To count or not to count

HOW can a country decide if ethnic minorities are thriving when it refuses to acknowledge they even exist? France has grappled with this conundrum for years. Under its egalitarian ethos, it treats all citizens the same, refusing to group them into ethnic categories. It is forbidden by law to collect statistics referring to “racial or ethnic origin”. Yet even the casual visitor notices how multi-ethnic France is—and how few non-whites have top jobs. Now a new plan seeks to make it possible to measure “diversity”. Yazid Sabeg, the government's diversity commissioner, has set up a group to find the best way to collect information.

The hope is that this will give France “the statistical tools that will enable it to measure diversity, precisely in order to identify where it is behind, and to measure progress.” That was what President Nicolas Sarkozy called for last year. To American or British ears this plan may sound uncontroversial, but in France it is causing uproar, even though Mr Sabeg wants any data to be offered voluntarily, anonymously and on the basis of self-categorisation.

Critics see ethnic data as an assault on the republic's secular principles, and detect a nasty echo of Vichy-era identity documents. SOS Racisme, an anti-discrimination group, is among the most hostile. It has collected over 100,000 online signatures for a “campaign against ethnic statistics”. Not only would this be anti-constitutional, it argues. Classifying people by race would also encourage discrimination, not prevent it, and reduce identity to “criteria from another era, that of colonial France, or Vichy”. Fadela Amara, a government minister of Algerian origin, went further. “Our republic must not become a mosaic of communities,” she said. “Nobody must have to wear the yellow star again.”

Yet unease over ethnic labelling makes it hard to get a sense of how minorities are faring. Census data refer only to nationality; there is no record of the ethnic origin of French-born offspring of immigrants. Only 2.3m non-European foreigners are legally resident in France. Yet the best estimate of the (legal) minority population, foreign and French, is 8m (see chart).

To get around the rules, social scientists have invented ingenious ways to analyse ethnic minorities in France without actually referring to race. Jean-François Amadieu, at the Sorbonne, has used names as a proxy for ethnicity. His research suggests that a French job applicant of north African origin gets a third as many responses as a comparable white person. He also reveals that only 7% of local councillors elected last year were from ethnic minorities—and a derisory 0.4% of mayors.

Tentative efforts have been made to break taboos over race. Rama Yade, the Senegalese-born junior minister for human rights, wrote in her book, “Blacks of France”, that “one sometimes has the strange impression of upsetting others by being black in a country that thinks of itself as white.” Patrick Lozès, a Beninese-born activist, set up a lobby group called the Representative Council of Black Associations of France. He argues that, for France to recognise and correct discrimination, it must have the courage to name those being discriminated against. “People don't like it when I describe myself as black because they say that skin colour doesn't count, but it's hypocrisy,” he says. “I'm black in the eyes of the police, or an employer. So as a society we should have the courage to say so.”