitism and Islamophobia share a longer tradition of xenophobia aimed at multiple groups #corroborates (0.78) — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1334
• Apparent ethnic splits in French antiracism are really organizational competition #exemplifies (0.75)