Anti-White Racism: Interview with François Bousquet
In this interview, author François Bousquet discusses his new book, «Le racisme antiblanc: L’enquête interdite» (“Anti-White Racism: The Forbidden Investigation”), where he conducts an investigation into what he describes as a systematic yet deliberately ignored phenomenon in French society: anti-white racism. Through dozens of testimonies spanning nearly half a century, Bousquet reveals how violence against white French citizens has been deliberately obscured by media and political elites, creating a culture where victims often cannot even name their experiences. He argues that this racism emerges not from historical grievances but from contemporary resentment, enabled by demographic shifts and perpetuated by a progressive establishment that simultaneously preaches diversity while practicing segregation. The interview challenges conventional narratives about racism in France, exposing what Bousquet sees as an uncomfortable truth about the consequences of mass immigration and multiculturalism in modern French society.
Originally published on Contre-Poison on May 12, 2025.
Translated by Alexander Raynor
Interview conducted by Nina Pravda
Nina Pravda: You chose to open your investigation by citing an internet poll from a forum I grew up with, jeuxvideos.com. Why this choice?
François Bousquet: These discussion forums are the soundtrack of a generation: that of white, male youth, not necessarily underprivileged, but who have no legitimate space for expression. These forums should be understood as echo chambers where what the dominant media refuses to hear resonates: a France, a youth that lives in direct contact with anti-white racism, in schoolyards, stadiums, school buses, the street, places where metropolitan elites never set foot. As their name indicates, these are forums that launch discussions on forbidden subjects, even though they are part of the daily experience of white adolescents. They are full of testimonies.
It's also on these platforms that these young people, often isolated, discover they are not alone in experiencing non-European immigration that lays down the law in their territory. While central media, dominated by bohemian bourgeoisie and boomers, practice shadow banning of anything outside their bubble, these forums offer a space of recognition, with its codes, its American-centered lexicon: derision, sarcasm, lack of filter... It's our own Trump's Troll Army. Result: there's a better chance of taking the pulse of a generation here than on Radio France or France Télévisions, where any speech contradicting the dominant narrative has long been unplugged.
Nina Pravda: The stories you collected are of an almost barbaric violence, and reveal to us that anti-white racism is far from being a recent phenomenon. The testimonies from your investigation cover almost half a century, and one of the harshest confessions in your book is also one of the oldest. I'm thinking of Sébastien, born in 1976, who grew up in the rough neighborhoods of Evry. "Even though I was only 7 or 8 years old, I understood perfectly that I was being chased because I was white," he confided to you. This testimony, from the mid-1980s, already foretold the fate reserved for white populations who would remain in the replaced housing projects. What forces, at that time, could have contributed to stifling this phenomenon?
François Bousquet: These forces didn't just stifle it, they made it possible by shaping public discourse for half a century. We would have to go back very far in time to trace its history, but the 1970s mark a decisive step. What is the prerequisite for constructing a new man? The deconstruction of the old man. That's exactly what happened during this period, in both popular and scholarly culture: they methodically undermined the self-esteem of the French by reducing them to a caricature of infamous, congenitally racist "franchouillards."1
Take a piece of filth like "Dupont Lajoie" (1975); an edifying tearjerker like "Life Before Us" by Émile Ajar/Gary, Goncourt Prize 1975, where a Holocaust survivor lovingly raises a grateful little Mohammed (to be put in perspective with the fate of Mireille Knoll, also a Holocaust survivor, murdered in 2018 in Paris by her neighbor Yacine shouting "Allahou akbar"); a propaganda song long taught in schools like "Lily" (1977) that explains in a cutesy way – it's Pierre Perret – to the French that they are racist bastards; or, on the academic side, a book as questionable as "Vichy France" (1972) by American historian Robert Paxton, which retro-demonizes our country. I could multiply the examples. They have shaped the mental landscape in which we evolve.
All this led, in the following decade, to the creation of SOS Racisme2 and its religion of "potes" (buddies). Meanwhile, the last Whites in the suburbs were getting smashed, literally. That's what Sébastien tells me, lost in the mid-1980s on the Parc aux Lièvres plaza in Évry, where he is virtually the only White, in any case the only White who refuses to assimilate in reverse. When he turns on his radio, he comes across the glucose syrup of the "potes" concert at Place de la Concorde or Balavoine's humanitarian tremolos singing "L'Aziza," while in real life, he gets his skull smashed in with skateboards or is chased like a rabbit because he is white. That's the great state lie of anti-racism: everything these Whites were taking full in the face in the street has never been allowed on screen.
Nina Pravda: One of your chapters is titled "Theory of the Great White and Social Construction of the Little White." How does the former allow racism to be exercised against the latter?
François Bousquet: In the progressive imagination, there are two types of Whites: the "great" and the "little." The first is the globalized elite, bristling with diplomas, living in city centers and gentrified areas. The second is caricatured, inferiorized, invisibilized. The first demonizes the second, giving itself the beautiful anti-racist role, when in reality it is the best agent of anti-white racism. Why? Because by constructing the repulsive figure of the "little White" – parochial, boorish, hick – it socially legitimizes the aggression and contempt of which the latter is the target.
The great White washes whiter than white, literally and figuratively. It drapes itself in a virtuous posture by denouncing a "white privilege" that in reality only concerns itself, while leaving the "little White" to bear alone the weight of Western sin. By opposing a sacrificed white majority to sanctified minorities, it creates an asymmetry from which it benefits: it reinforces its cultural capital by crushing the symbolic capital of those who no longer have any. This social contempt allows anti-white racism to be exercised, provided it strikes only the bad White: the little one, not the great one. That's how, under the guise of virtue, the great White feeds hatred against the "little Whites."
Nina Pravda: "Most of the witnesses I met had never questioned their identity before being confronted with anti-white racism," you write. To explain this mechanism, you take up Gilles-William Goldnadel's interpretation, which postulates that their guilt-inducing superego forbade them from thinking of themselves as Whites (out of shame for the Holocaust, colonialism, slavery...). Under these conditions of European guilt, can ethnic consciousness only be revealed through racist violence?
François Bousquet: That's the whole French and European paradox: all the peoples of the Earth have an identity consciousness, except us. Or rather: we are forbidden to have one. Others are encouraged to proclaim themselves Arabs, Africans, Muslims, trans, queer, whatever you want... Except Europeans. As soon as they try to define themselves, they are thrown back a list of imprescriptible crimes like a boomerang.
It's this mechanism of intimidation that prevents access to self-awareness. Result: you discover your identity when it hits you in the face. That's what I observed in most of the witnesses in my investigation. None were activists, none claimed an identity. They had never even thought about it. Yet, one day, it fell on them in the form of an aggression. It forced them to define themselves in the negative, but always against a background of guilt. Because with us, the only authorized identity consciousness is an unhappy, guilty, ethnomasochistic consciousness. It's suicidal, because we know well that a people that no longer has the right to love itself condemns itself.
Nina Pravda: You raise, in a chapter entitled "The Farce of Diversity," an important issue: "separatism is not a trend, it's a mechanism." People do not mix. When they have the means, they flee immigrant neighborhoods, and even in so-called "multicultural" districts, public space is segregated ("Fifty meters below, it's Boboland. Fifty meters above, it's Paristanbul."). How do you explain that the most progressive individuals are also those who have the least contact with diversity?
François Bousquet: The mixing is the great farce of our time. It is celebrated on TV sets, taught in schools, invoked as a moral incantation. But in everyday life, nobody believes in it, especially not those who have erected it as a dogma. The most fervent apostles of living together are also the champions of an unspoken social distancing. They preach diversity with the left hand and dodge it with the right when it comes to choosing their children's school or signing a lease to house their family. The school map becomes an avoidance strategy reserved for the initiated.
Who knows the system better – and how to circumvent it – than progressives? On the ground, diversity does not resist reality. Multiculturalism can at most be experienced as a musical, gastronomic, or tourist experience, never as a shared daily life. We exchange Oriental recipes, post selfies at a rap concert, praise creolization on social networks, but for the rest, we live among ourselves.
The border is everywhere: a street, a metro station, the price per square meter. On one side Boboland3, on the other Paristanbul – between the two, not even fifty or a hundred meters of distance. Segregations are invisible, but they impose themselves in all determining choices: housing, work, children's schooling. Republican universalism has never worked – or rather: it only worked when it came to assimilating the same, Italians, Spaniards, Portuguese.
Nina Pravda: At the time of their aggression, a very large number of victims seem not to have been aware of the racist nature of the violence they suffered. As if anti-white racism was inconceivable, unimaginable, unspeakable. What are the psychological consequences of the denial of anti-white racism on its victims?
François Bousquet: A form of double denial, if you'll allow me the expression. First, the official denial, imposed by the dominant discourse that explains to us that anti-white racism doesn't exist. Then, the denial of the victims, more insidious, which functions as an immunodeficient defense mechanism. Let me explain. The first shock of anti-white racism, for many, is not understanding what they're experiencing. The violence they suffer is racial, but the word is forbidden to them. They've been taught that a White person cannot be a victim of racism. They have neither the words to verbalize it nor the tools to think about it.
Denial prevents confronting discourse with reality; that's when the repressed buries it. Where? In the depths of the unconscious. That's the story that happened to Nicolas, whose testimony I collected. He arrives in eighth grade at a school in Crépy-en-Valois, an hour by train from Paris. For a year, he endures humiliations, blows, insults – because he is white.
But the most terrible thing is not there: the most terrible thing is that he ended up espousing the cause of his tormentors, to the point of blending into their universe, adopting their codes, their language, their culture. That's what he told me. He denied everything he was, to buy social peace or rather a form of inner tranquility that he didn't have to question. It's the Stockholm syndrome in its multicultural version, which I call the Stockholmistan syndrome.
For these adolescents, survival means following the laws of imitation. They adopt the cultural norms imposed by the occupier. Because they know that resisting means exposing themselves. The process is terribly perverse: it produces hostages who, to stop suffering, convince themselves they have chosen their condition. Until the day when an event – the 2015 attacks for Nicolas – tears the veil of lies. But at what price? Ten years, twenty years lost, sometimes more. Nicolas has freed himself from this evil spell, but how many never free themselves?
Nina Pravda: School transportation, paths to work or school, university, dormitories, football field locker rooms, training centers, anti-white racism seems to be exercised as soon as one enters a space of living together... Circumventing the school map does not seem sufficient to avoid attacks, and even Aurore Bergé, minister for the fight against discrimination, tells of having been "spat on" while being called a "dirty French woman." Which White person, today, can escape anti-white racism?
François Bousquet: Who can still escape anti-white racism? No one, at least if we stick to Aurore Bergé, the immovable minister of Macronism. However, she refuses to see it as a form of anti-white racism (unlike the government spokesperson, Sophie Primas). Aurore Bergé is not an exception here. How many bohemian bourgeoisie, attacked or humiliated, prefer to find excuses for their attackers? They always recite the same miserabilist platitudes: ghettoization, poverty, discrimination, as if they attributed to immigrants a sort of moral immunity coupled with a permit to attack with total impunity.
Anti-white racism didn't fall from the sky. It is the direct by-product of an unprecedented demographic imbalance, the result of massive and continuous immigration that transforms majorities into minorities on their own soil, neighborhood after neighborhood, school after school. As long as we refuse to dry up migratory flows, anti-white racism will prosper. It's not an accident, it's the symptom of an archipelagoed society, fractured, delivered to a war of all against all, where yesterday's majority element has become a pariah. What is multiculturalism? A society without coherence, without a shared project, without a future – that is to say, an absence of society itself. In other words, we're living on an ammunition dump. As long as we refuse to face the migration issue, the taboo will hold. Because breaking it means reopening the file on mass immigration that has served as the backbone for our elites for forty years.
Nina Pravda: Beyond the "vengeful" interpretations related to slavery or colonization, what are, in your opinion, the drivers of anti-white racism? The testimonies you report are all of extreme violence, anti-white racism being exercised almost instinctively, by groups or even individuals taking the initiative alone to assault isolated French women or men who at no time sought any conflict.
François Bousquet: We must move beyond ready-made victim thinking, which reduces anti-white racism to historical revenge against slavery or colonization. This interpretive grid, conveyed by decolonial discourses, is an intellectual scam. The testimonies of anti-white racism I've collected prove it. It manifests itself in the street, in schools, in stadiums, without the victim ever having provoked anything. It's gratuitous, instinctual, bestial.
The real driver of this hatred is not the past nor the liabilities of the past, it's resentment. Nietzsche said everything on the subject. Resentment is the passion of ill-born souls. It's hatred macerated in failure, aimed at those perceived as superior, not because they necessarily are, but because they embody an envied image that one doesn't dare admit to oneself. Resentment desires what it hates and hates what it desires. It's the sad passion of multicultural societies. It's born of comparison. It's not colonization that feeds it – all that is well and truly dead – but failure, here and now, starting with academic failure. It's from this failure that in early years a rage is born that finds its outlet only in gratuitous racial violence.
Nina Pravda: In "Lynching Session – the Tomb of the Unknown Schoolboy," you dig up several corpses from the media closet. An article in Le Monde, which headlines on the "specter of anti-white racism," in which the unheard-of violence committed on processions of high school students by a thousand suburbanites who came to attack "those who have the faces of victims" during demonstrations against the Fillon law in 2005 is related. The following year, same thing again on the occasion of demonstrations against the CPE, with this difference that the racist raids could have been avoided. You summon the testimony of Patrick Buisson, who reports that Nicolas Sarkozy, then Minister of the Interior and rival of Villepin, had "taken the decision to let the bands of Blacks and Arabs attack young Whites at Les Invalides, while informing Paris Match photographers of the likelihood of serious incidents." So, twenty years ago, the newspaper of record and the top cop of France, future president of the Republic, were aware of the existence of anti-white racism. How do you explain the awareness, as brief as it was opportunistic, of these French elites?
François Bousquet: You're right: the media and political lucidity of 2005-2006 was as brief as it was opportunistic. Two articles in Le Monde and a report in Paris Match. No more. After which, they closed the file like one gets rid of a corpse. Since then, a lead blanket has fallen on it. This lead blanket is systemic racism, which has locked everything down and prevents thinking about anti-white racism.
This systemic racism is a theoretical scam, yet another: it assumes that all social structures – school, police, administration, etc. – would be traversed by an unconscious but omnipresent racism, always to the benefit of Whites. Yet, look at reality: who holds the walls of the neighborhoods today? Who controls the street? Who makes the law in locker rooms, high schools, stadiums, buses? Certainly not the "dominants" as they are fantasized at Sciences Po.
If there is something systemic, it's anti-racism erected as a state religion, but an anti-racism that sorts victims on ethnic criteria, that manufactures memorial hierarchies, that erases Whites from statistics on racism. In this respect, it is permissible to affirm that the only systemic racism that holds is anti-white racism.
TN: “franchouillards” is a pejorative used to describe ‘typical French people’
SOS Racisme is an international NGO dedicated to the cause of “anti-racism.” It is the largest anti-racist NGO in Europe. It is equivalent to the SPLC in the USA.
TN: “Bobo” is a French portmanteau for bourgeois-bohemian. The English/American equivalent would be a champagne socialist.