French colorblindness law masks state-driven racial inequities that feed extremism recruitment

Evidence

These banlieues are where the French lights and glossy lie of colorblindness come to die. Enshrined by a 1972 law prohibiting the collection of racial and ethnic data, French colorblindness facilitates the racial and ethnic inequities in education, housing, and employment that ravage the predominantly Arab, African, and Muslim residents of the banlieues. These conditions simultaneously feed anger toward the state and produce a fertile recruitment ground for ISIS. A cycle of marginalization rooted in state policy. — Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamophobia and the…, 773

Categorization

• XREF: Links to the broader War on Terror scholarship (Iftikhar) on surveillance states and to US-style counter-radicalization dynamics Beydoun treats in earlier chapters. — connects to: Antiracist victories across three eras were each defused by formal legal colorblindness — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race: Reflections on…, 127
• DEEPTHINKING: Colorblindness functioning as a racial project’s cover — the 1972 data prohibition operating as both shield and wound — is a dense, layered mechanism.