While championing the mariage pour tous [‘marriage for all’] law that legalized same-sex marriage in France, Justice Minister and former Deputy for French Guiana Christiane Taubira was subjected to multiple racist insults (‘La Vidéo de Christiane Taubira’, 2013). One headline-grabbing incident involved National Front candidate Anne-Sophie Leclère who, on both television and Facebook, compared Minister Taubira to a monkey (‘Front National Politician Sentenced’, 2014). Although the National Front withdrew its support from Leclère, well-known French journalist Harry Roselmack (2013) suggested that Leclère's racist commentary was neither an isolated incident nor an exception to the norm in France.

Roselmack, the nation's first black primetime news presenter, responded with a piece in Le Monde entitled ‘La France raciste est de retour’ [‘Racist France is back’] (2013). Therein he decries racism within the National Front, but also unconscious racism within French society at large. Roselmack maintains that this widespread racism paradoxically exists within an officially differenceblind and egalitarian Republic that has been very successful in raising its citizens – of all backgrounds – to feel ‘un sentiment d'appartenance et d'attachement national’ [‘a sense of belonging and attachment to the nation’].

Ultimately, Roselmack argues that it is this tenacious inconsistency between ideal and reality that produces communautarisme [‘communitarianism’] (2013). Unlike the literal English translation, this term carries a negative connotation and is associated with a problematic fracturing of the nation along the lines of particularist affiliations like those of race, gender, religion, and ethnicity. Concerns about communautarisme are at the heart of the republican suspicion of identity politics. It is supposed to be surprising, then, when Roselmack states in his opinion piece that ‘La France sursaute en se découvrant communautarisée, mais ce que je décris témoigne du fait que le communautarisme en France n'est ni naturel ni spontané. C'est une réaction née d'une duperie: le hiatus congénital entre la promesse républicaine et la réalité de la société française’.

Roselmack himself does not appear inclined to make race-based claims for recognition. In his essay, it becomes apparent that he sees himself as many things – black, certainly, but that comes at the end of a long list strong on familial, professional, and civic identities and affiliations: ‘Je suis d'abord un homme, un fils, un frère, un mari et un père, un citoyen, un journaliste, un passionné et oui, oui, c'est vrai, je suis noir’ (Roselmack, 2013).