Riots over the killing of 17-year-old Nahel Merzouk in Paris have started to slow down, but debate is raging over whether the incident points to wider issue of systemic racism in how France police is behaving towards its non-white population.

Many in France and abroad tried to paint the riots resulting from the killing as a problem of migrants occupying too much space in the country. The Guardian even reported that police had called the rioters, most of them young people, as “savage hordes”.

However, a look at similar incidents in the recent future make it clear that systemic racism is the clearest explanation for how the French police killed a boy and then dealt with the aftermath.

This is the third incident where a person was killed by police shooting this year, and there were a record 13 such incidents last year. The Guardian said that most victims of such shootings have been black or Arab since 2017.

An 2020 article in Foreign Policy said that France’s official policy of being ‘colour blind’ was over. It argued that while the country says promotes a uniform frnech identity beyond race, not even collecting race based statistics, the reality is much deeper.

In reality, Arabs and black people get stopped for police checks 20 times more than white people and racial minorities are also heavily represented in jails.

Violence against the racial minorities is also not new. In 1961, French police killed over 100 French Arabs who were protesting in Paris. The event was acknowledged almost 50 years later, but no apology was ever issued.

How French police treat non-whites has been linked by some writers to its inglorious past of colonialism in places including Haiti, Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean to Réunion Island in the Indian Ocean, North and West Africa as well as Vietnam, which was built on repression. And that repression has come home as with France’s diversifying population.

“Nahel’s death is not an unsolvable mystery – it was the result of systemic racism,” wrote Crystal M. Fleming, a professor of sociology and Africana studies.

She also added that only “an honest acknowledgement of systemic racism” will end the cycle of violence.