In both French and German educational policy, informal learning spaces are increasingly taken into account. While Germany recently admitted that its multicultural approach to education has led to the maintenance of essentialist perceptions of differences, France has also questioned its intercultural model, including because it did not resist temptations of communitarian politics (Cuche, 1996). This study focuses on the social experience - as central vector of identity construction in adolescence – of young Whites in French and German neighbourhoods where migrants predominate. The lives of the young people in the study are marked by difference. Particularly ethnic difference is identified as an essential aspect of relationships, identification and social recognition. However, the study identifies a redistribution of roles and statuses on a micro-social scale, and a reversal of the order of ethnic majorities (Cuche, 2009). The paper argues that these young Whites experience an unthinkable and unthought minority status which is, nevertheless, meaningful for the renewal of the thought of living together (Arendt 1961). The young Whites unexpectedly develop remarkable adaptability skills and appear comfortable with the cultural other. In this way, they invite us to revisit Robert Ezra Park’s (1928) notion of the happy Marginal Man.