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This article underscores the racialization of certain categories of patients – identified as Roma – by emergency physicians through a process combining an “ethnoracial” othering with socio-economic, residential and administrative precariousness to foreground “their cultural difference” as a prime motivation factor for their reliance on emergency services. Yet – these motivations are similar to those invoked by the majority of individuals using these services – who are also characterized by precarious economic, residential or administrative conditions. The analysis of the representation that emergency physicians draw of their professional missions and the stakes of financial return that new public management reforms impose on their services helps put to light the fonctional usages of this racialization. By invisibilizing the socio-econmic, administrative or residential precariousness of the targeted group, the racialization of the “Roma” patient thereby enables emergency physicians operating within public hospitals to valorize their medical achivements despite functions seen to downgrade their professional status.