France Is Officially Color-Blind. Reality Isn’t.
Nearly 20 years ago, one of France’s most prestigious schools, Sciences Po, took what was then seen as a bold step: It became the first elite French university to attempt to diversify its student body. The program is small, with only about 1,000 graduates in total since its inception, but has generally been regarded as successful, offering scholarships to many who would not otherwise have had access.
Its nature, though, reveals something significant about France: The program is not defined in terms of race, but entirely by socioeconomics and geography. Sciences Po—officially l’Institut d’études politiques de Paris—makes a point of recruiting a percentage of its students from high schools in areas that are economically disadvantaged. Though the point of the program is to diversify the school’s intake, it does not specifically target ethnic minorities. That is because, officially at least, France is color-blind.
In the aftermath of the French Revolution, the ancien régime in which lives were entirely circumscribed by economic capacity inherited at
