France. No government agency can mention or ask about ethnicity - in particular, our national statistics agency, the INSEE. Private organizations can, but this is not often seen.
I think its an heritage from WWII, in particular the "yellow star".
France refuses to consider racial differences (and religious differences too), it seeks unity in everything, to the point that it almost drove local languages to extinction.
> Ethnicity is an extremely important identity category, and if you want to manage that diversity you need information.
As a french person I object to this. It's all about culture, not face features. If you want to study "communities", don't look at the face, look inside the head. And the idea that a government would "manage" ethnicity is exactly the kind of thing that repulses us.
If France is so blind to ethnicity, would you say that your experience as a Frenchman is the same regardless of the colour of your skin? Access to employment, interaction with police, visibility in medias, access to politic circles etc.
What you describe is the French dream but is that somewhat a reality?
> would you say that your experience as a Frenchman is the same regardless of the colour of your skin?
You are committing the American mistake of thinking that people sharing a skin colour also share a culture. There will be a tremendous amount of cultural difference between a black Senegalese who is a first generation immigrant and someone from the Reunion whose great grand parents were already all French citizens.
You don't need to collect ethnicity based statistics and start treating people differently based on the color of their skin to fight racism.
> There will be a tremendous amount of cultural difference between a black Senegalese who is a first generation immigrant and someone from the Reunion whose great grand parents were already all French citizens.
To which I will also add that there can be great cultural, social and/or economic differences between two first-generation black immigrants from two different african countries, or even from the same country, that it does not make real sense to lump them under the same category.
It is about “ethnicity” as in country of origin and customs, not skin color.
I was not born in the Netherlands but did spend my formative years there; my skin is certainly a fair bit darker than the average Dutchman; my eyes are more oval; my nose is wider and smaller; my lips fuller; my hair is a perfect black. — yet never have I been treated as non-Dutch.
This is very different for my parent who speaks Dutch with a Surinamese accent and has different mannerisms, as it is for my parent's younger sibling who looks quite white but also has the Surinamese accent and mannerisms.
Surinamese people in the Netherlands definitely seem to feel some sort of kinship, and large parts of my family live in areæ of high concentration of Surinamese people, but these come in all colors, many of them are quite white but speak with a Surinamese accent.
I am not quite sure what you are getting at. Yes, this is the french ideal (and it's not so special, really), and yes, we are not here yet wrt to discrimination, be it for race, gender or sexuality.
This is what the majority of the french people vote for, but of course not all french people agree with that, unfortunately.
> As a french person I object to this. It's all about culture, not face features.
I mean... yes? "Ethnicity" is a cultural category, not a genetic one. Specifically, its boundaries are socially-constructed, and the US is unusual in constructing said boundaries mostly around blood-quantum and hypodescent rules. e.g. the distinction between "Arab", "Jewish", "Circassian", &c ethnicities in Israeli identity documents is based on the specific criteria of those groups.
I think its an heritage from WWII, in particular the "yellow star".
France refuses to consider racial differences (and religious differences too), it seeks unity in everything, to the point that it almost drove local languages to extinction.
> Ethnicity is an extremely important identity category, and if you want to manage that diversity you need information.
As a french person I object to this. It's all about culture, not face features. If you want to study "communities", don't look at the face, look inside the head. And the idea that a government would "manage" ethnicity is exactly the kind of thing that repulses us.