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This paper aims at examining the use of the word race and its activation as a concept through the conceptualization of the “French”. The analysis is based on a corpus of political debates on naturalization and immigration conducted between 1981 and 2012 at the French National Assembly. The results of the research show a twofold evolution of racialization forms: on the one hand from the classical racism to the cultural and civic “racism without races”, and on the other hand from a racism based on a majority/minority relation to a racism based on the incompatibility with the particularities of the dominant group. We conclude questioning the scope of these two concepts: racism and racialization.