The French presidential election takes place this weekend and the topic that has dominated the campaigns is the so-called immigrant issue. For the French, the immigrant issue is less about people coming into the country than it is about the brown and black people who already live there, many of them Muslim North Africans. To an American it seems that everyone in the country is talking about race but in a vocabulary that doesn’t facilitate such talk. It is, in other words, a situation that can twist the head of an American dizzy. It all sounds absurd, as the French would say, a form of historically formulated denial.

Visit Paris outside the Louvre for anything more than half an hour and it will be clear to you that “immigrant” issues are happening all around. But reading the papers, listening to the news, you find yourself increasingly confused. I have found myself seeking out other Americans just to be reassured of the basics. I hear myself saying things like: “Hey, man, did I see that right? Wasn’t that yet another bunch of white cops sticking it to yet another black guy? Shit’s fucked up! Isn’t it?”

And it is fucked up and everyone knows it, which is partly why the election is shaping up to be a real Bush/Gore-style cliffhanger with perhaps the same kind of major long-term consequences. The two top candidates are Ségolène Royal, a leftist woman, and Nicolas Sarkozy, a rightist man, who is slightly ahead in the polls.

Sarkozy is a deeply controversial figure, known mostly for the harsh law-and-order policy he advanced as interior minister, his strongman reputation established even before he acted as the catalyst for the riots that shook the country in 2005.

Called to comment on unrest spawned after two ghetto-kids were killed in a police chase, he called the rioters— and by extension all of France’s immigrant ghetto-kids— scum, a comment that referenced an earlier Sarkozy “immigrant youth” tirade in which he said they needed to be “Karcherized” or scrubbed from the nation the way street-filth is scrubbed from the buildings of Paris. Ghetto-kids throughout the nation and in countries across Europe responded by blowing up cars and trashing shop windows for nearly three weeks.

Ever since, Sarkozy has been leading the nation on a sort of political tightrope walk. Each instance of unrest involving “immigrant youth” is either evidence that France needs Sarkozy or conversely that the Sarko-style hard line is failing by merely causing deeper societal tensions and animosities. The physical symbol of the Sarkozy politics, the instant powerful wordless shorthand, comes in the form of the Paris riot police. Arrayed, robotic, intense and everywhere, they have come to mean Sarkozy. You either love them or you hate them. You’re either thankful or resentful of their presence. You’re either glad they’re doing what they’re doing or appalled.

The police as symbol is especially powerful, I think, because the language of what’s happening is maddeningly coded, at least by American standards. The words “immigrant” and “youth” and “immigrant youth” typically mean “non-white French folk.” These are the words in the news and in the government and on the campaign stump that describe teenagers and twenty- and thirty-somethings who have lived their entire life in France, whose parents or grandparents or great grandparents were immigrants, but who are themselves entirely culturally French. In other words, they are not really immigrants or youth.

Roughly two weeks ago, there was a major clash at one of the Paris train stations, the Gare du Nord. A thirty-two-year-old Congolese man hopped a gate without paying for a ticket and was apprehended by the police. He was handled in dramatic fashion, given the offense— spread out on the ground, manacled, surrounded by the robot police and asked for his identity papers. The man was not in possession of his papers at the time of his very public arrest because he was, reportedly, one of the hundreds of thousands of “sans papiers” residents of France, a resident in legal limbo and therefore hounded by the Sarko-empowered officials, who have in recent months gone from patrolling train stations and public squares to invading schools throughout the nation to find and export the children of “paperless” families.

Commuters at the Gare du Nord, which feeds the “immigrant” ghettos north of Paris, saw these events for what they were: racist intimidation. A crowd of what the leftist daily Liberation predictably called “youth” gathered to shout down the police. In photos of the crowd you can see a lot of African-French twenty- and thirty-somethings. There are also white kids and some forty- and fifty-somethings. To an American, the word “youth” just doesn’t begin to serve as a fitting descriptor. Yet everyone reading Liberation well knows what it means: it means the Africans and their sympathizers.

To say to a French person that the French police are constantly practicing a virulent form of racial profiling is to be comically literal, to be offering another American banality. “What else?” the French person might likely respond. “They’re looking for people without papers and without money. Troublemakers. What else would they do? Why make yourself dense in the cause of political correctness?”

I am a white American. I lived in France for more than three years while I waited to be granted the proper papers to live there. I was an illegal immigrant. I was never once stopped in a public square or train station. But black guys who spoke real French— who were French— were stopped all around me every day and asked for the very papers I did not posses.

Paperless me with my horrible accent and my expired metro pass. Never stopped once.

In lines at the government offices, I was greeted with merely a grunt, which in those places felt like a warm embrace. The North Africans and Turks in front and behind me? They enjoyed no end of the special sting of Gallic scorn. People from West Africa who were schooled their whole lives in French language and civilization, the very essence of global France? They were treated as interlopers, and again, not nearly as well as I was treated. Most pitiable of all was a confused and apparently country-less Kurdish family beside me once at the main offices on the Seine, near the ancient courthouse and prison of Paris. From the aghast stares and sighs of our hosts, I felt sure a trap door was being readied to plunge the whole family in a swoosh into the bowels of the city, to a dungeon under the river, where the four of them would be made to go on practicing their French pronunciation forever: “Je- n’ai- rien- des- papiers- madame. Je- suis- vraiment- désolé.”

I know that this sort of immigrant discrimination is a fact of life in countries everywhere, exacerbated by a globalization that greases the way for products and money and information but not for the humans these free-flowing things are supposed to help make more liberated and happy. Yet in France it seems different, because all the usual hideousness of societal racism— the glaring police stops, the transportation authority hassles, the restaurant and shop worker snubs, the employment discrimination and invisibility in the national media apart from crime footage— is exacerbated by a noble but misguided cultural philosophy that resists the fact of race.

“Resist? It does more than merely resist race,” Jayson Harsin, a media studies professor at the American university of Paris, tells me. “There is no race in France, not officially.” This is the case, he says, first because French cultural indoctrination puts schooling, manners and mentality above all else: you are supposed to be accepted as French because you have been taught to think and speak and act like a French person. Second is that the legacy of Nazi race science lingers in France: race talk and race classification are still charged by the fact that not too long ago race categories marked minorities in Europe for extermination. Not a good thing. And definitely, god forbid, not something to be associated with France and French history.

“There are poor people in the suburbs who, according to hearsay, may well be Africans, but the problems associated with them are officially economic and cultural issues,” Harsin continues. “These people, who are never identified by ethnicity, are charged with stubbornly resisting adapting to the private-public secular French way of life.” That’s the problem, skin color supposedly having nothing to do with it. Yet, just as in America, crime is racialized as a manner of thinking. “Violence, drugs, mugging— it’s all thought of as Arab or black… Sarkozy is the same as Nixon and Wallace in the sixties in this regard. Sarkozy’s ‘law and order’ talk is code for ‘control those rioting niggers.’”

French thinkers like Baudrillard point to the colonial history of France as the key to understanding the difference in American and French race relations. The U.S. had slavery and France had colonialism. But where the ideology that supported U.S. slavery has been widely rejected (even if its legacy endures), the ideology of French colonialism— where pith-helmeted administrators were to make Frenchman out of Africans, who for their part were supposed to feel fortunate to surrender their African-ness for French-ness— has not been widely rejected. Indeed, the cultural hubris at the base of colonialism remains a cornerstone of contemporary French politics.

“In an immigrant nation like the States, every race or ethnicity can make their own kind of American-ness, the national identity being more openly contested,” says Harsin. “In France, the idea that the national identity could be changing, that it has been a thing in flux from the beginning, is limited, the acceptable boundaries of Frenchness still pretty narrow.”

The American civil rights movement is known for its great speakers. Malcom X, in particular, made a point of speaking “right down to earth” in language that shied from nothing, that distinctly opposed the sort of coded or dodgey language difficult subjects like racism can generate. In 1963 he told an audience of black Americans that “America’s problem is us… that the only reason she has a problem is because she doesn’t want us here. Be you black, brown, red or yellow… you pose a problem because you’re not wanted.”

Look around the cities of France today and you see a country that is multicolored, multicultural and increasingly Muslim, full of African and Asian and Middle Eastern spice and style. Music and art is exploding in a way France hasn’t experienced in decades. But the official language of the multiculturalism behind the new French culture is stilted, corked, repressed— and so erupting from people like Sarkozy in uncontrolled bursts.

The French mock American earnestness, our simplistic political correctness, our insistence on officially seeing the color of one another’s skin and talking about it again and again as if it mattered, as if it were an essential determiner of social reality and power— an admittedly and unbelievably basic and stupid assumption that also happens to be an unfortunate fact of human life.

Our ability, after nearly the first hundred years of our nation’s history, to finally speak officially about the American slaves as human beings and residents of the country was part of why things began to change. The civil rights movement of the sixties was likewise largely about learning how to engage in a national dialogue about race, the more “right down to earth” the better. The French should stop laughing and start talking. Using the law, through policies like affirmative action, to make race and racism officially impossible not to talk about, even ridiculously so, is a way to begin to move beyond it.

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John Tomasic is managing editor of Pop and Politics. He has lived in France on and off for years, most recently for a three-and-a-half year stint, during which, on a faulty, incomplete, and partly faked visa, he taught at the University of Paris Dauphine.