On June 2, 2020, tens of thousands gathered in front of the High Court of Paris to protest against police brutality and racism. Showing support to the family of Adama Traoré, a twenty-four-year-old black man who died asphyxiated at the hands of the police in 2016, the crowd chanted, “Justice for Adama! No justice, no peace!” Reacting to the scope of mobilization, started in the United States and spread around the world following the murder of George Floyd, French pundits and politicians have tirelessly argued that “France is not the United States,” and that “comparing both situations is appalling.”

Yet recent studies from Human Rights Watch and the national ombudsman respectively conclude that the French police’s checks on minors are “racist and abusive” and that “young men perceived as black or Arab are twenty times more likely than others to be stopped by the police.” This is not a new phenomenon. In fact, as many researchers and activists insist, modern French policing draws its roots from centuries of institutionalized racism; today’s repressive techniques — harassment, manhunt, capture, strangulation — partake in a long, obsessive history of seeking to subjugate racialized people.

In a June 2018 conversation with Assa Traoré, Adama Traoré’s sister and founder of the Justice and Truth for Adama committee, activist and scholar Angela Davis declared: “Police violence is unabated, and what you are experiencing here in France, and have experienced, as a direct result of colonialism — the attacks on black communities, Arab communities — is something that has continued unabated.”