This study is about the manner in which ‘ethnicity’, ‘race’, ‘racism’ and ‘anti-racism’ are understood in contemporary France and how this affects the ways in which racialized young adults experience their schooling and early working lives. I explore the ways in which young people living and working in Paris and its surrounding suburbs understand the opportunities and barriers they face. I ground these narratives in an historicized account of the emergence of recent formulations of debates about the appropriate place of immigrants and racialized communities in public political culture in France. I do this through both an examination of the controversy surrounding the use of the categories ethnicity and ‘race’ for the purpose of monitoring discrimination as well as an analysis of a recently inaugurated national museum dedicated to the contribution of immigrants to the French nation. I argue that highly mediatised discussions in France revolving around the meaning of the French national identity, immigration and integration, youth unrest in the banlieues and the place of religion in French society are all implicitly discourses of ‘race’ and racism, despite the concerted and explicit avoidance of the deployment of racial terminology. I draw together an analysis of racialization processes as they take place at different scales and arenas from the denial of the significance of racialization in intellectual milieus, to the process of invisibilisation of racialization and colonialism at work in museum displays and memory narratives to the individual and collective everyday lived experience of racism of relatively high achieving young racialized adults. While rooted in human geography, I rely on a variety of qualitative methods and contribute to a range of academic fields, including the study of racism and anti-racism, the sociology of statistics, museum studies and political science.