In France as in much of Europe, the first decades of the millennium have been marked by an increase in racially-inflected social tensions, generating intense debate about the capacity of European nation-states to make room for difference, and about the impoverished conceptual means available to meet these challenges in the 21st century. The lifeways and perceptions of those who are the putative subjects of this debate, however, are often overlooked or fitted into pre-existing social categories that do not reflect the variety and particularity of their experience. For this project I propose to return to the post-industrial suburb outside of Paris that I first studied for an extended period in 1994-1995, in order to investigate the tensions that especially since the (sub)urban uprisings of 2005 have dramatically re-configured French national debates around identity and immigration, moving interest away from a predominantly socio-economic framing of social inequality toward a growing preoccupation with identity and ethno-racial concerns. Building on my previous work, I will explore how these shifts have impacted the lived experience of those who reside in the multiethnic and socially fragile suburbs that are the object of so much of this debate, and inversely investigate what their experience can reveal about contemporary polemics. Of particular concern is the precarious tension between the increased reification of identity claims and the multiple admixtures of contemporary life. I aim to investigate that tension, to see what it reveals about how typologies of difference are constituted, the gaps they fill, the restraints they impose, and the ethics to which they are tied.