De la question sociale à la question raciale ? Debate with Didier and Eric Fassin

Last night I attended a discussion about this new book (De la question sociale à la question raciale ?, La Decouverte, 2006). The event took place in the very grand ’salle des mariages’ of Mairie du 4eme; on velvet upholstered benches, beneath the obligatory bust of Marianne and the portrait of Chirac, with gale-force winds buffetting the enormous tricolor and EU flags hanging just ouside the window, we sat down to discuss the nature of racist discrimination in the Republic, a simultaneously pleasurable (given the setting) and discomforting (given the topic) experience, as Louis-Georges Tin noted in his concluding remarks. There were, I would guess, about 60 people in the audience; with the exception of the speakers, a handful of sociology students and myself all members of the black professional middle classes (judging mainly by attire and the obvious level of erudition in the debate). The event was organised by the CapDiv, although there is a considerable overlap between this organisation and the CRAN (including its President!) – indeed, I wonder to what extent the two are basically the same thing, with the CapDiv directing its arguments towards ‘la France majoritaire’ (as it was described last night) in a language that’s more palatable to many than the CRAN’s, whose audience is primarily black? The ‘racial’ composition of the audience is not, in itself, important; however, it struck me because it seems unfortunate that an issue which is so manifestly about French society as a whole should be perceived as a ‘black’ issue.

The debate was introduced by Pap Ndiaye, whom I last saw presenting Toni Morrison (it’s perhaps worth mentioning that Ndiaye is the only French black intellectual I’ve come across during the course of my research, with the exception of Roger Somé, whom I’ve never met).

Eric and Didier Fassin took in turns to present the book. Their starting point is the riots of 2005 which they see as a turning point or “rupture de sens” in the way racial minorities are perceived in France (a chronology that was widely if good-naturedly contested in the debate). It’s worth noting that the Fassins use the terminology of ‘racial minorities’ and without inverted commas, which is unusual in French public discourse. Not because they think that ‘races’ exist but because they observe that, regardless of their biological fictiveness, plenty of people in France behave as though they do. Race then is not a biological but a discursively constructed phenomenon; to use a euphemism, as is common practice, won’t make discrimination or racism go away. The riots, in their view, accelerated the emergence of a anti-discrimination discourse. This discourse was already present – see my post about an early article by Didier Fassin – but the riots gave the issue greater prominence.

Discrimination policy in France, they argued, has passed from a ’state of denial’ (”inequalities exist but they’re not the fruit of racism”) to ‘dénégation’ (also translated as denial in English, but implying something less strong. Here the discourse is pre-emptive “you’re going to accuse me of being racist, but I’m not…”). Slow progress then. They also discussed the way those people who insist on the existence of racist discrimination are publicly ‘disqualified’, either as self-interested victims (who can’t accept they’re not up to the job) or as militants agitating for ‘communautarisme’ or multicultural separatism. I am interested in the idea of ‘communautarisme’ as a disqualifying discourse; this is purely anecdotal but I found the atmosphere at yesterday’s debate far more congenial, engaging, tolerant and – dare I say it – Republican than the thinly veiled hysteria of the ‘observatoire du communautarisme’ [see my post].

But why has this issue emerged so late in France? The Fassins both know a lot about what goes on outside the hexagone, fortunately, so they are perhaps more equipped to answer this question than many. They attributed the delay to two factors: firstly, the hegemony of a strong Republican discourse since the 1980s that has blocked recognition of any identities bar that of citizen (a reponse, they suggested, to the ‘Marche pour l’egalite’ of 1983 and the increased visibility of immigrants and their descendants) and secondly, the preponderance of the class struggle in the discourse of the French left. Whilst acknowledging the pertinence of a social or economomic analysis of inequality the Fassins seem to be arguing for a social analysis that would consider the interaction of class, race, gender and sexuality; this has been the standard line in Anglo-American thought for some years (and is a basic tenet of cultural studies, I would suggest) but in the French context it sounds fresh. And viable.

The sympathetic audience encouraged the Fassins to pose some difficult questions at the end: is the ‘race’ issue distracting attention from economic inequality? And how is ‘black’ defined in France? How helpful is it to carve out a black politics rather than a minority politics that would also engage people of North African descent and the growing population of South Asian origin?

After an intelligent, polite but testing debate (for once participants kept their questions brief and to the point…) Patrick Lozes, the President of the CapDiv and the CRAN closed the session by annoucning the next debate: “De la question sociale à la question post-coloniale?”. But unfortunately in the flurry of bag-packing and coat-putting-on I didn’t catch whether this was a genuine plan, or the expression of utopian wishful thinking. By post-coloniale did he mean the post-racist society over the horizon I wonder? By which logic contemporary France would still be profoundly colonial…

 

Explore posts in the same categories: Colonial legacies, Cultural diversity and multiculturalism, French politics, Immigration