Black French people

and the lack of legal recognition of ethnicity in French population censuses make this social entity extremely difficult to define, unlike in countries such as the United States.

However, the definition of "black" in the United States, based on the "One-drop rule", is also highly open to criticism, and only partially correlates with skin color and historical trajectory.

"[2] This great complexity in talking about "Blacks" served as the basis for the screenplay of the film Tout simplement noir (by Jean-Pascal Zadi and John Wax, 2020), which illustrates the distance between personalities such as Claudia Tagbo (a naturalized French actress from Côte d'Ivoire), Omar Sy (a French actor born in Trappes to Senegalese and Malian parents), Lucien Jean-Baptiste (an actor from Martinique) and JoeyStarr (born in Paris to Martinique parents of Afro-Caribbean, Breton and Chinese descent), Éric Judor (born to a father of mixed race from Guadeloupe and an Austrian mother) and Vikash Dhorasoo (of south Indian origin).

Although it is illegal for the government of France to collect data on ethnicity and race in the census (a law with its origins in the 1789 revolution and reaffirmed in the constitution of 1958),[4] various population estimates exist.

[11] Part of a parliamentary bill which would have permitted the collection of data for the purpose of measuring discrimination was rejected by the Conseil Constitutionnel in November 2007.