France overtly ethnicized Roma despite laws banning ethnic identification

Evidence

France failed to uphold its state policy against ethnicization by referring explicitly to the Roma as an ethnic group. As Nacu ( 2012 ) argues, ‘among the things which shocked observers was the explicit way in which the Roma were referred to as an ethnic group, which, until recently, was unusual in public debate for those sharing the general democratic consensus’ (p. 1326). Its policies were directed at the Roma because they were identifi ed, in the fi rst place, as Roma. Although French legislation prohibits explicit use of ethnic identifi cation and upholds the values of equal treatment and freedom of movement and settlement, this did not stop the French police from issuing a memo calling for the ‘systematic’ eviction of Roma from temporary, and supposedly illegal, camps, on the basis of their ethnicity. — Cristian Tileagă, The Nature of Prejudice, 410

Categorization

• QUESTION: Worth chasing: how did French authorities reconcile an explicitly ethnic memo with republicanism’s supposed color-blindness?

Related

• France forcibly evicted over 21,500 Romani migrants in 2013 (similarity 0.79)