In her book Derrière le mythe métis ("Behind the mixed-race myth," La Découverte, 336 pages, € 22), sociologist Solène Brun – a specialist in racial issues and researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research – studies mixed-race couples in France and their children. An essay that shows just how much mixed-race – and race – is a social experience.

It is the myth of happy mixed-race that completely conceals relations of power and domination and supports a certain rewriting of history by evacuating racial inequalities. It is love as a solution to racism, which is understood as hatred of the other, not as a system. But racism is not so much a question of hatred as of relationships of domination. Its matrix is rooted in Christian Europe and its blood purity laws to prevent intermarriage between Christians and Jews or Muslims.

Etymologically, [the French term] "mixité" means both mixing and disorder. This is a good illustration of what can also be seen in "métissage [race mixing]:" a mixing that disturbs the racial order. One could not be both slave and free, or native and settler. Working on the question of half-breeds provides a wealth of information on how the race was formed, and how the white group felt the need to reinforce racial boundaries out of fear of mixing. This can be found today in the notion of the "Great Replacement."

Historian Emmanuelle Saada's work on the mixed-race persons of Indochina showed that a racial dimension was introduced into French citizenship. A 1928 decree, confirmed by new legislation in 1944, established that mixed-race descendants of unknown father, but "presumed to be of French race," were eligible for French citizenship. French citizenship was thus granted on the basis of race, until very late in our history. This shows the extent to which French citizenship has been historically racialized, and Frenchness identified with whiteness. The effects of this are still felt today, in the way in which belonging to France is viewed.

Against this background, the valorization of "métissage" comes at the expense of non-white people who are neither mixed race nor in mixed couples. The issue of assimilation plays out in the background. Moreover, the intermarriage of immigrants has long been used as an indicator of integration in sociology and demography. This idea is found in most political discourse on integration or even creolization, which does not raise the question of racial inequalities but maintains the idea that intermarriage, for those arriving in France, is a good thing.

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