Underlying Conditions: Global Anti-Blackness Amid COVID-19

Recent events have revealed two global crises—one, the COVID-19 pandemic and related quarantine measures, and two, police violence against Black individuals and subsequent protests. Both reveal how anti-blackness is global, and how populations racialized as Black are forever suspect and marginalized. As a Black woman who has researched race and racism in France for over a decade, I see how these two crises present themselves in France as indictive of how anti-blackness manifests globally.

On April 18, 2020, in Villeneuve-la-Garenne, a banlieue¹ in the Hauts-de-Seine département north of Paris, Mouldi, a 30-year-old man, left his apartment and went on a brief ride on his moped to get some air that evening. He later admitted he did not have the proper attestation, or signed certificate needed in order to travel more than five kilometers from one's home during France's COVID-19-related quarantine period. He quickly collided with a police car. Accounts vary, but some residents felt the officers purposely opened the police car door as Mouldi approached, causing him multiple injuries including a broken leg. In the immediate days afterwards, some residents burned cars and buildings and shot fireworks and police fired teargas at protestors in both Villeneuve-la-Garenne and nearby banlieues. As one French analysis put it, this is revolt against “the police who control them all year round, who ‘tutoyer’ them,² who insult them, who violate them” (Ramdani 2020; Le Parisien 2020). From his hospital bed, Mouldi appealed for calm (Le Parisien 2020; McAuley 2020a; Ramdani 2020).

This incident reflects both the confinement of marginalized populations, even before COVID-19 as I discuss below, as well as the tenuous relations between racial and ethnic minorities—or visible minorities in French parlance—and the police. COVID-19 has illustrated various racial and ethnic inequalities, or the general marginalization of Black individuals, and the global attention to the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, has illustrated the persistence of anti-Black violence around the world.

In an interview in March with Mediapart (a French online journal), Youcef Brakini, an activist working with Comité Vérité et Justice pour Adama, stated “all year round, the quartiers populaires [working-class neighborhoods] are confined” (Polloni 2020). Between March 17th and May 11th, France was under lockdown, or l’état d'urgence sanitaire (state of health emergency), to reduce the spread of COVID-19.¹ During this period, residents could be asked for their identification and reason for being outside, and fined by police for not having the proper attestation.

Residents of various quartiers populaires and banlieues, particularly in the Seine-Saint-Denis and Hauts-de-Seine départements, were blamed in the media for worsening the pandemic by not respecting the quarantine orders, including social distancing (Gilbert 2020). One report indicated about 10 percent of fines related to breaking these orders were issued in the département of Seine-Saint-Denis, north of Paris and one of the poorest départements in France (Revenu 2020). Yet, I argue this actually speaks to the intense presence of the police in such neighborhoods and how the quarantine only reveals this police activity, rather than justifies it. In other words, communities marginalized during the COVID-19-related quarantine are those marginalized before COVID-19.

When Brakini speaks of the general confinement of these working-class communities, he is referring to how these communities are continually surveilled and patrolled. This has also been evident since the COVID-19 quarantine began. The need for an attestation provided the police with further legitimacy to conduct identity checks, or les contrôles d'identité, in order to enforce the quarantine order. Christophe Castaner, who until early July was the Minister of the Interior, confirmed there were significantly more identity checks in Seine-Saint-Denis compared to the rest of France (JCI 2020; Degbe 2020). Such a disparity was an issue before COVID-19: A 2012 Human Rights Watch report found that the majority of Black and North African, or Maghrebin, origin individuals identified identity checks by the police as a major problem; they are six to eight times more likely than whites to undergo these identity checks.

This marginality is also reflected in disparities regarding who is impacted by COVID-19, especially regarding exposure to contracting the coronavirus and ability to socially distance (Gilbert 2020). Residents of Seine-Saint-Denis, for example, were more likely to live in overcrowded conditions, have less access to adequate healthcare, and have jobs deemed essential (Diallo 2020; Diallo and Robine 2020; Marliere 2020). This explains the sharp increase in mortality rate in Seine-Saint-Denis compared to other regions of France (Gilbert 2020).

Yet, the fact that France does not collect “ethnic statistics,” or data based on race and ethnicity, means that we do not even have the full scope of the specific racial and ethnic disparities (McAuley 2020b). Rather, as is often the case with research on race and racism in France, we have to rely on geography as proxy for race and ethnic origin.

Racial and ethnic otherness is often situated in and euphemistically connected to France's banlieues.² This construction of the banlieue is therefore not solely a spatial or geographical one or one predicated on socioeconomic dynamics, but rather a racial formation. Due to French Republican ideology, in which, among other things, identity-based distinctions such as race and ethnicity are not acknowledged, the banlieue comes to stand in for a racial and ethnic otherness where race and ethnicity cannot be directly invoked (Beaman 2017; Silverstein 2008). Having a banlieue residential address is a proxy for race and ethnic origin, which creates numerous obstacles for its residents in areas such as employment (Calvès 2004).

The “territorial stigma” (Wacquant 2007)¹ that banlieue residents face is therefore not solely attached to place, it is attached to the people associated with these places. It is attached to populations continually kept on the margins of mainstream society—Black and Arab² individuals. This association with the banlieues further marginalizes and separates these individuals from mainstream society. Because marginality in France is framed in terms of socioeconomic status, and not race or ethnicity, Wacquant argues that banlieue residents can “pass” in larger society so long as they do not exhibit markers of living in a banlieue (including physical demeanor or speech patterns) (Wacquant 2007). Yet this argument ignores the connotation and conflation between living in banlieues and being non-white; there are other markers of difference—namely, being a racial and ethnic minority – that cannot be easily overcome. French sociologist Sylvie Tissot (2007) makes this point strongly and disputes Wacquant's elision of racial discrimination in these communities when she states that, “If we speak about ‘non-whites,’ homogeneity becomes a striking feature of the banlieues” (367). As such, it is useful to consider the banlieue both as a stigmatized place, and as code for racial and ethnic otherness. This leads to a broader understanding of how race and place intersect for already marginalized communities.

As banlieue residents—and often Arab and Black individuals—are framed as social problems, the police become a mechanism to solve these problems. As anthropologist Didier Fassin (2019) notes, this leads to strained relations between various banlieue communities and the police as they enforce a social order through identity checks and other measures by which such individuals, who are often descendants of former French colonies in Africa, are marginalized. In other words, the police enact the real and symbolic violence of the state, or do its “violence work” (Tahir 2019).

Therefore, the incident in Villeneuve-la-Garenne is not unique. Much like the heightened attention to police violence against Black Americans in the United States, as recently evident in the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis on May 25, 2020, and the subsequent protests across the country, so too have recent years seen a growing attention to and mobilization against police violence targeting Black and Arab individuals around the world and especially in France. There have been significant reports of police harassment and violence during the quarantine period (Gilbert 2020). A recent Amnesty International report revealed discriminatory practices and illegal use of force by police officers during the quarantine period throughout Europe.¹ One French media account reports twelve deaths due to the police since France's lockdown began.²

On June 2, 2020, about 20,000 protestors demonstrated outside of the Tribunal Judiciaire de Paris (high court) demanding justice for Adama Traoré. This massive demonstration occurred despite the quarantine-related prohibition on gatherings over 10 people. Traoré was a 24-year-old Black construction worker who died under police custody after being arrested during an identity check in the Beaumont-sur-Oise banlieue, north of Paris, in July 2016. The police initially claimed he had underlying conditions leading to his death. Assa Traoré is his 32-year-old sister, who is leading the movement for justice for Adama as well as other victims of police violence (through her collective Comité Vérité et Justice pour Adama). Every July on the anniversary of Adama's death, Assa leads a demonstration in the neighborhood where he died. The June demonstration was initially in response to a judgement clearing the three police officers involved in Adama's death, however, after George Floyd's murder, his name was incorporated as well. A flyer for the demonstration read “Justice pour Adama, Justice pour George Floyd, Justice pour Tous!,” or “Justice for Adama, Justice for George Floyd, Justice for everyone!” (Collins 2020; Nossiter and Méheut 2020). Protestors held signs stating “I can't breathe”—the last words of both Floyd and Adama.

Yet, violence by the police, or state-sponsored violence,¹ against Black and Arab individuals is not a new issue in France, particularly when considering its colonial history. On October 17, 1961, during the Algerian War of Independence, the French national police, under Maurice Papon, repressed a demonstration of Algerians, and drowned dozens—some reports say hundreds—in the Seine river which traverses Paris (Bertaux 2011; Body-Gendrot 2010). This incident and other examples of torture and brutality by the French state are rarely discussed. The 1983 March for Equality against Racism, or “Marche des Beurs,” began after an incident of police violence in a banlieue south of Lyon (Hajjat 2013). More recently, the 2005 uprisings which swept through various banlieues that fall began with the deaths of two teenagers—one of Tunisian origin and the other of Malian origin—who were electrocuted in an electricity substation as they fled police in the banlieue of Clichy-sous-Bois. Zyed Benna and Bouna Traoré were apparently trying to avoid un contrôle d'identité.

The racial logic² evident in these two crises—COVID-19 and police violence—(and the state's response to these crises) reveal how certain populations are framed as problems to be solved, rather than focusing on the discrimination and exclusion they face (and how they agentically respond to it).¹ As Assa explained to me when we first met in 2017, these visible minorities, or Black and Arab individuals are “forgotten populations who know the police only as an invading force.” Despite the promotion of a colorblind ideology and an official masking of possible and real ethnic differences, France has a narrow definition of what it means to be French, a definition with particular racial and ethnic underpinnings. Specifically, white supremacy structures the definition of who is actually seen as French by other French people (Beaman 2019).

The spatial formations of quartiers populaires and banlieues similarly undergird a racial logic, in that Seine-Saint-Denis and Hauts-de-Seine residents are relegated to the margins of society. This is evident in how these communities were treated during the COVID-19 lockdown, which only exacerbated under which they lived before COVID-19. This racial logic serves to mark differences outside of state-level categories, and remind such individuals that their belonging in France is forever suspect.

And this is the case globally, as evident in how Black populations have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19 in the United States, the United Kingdom, or Brazil, to name a few examples (Keval 2020; FASE 2020). This disparate treatment is itself a form of state-sponsored violence. Despite growing global anti-racist mobilization, Black individuals’ inclusion in society is forever suspect.