In this article, I use the example of Ahmed Merabet, a Muslim and Algerian-origin police officer who was one of the victims of the January 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre, as a way to understand how Islamophobia is a form of racism. Based on ethnographic research in Paris and its banlieues with the middle-class segment of the North African second generation, I discuss how they experience ‘collective punishment’ due to their status as both racial and religious minorities. I further trace the use of a ‘Muslim other’ category as a catch-all term for non-White individuals in a society that disavows race and ethnicity. I ultimately demonstrate how Islamophobia is a form of racism – one that sees certain individuals as too culturally different to ever be fully accepted as part of the French mainstream.

Amid growing Islamophobia throughout Europe, Muslims in France have been described as “ethnoracial outsiders” (Bleich 2006, 3–7) and framed as a cultural challenge to the identity of the French republic. Based on ethnographic research of 45 middle class adult children of North African, or Maghrébin, immigrants, I focus on the actual religious practices of this segment of the French Muslim population, the symbolic boundaries around those practices, and the relationship between how middle class, North African second-generation immigrants understand their marginalization within mainstream society and how they frame their religiosity to respond to this marginalization. How respondents frame their practices reveals their allegiance with the tenets of French Republicanism and laïcité as well as shows how Muslim religious practices are being accommodated to the French context. This religiosity is not a barrier to asserting a French identity. Individuals frame their religious practices in ways that suggest they see themselves as just as French as anyone else.

Jean Beaman compares the conditions that led to 2005 uprisings in French banlieues and 2014 protests in cities across the U.S.