6. France
White population: around 60 million
The sixth country on the list 11 countries with highest white population, France, prohibits collecting data on residents’ race, ethnicity, and religion since 1978. Two years ago French officials went one step further and decided to erase the word “race” from state’s documents. The logic behind the ban is that the words race and racial can support racist ideologies. However, the fact that there are no official estimates on the number of ethnic groups creates a pile of problems – it is hard to measure the level of discrimination against minorities if there are no data about their number. According to rough estimations, there are around 60 million whites living in France, who account for 85 percent of total population.
While European value survey showed that level of racial intolerance in France is relatively low, in World Value Survey 22.6 percent of respondents said that they wouldn’t like to have a different race neighbor, which is the largest percent among the countries on this list. Moreover, earlier this year Council of Europe labeled France as a country that “is becoming more racist and intolerant”.
