These banlieues are where the French lights and glossy lie of colorblindness come to die. Enshrined by a 1972 law prohibiting the collection of racial and ethnic data, French colorblindness facilitates the racial and ethnic inequities in education, housing, and employment that ravage the predominantly Arab, African, and Muslim residents of the banlieues. These conditions simultaneously feed anger toward the state and produce a fertile recruitment ground for ISIS. A cycle of marginalization rooted in state policy.

XREF: Connects to critiques of colorblind ideology in US race discourse, where similar arguments link official colorblindness to preserved structural inequity.

Khaled A. Beydoun, The New Crusades_ Islamopho…, loc. 773