Mainstream French tolerance favored sub-Saharan over North African immigrants because decolonisation was less violent

Evidence

An important element of its original 1980s mobilisations were alliances forged with Jewish student groups, which may make this appear in retrospect as a golden age of Jewish–Muslim unity, but which attracted suspicion from some North African associations. It has even been suggested that Désir’s narrative appealed to mainstream opinion partly because the hero of the story was not North African134 (at the time, representations of sub-Saharan Africans were less overwhelmingly negative, in part due to the legacy of a less violent decolonisation). — James Renton, Ben Gidley (eds.), Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, 1372

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the broader discussion of Islamophobia in France and how colonial legacies shape racial hierarchies among immigrant groups; echoes the ‘exotico-victimist discourse’ critique and the differentiation of migrant groups by French mainstream opinion. — connects to: the MOC “The Republic’s Impossible Embrace: How Universalism Turned Algeria from the Future of France into Its Undoing”