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Comment by aerosmile | Hacker News Reader

> ethnic studies are forbidden in France

Yep, crazy. As an offshoot of that, affirmative action is also forbidden. True story.

Less crazy when you learn why: "There are no public policies in France that target benefits or confer recognition on groups defined as races. For many Frenchmen, the very term race sends a shiver running down their spines, since it tends to recall the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the complicity of France’s Vichy regime in deporting Jews to concentration camps. Race is such a taboo term that a 1978 law specifically banned the collection and computerized storage of race-based data without the express consent of the interviewees or a waiver by a state committee. France therefore collects no census or other data on the race (or ethnicity) of its citizens."[0]

tl;dr: such data was used during the Nazi occupation and France helped deportation

[0]: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/race-policy-in-france/

I am not implying that France had some hidden motives in passing this legislature. But WW2 trauma is preventing them from making policy decisions that would benefit the society today. Here's just one very practical example of that: in the below WSJ article [0], it's claimed that the lack of ethnic statistics has contributed to housing and employment discrimination, among many other problems.

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/europe/coronavirus-fran...

Agreed. I'm not defending the lack of ethnic statistics. Just offering the perspective from the other side. I strongly believe you cannot improve things you do not measure.

> the lack of X statistics has contributed to problem Y

The term "contribution" implies active impact on a problem. It comes from the Latin "contribuere" which means to "bring together" or to "add". If X contributes to Y, you should be able to measure the contribution, but there's no way to measure the impact of something that never existed in the first place.

They need ethnic statistics to prove that residents of denser neighborhood working essential jobs (that can't be done remotely for the most part) are disproportionately affected by COVID?

I'm sure the far right in France would love to have ethnic statistics, especially for crime rates... it's the left that historically pushed back against it.

It depends. Affirmative action depending on skin colour is giving someone a different treatment because of their skin colour, which is racist.

There are several forms of affirmative action that depend on things like income and local disparities.

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