Posted on December 8, 2008

Miss France Wants to Advertise French Diversity

AP, December 7, 2008

The new Miss France, born to an African-American mother and white French father, said Sunday she wants to advertise her country’s diversity on the world stage.

Chloe Mortaud is not the first nonwhite winner of the beauty pageant, but she is joining a growing chorus of French public figures breaking traditions by speaking openly about race.

“I want to go to people and explain to them that fear of the other is unfounded,” she told The Associated Press the day after being crowned. “I want to incarnate . . . today’s French diversity” at international beauty pageants.

France has championed a colorblind standard that sees all citizens as just French, regardless of ethnic origins—an ideal meant to make everyone feel equal. But it has failed to snuff out racism, particularly against immigrants from former French colonies in Africa. Discrimination in part fed riots in 2005 by largely minority youth in French housing projects.

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Mortaud, a dual French-American citizen, said her mother was born in Mississippi but grew up in California, and her father’s heritage is ethnic French “as far back as we could trace the family tree.”

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