| Abstract | On the 10 May 2008, approximately 2000 people marched through the center of Paris proclaiming that, ‘Slavery has been abolished, but prejudices not!’ Based on participant observation of this march, this article explores two main issues with regard to the challenges of blackness in contemporary Paris. First, it examines how the ethno-racial category of ‘black’ becomes significant for collective action in the French republican context, specifically in terms of how French black people symbolically occupy the French national imagination by physically occupying Parisian urban space. Second, the article shows that, as a commemorative march, one of its key objectives is to make present-day claims of social justice, namely, a denouncement of ongoing racial discrimination experienced by French black people. The article seeks to understand how the marchers, paradoxically by making themselves visible in public space, are in effect also proclaiming a demand for social invisibility.
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