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On the basis of a study carried out in Nord–Pas-de-Calais region, this article analyses the representation of the public problem of racism in the local printed press, through the example of La Voix du Nord. Analysing a corpus of articles written in 2000’s, it highlights the narrative work undertaken by the media to define racism. That narrative work is modeled on a moral anti-racism that actually relates to a national ideology. The article shows how public discourse tends to reformulate the question of race (and its principle of division) in a idealized nation (and its presumption of consensual unity), with at least two consequences: firstly, the materiality of racism gets dissolved in the process, favoring imagined racism, a reversed reflection of the national imagined community. Secondly, in doing so, a relative racism transfers into the national ideology.