France is not a colorblind society, in fact it is inescapably color-conscious for the people at the center of Beaman's book, Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France. Beaman spent the academic year 2008–2009 on location in France conducting an ethnographic study of 45 descendants of Maghrébian immigrants and their experiences as French citizens. The author met with her subjects multiple times and in different settings, capturing their views of what it means to be French at their workplaces, in family settings, schools, and in social life overall.

Building on the conceptual and analytical insights of intellectuals of the African diaspora such as Audre Lorde and W.E.B. Dubois, who have written on the transatlantic politics of racial exclusion, Beaman deploys Cathy Cohen's concept of the “citizen outsider,” conceived for the U.S. setting, and applies it to the case of Maghrébian minorities in France (p. 4). Beaman argues that although her subjects are legally citizens of the Republic they remain outside of French society as they lack “cultural citizenship” (p. 4). What comes across quite clearly in this crisp and deeply engaging book is that while the subjects of her study are ethnic minorities, their social exclusion arises not from their minority status or ethnicity per se, but rather from how white French society views and treats the children of North African immigrants—by attributing social significance to their racial and ethnic characteristics.

Beaman makes several important contributions with this book. Citizen Outsider demonstrates how people can be excluded even while possessing legal citizenship, thus challenging scholarly and policy approaches that frame citizenship as the goal of immigrant integration (see e.g. Bloemraad Reference Bloemraad2006; Reference Bloemraad2018). Beaman also counters the official mantra of colorblindness espoused by the French state and accepted by many sociologists of French society (see Wacquant and Bourdieu Reference Wacquant and Bourdieu1999; Lamont Reference Lamont2000) by uncovering the processes of racial formation and racialization that are not supposed to occur in France. The book is packed with detailed passages from her informants describing repeated experiences of exclusion based on their race. Her interview data show how racialization occurs through “daily interactions” and provide examples of a French “racial common sense” in practice, reified and learned (p. 19). For example, Beaman's informants Sofia and her husband were turned down in their application for an apartment and the landlord explained “there was a French couple who came, so we rented it to them. It's just easier.” Sofia points out that she was “disgusted” as she said “but Madame, we are French also.” Sofia then reflects that the couple who received the apartment “were white French” (p. 62). The powerful inclusion of these and other quotations from minorities in France utilizing the language of racial hierarchy to name their exclusion contrasts with many existing scholarly characterizations of how immigrant integration in France works. Beaman's informants relay multiple experiences of exclusion based on race beginning in childhood and continuing through adulthood as they encounter schools, the police, and other institutions. Her informants express pessimistic expectations as to whether their experience of racism will end in the future, but it remains unclear how their repeated experiences of racism may be changing their sense of belonging, and social mobility, over time. Beaman hints at this analytical puzzle when she contrasts informants’ experiences in elementary school with those in university but does not explore this fully.

Beaman's discussion of racial formation and racialization is highly suggestive for work in other European settings where an official ideology of colorblindness prevails. The specific historical backdrop of French processes of racialization, in the context of colonialism in Haiti and North Africa, was part of a larger Europe-wide phenomenon in which European countries sought to dominate peoples and cultures outside of Europe, and invented racism as a justification for empire. In this way, for example, Citizen Outsider is in dialogue with recent work on racialization in Scandinavia (see McEachrane Reference McEachrane2018). Rather than confining her analysis to either the concept of race or the concept of ethnicity, or to race as a subcategory of ethnicity, Beaman argues for the two terms as “co-constitutive of each other” given that her informants are excluded from Frenchness both as people “having ethnic origins in the Maghreb” and because they are “racialized as nonwhite” (p. 19). Beaman thus provides an insightful model for how to fruitfully examine identity formation within an ethnic group without ignoring racialization (see Brown and Jones Reference Brown and Jones2015).

Throughout the book, Beaman grapples with the question of what it means to grow up French. She highlights the role of schools, as institutions where immigrants can be integrated into the French mainstream, and where the molding of the population into Republican citizens occurs. However, Beaman critically reveals that the children of North African immigrants experience something very different from their white classmates. On the one hand, while all children learn about Republican values at school, these values are transmitted without including substantive content on France's colonial past from the perspectives of those colonized (p. 32–33). In addition, the social setting of the school is where children of North African immigrants experience their lower status within France's racial hierarchy, and where their immigrant background is noted by white French students and teachers as abnormal, rejected as problematic, and excluded. What should be of interest to scholars of white identity and white working-class mobilization in Europe (see e.g. Gest Reference Gest2016) is that Beaman's work points to the way in which white French children and white French teachers themselves become French and white through the shared experience of identifying and marginalizing students of Magrhébian background. Beaman's work reveals that children of Magrhébian background have a singularly racialized experience of becoming French, but Citizen Outsider also reveals that the process by which white citizens become French is also not colorblind, but thoroughly color-conscious as well.