When I sat down with Maddox, an 18-year-old teenager from Paris, he told me it was his first time speaking to a journalist. “I want to break the terrible silence,” he said, to “prevent these kids from going through the same hell as me.” He pointed to a group of black toddlers playing nearby. I met him in the office of Soleil—an association that has been in the national news since December, when it helped 18 adolescents file a complaint with the Paris prosecutor against a dozen police officers, citing charges that included grave voluntary violence, sexual aggression and discrimination.
Maddox, who wished to be identified only by his nickname, had his first encounter with the police when he was 12 years old. He and his friends were sitting on scooters parked on the street when the police accused his older friends of “attempted theft” of the vehicles. After that, he told me, as often as ten times a month, officers would find minor excuses to detain him and his friends at the police station for up to four hours at a stretch, often not even letting them make phone calls. He has been handcuffed, beaten, tear-gassed and insulted by officers—who are often called “Tigers” in his neighbourhood’s slang. Many of these incidents, he told me, occurred only because he was black. “It’s discrimination,” he said. “I am not allowed to feel as French as the others.”
His experience is far from unique. In France, black and Arab adolescents and men are disproportionately likely to face police harassment and brutality. In 2009, a study by the French National Centre for Scientific Research and the international organisation the Open Society Justice Initiative showed that in Paris, people who look Arab were eight times more likely to get stopped by the police than white people, and black people were six times as likely. In 2005, 2009 and 2012, the human rights group Amnesty International released reports on police impunity in France, highlighting cases of “illegal homicide, torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatments.” One of these reports, in 2009, cited how “the vast majority of complaints” of police violence that Amnesty reviewed concerned “French citizens from an ethnic minority or foreign nationals,” and in many such cases, “racist abuse was an explicit element.” In recent years, responding to these realities, a number of activists and organisations in minority communities have been leading a movement that highlights the connections between police brutality, structural racism and even the violent dynamics of colonialism.
On 31 October 2015, I attended the Marche de la Dignitè, or Dignity March—a demonstration against state violence, Islamophobia and racism. It started from Paris’s Barbès area, known for its shops selling spices and African-print fabric. A sea of protestors—20,000, according to the organisers—flooded the streets.
Amal Bentounsi, a woman who founded and runs an anti-police-violence organisation, had coordinated the march. Like many French women in the suburbs, she lost a loved one to police violence: four years ago, her 28-year-old brother was shot in the back by a police officer. Wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with her organisation’s name—Urgence Notre Police Assasine, or “Emergency: Our Police Kill”—Bentounsi stood on a truck loaded with giant speakers and delivered a rousing speech. She drew cheers when she declared, “We are not a stand of shooting targets.”
Rap music played from the speakers, with one song–called “Letter to the Republic”—directly referencing the shadow that colonialism casts in contemporary France. “To all these racists with their hypocritical tolerance, who built their nation on blood, and now pose as givers of lessons,” the song blared, “This colonial past is yours. It is you who have chosen to link your story to ours.”
At the head of the procession, among dozens of Arab and black women activists and intellectuals, was Houria Bouteldja: a 42-year-old woman of Algerian origin, who is the official spokesperson of a political group called the Parti des Indigènes de la République, or PIR—the party of the indigenous people of the republic. The PIR, which defines itself as a political party and a movement, aims to bring about a “de-colonial,” anti-racist government. The PIR, Bouteldja told me when I met her for lunch in central Paris, has deliberately chosen to call non-white French citizens of immigrant descent “indigènes.” This word, which literally translates to “indigenous people,” carries historical baggage: French colonialists used it to describe the native inhabitants of the lands they ruled. In the PIR’s formulation, indigènes are often black people, Arabs and Muslims who come from regions formerly colonised by France. By identifying themselves as indigènes, Bouteldja told me, the people in the PIR aim at “seeing things as they really are”—asserting that they are still treated like colonial subjects. “The French state is racist and imperialist,” she said, adding that it treats indigènes like “second-class citizens.”
The PIR was founded in 2005, after two adolescent boys—15-year-old Bouna Traorè, who was black, and 17-year-old Zyed Benna, who was Arab—died by electrocution while hiding in a power station during a police chase. After the boys died, the suburbs of Paris were embroiled in clashes that were reported as “riots” by media across the world. Nicolas Sarkozy, then the minister of the interior, exacerbated national tensions by accusing the adolescents of being delinquents. In fact, an inquiry revealed, they were simply on their way back from a football game when they saw the officers and instinctively fled. Later, in court, the policemen, who are white, were accused of not assisting the boys, even though they knew them to be in mortal danger.
Didier Fassin, a sociologist at Princeton University, who has researched urban policing in French suburbs, explained to me over email that since the early 1980s, there have been “urban disorders” in France each time a person—almost always young, poor and of a racial minority background—has died as a result of interacting with the police. For minorities, who already endure frequent harassment and violence, these deaths set off a “tragic limit to what they could tolerate.” When Traoré and Benna died in 2005, Fassin said, the people “revolted.”
In 2015, the officers were acquitted of charges of “non-assistance to persons in danger.” Fassin told me that such acquittals are routine in cases of police brutality. “Impunity is the rule,” he wrote. “Administrative sanctions are rare and not dissuasive.”
Many activists within minority communities, such as Sihame Assbague, are spreading awareness of police violence, trying to prevent abuses of authority. A 29-year-old of Moroccan origin, Assbague is the spokesperson of a group called the Coalition Against Racial Profiling. In 2011, the organisation launched a service through which victims of police abuse could send a text message to a hotline to receive a call from experts, who would assist them by explaining their civil rights to them. When I met Assbague in August last year, she told me she had been greatly influenced by the PIR. “There’s been a lot of focus on deaths from terror attacks lately,” she said, “but few have spoken about how for the last 50 years, one person dies every month in France because of police violence.” She was echoing a statistic often quoted by activists, from a 2014 report by Basta!—an independent news website.
Rokhaya Diallo, a 38-year-old journalist and filmmaker, spoke to me of what she sees as a prevalent denial of race, or “colourblindness,” that haunts France. Diallo, who is black, grew up in Paris with her working-class family from Senegal. In 2016, she made a documentary that draws parallels between racist violence in France and the United States. France, she said, “sees itself as a non-racist country,” choosing not to acknowledge its racial and ethnic diversity in order to brush institutional racism under the rug. For example, in media coverage of Traoré and Benna’s deaths, she said, the races of the policemen and the boys who died were systematically omitted. When non-white activists draw attention to racism, the majority often paints them as dangerous and divisive.
According to many activists I spoke to, the only leading French media outlet that regularly gives voice to activists and intellectuals of immigrant origin is the online publication Mediapart. I met the outlet’s co-founder and president, Edwy Plenel, in his office in northern Paris. He said the problem new activist groups in the suburbs face is that their likely allies—the left—have failed to collaborate with them. “France has failed to overcome the trauma of the loss of empire,” he said, explaining that as a result, its dominant political culture fails to accommodate diversity.
For Maddox, this dominant culture does little to acknowledge his frequent experiences of racialised police violence. The only “revenge” he gets, he told me, comes each year on 14 July, Bastille Day—France’s National Day. Each year, police officers tell adolescents to “come out like big boys” on the street for pitched battles, with the understanding that they will not be arrested. The adolescents spend “anywhere between 400 and 1,000 euros to buy firecrackers” to hurl at the officers, Maddox told me. But the police “come armed in their heavy riot gear, complete with tear gas and grenades.” Some of his friends have suffered grave injuries, and some have even died. Still, Maddox and his friends continue to take part in this ritual. “We tell our parents we are spending money to buy firecrackers to celebrate and do barbecues,” he said.