I OFTEN ACT as if I am colour blind. I do it most often when shopping for clothes. I walk into a shop, declaring my intention to buy a navy shirt, and then pull a dark green one from the rack. Sometimes I do it when selecting flowers; my wife finds the bouquets more amusing than romantic.

I do not act colour blind to be funny or clever. I do it because I really am colour blind. Colour blindness is an affliction, not a virtue.

Except when it applies to race. Then the matter is reversed. Those who live Martin Luther King’s dream and judge people not “by the colour of their skins but by the contents of their characters” are not suffering a rare visual disability. They can see that Thierry Henry’s character is contained in a black skin and Jacques Chirac’s in a white one. They simply think the fact irrelevant to the way they treat Henry or Chirac. No one is really racially colour blind; some just act as if they are.

Except in France. There, racial colour blindness is both a virtue and an affliction. The French Government does not only refuse to treat people of different races differently, avoiding American “affirmative action” policies and British racial targets in the judiciary. It refuses even to know the racial composition of France. It is illegal to collect data about the race or religion of the universally French French. The French Government has made a statistical affliction out of the virtue of racial colour blindness.

Why do this? The reason, I suspect, is biblical. Lusting after other men’s wives is not considered a sin in France, but it was in 1st-century Judea. Alas, it can be a difficult sin to resist. Just seeing some women is enough to make you want them. What’s a man to do? Jesus had some advice for those too weak to control their wandering eyes: pluck them out. Sometimes the only guarantor of virtue is blindness.

The French Government does not trust itself to see the racial facts. If it saw a striking racial inequality, it might be tempted by the sin of positive discrimination. Better not to know. If thine statistic offends thee, don’t collect the data.

Perhaps positive discrimination really is a sin. It might not work either. But there is more to the public policy of race than the question of positive discrimination: there are also questions about immigration, welfare, public housing and, in France, sartorial freedom. By denying themselves racial and religious data, the French Government restricts its ability to design and test its social policy.

Fortunately, statistics are not the only source of information. Riots also tell us something about the quality of a nation’s social policy. Wilful ignorance is not as easy as French politicians might have hoped.

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