I was born in the late 70s of a mother from Martinique and a father from Lorraine region in eastern continental France: I was always aware that, for good and bad, France was more than white, more than Europe, more than what most thought and took for granted. I looked to history to make sense of the very existence of my family, and the history I found was a history of exploitation, slavery, abuse ignored by most French people.

Growing up in the 1980s, there were few places where French flags were acceptable: government buildings, sporting events, right-wing and fascist meetings. That was about it. For lefties like me, waving the flag was an act of political aggression. For a Frenchman of West Indian descent like me, waving the flag was also source of special ire, because I’d grown to know that no matter how French I actually was, no matter how well I knew French history, how well I spoke or wrote, how beholden to French values of liberté, égalité, fraternité, how connected to culture I was, there would be Frenchmen to fly the Drapeau tricolore in my face as a reminder that for them, against all aforementioned values, my skin alone was proof that I would never quite be French. All of this was both sublimated and exacerbated in football games where black and brown people were especially visible and worshipped by fans who would just as soon spit racial slurs at them.

So, 1998 was a bit odd. I shunned crowds and watched at home.

I had no special pride in being French, but then there wasn’t really anything else for me to be. My ties to Martinique do not make me Martinican. I was born and raised in a country that often struggles to fit me in. Like most Frenchmen of African descent, I’m a conscript of Frenchness—to riff on Conscripts of Modernity, David Scott’s reflection on Haitian revolutionaries’ vexed relation to revolutionary France and its averred values. Football occupies a unique and peculiar role in this relationship: I started playing at seven and never stopped. Football is tied to real world politics, morals and history, but it is also its own parallel world. Football allegiances do not seamlessly fit maps or borders. Football allegiances reveal individual geopolitics. I support FC Metz—my hometown team; I support Arsenal FC—Petit, Pirès, Kanu, Overmars, Bergkamp, Wiltord, Vieira and Henry’s team forever and ever, amen; I don’t trust PSG, Chelsea, Lazio which, rationally or not, I connect to their once and future fascist fans; I support all African teams, because I want them to teach the world a lesson, and I support football beauty wherever and whenever it appears, however fleetingly. I also support France (the team) in spite of France (the country), and for the imagined, alternative flag it flaunts in the face of France.

Have it in French: Je supporte la France, mais la France m’insupporte.

In 1999, I left the country for a year, and eventually for good. Not that racial matters in the US are any better; but I figured it might feel a bit different to actually be a foreigner.