Fighting discrimination in a hostile political environment: the case of “colour-blind” France

ABSTRACT

This introduction discusses responses to ethno-racial discrimination in a hostile political environment, colour-blind France. The article presents the current characteristics of the French case, including data measuring ethnoracial discrimination. We outline the on-going role of state institutions and their agents in disqualifying minority claims, but also the recent turn against Islam and the hostility towards new movements against structural racism. We discuss how colour-blindness constrains both local policies and movements. We examine the consequences for individuals that experience discrimination and the collectives that fight against it. We highlight the various strategies that they adopt such as discretion, infrapolitical mobilization as well as tactical re-framing.

KEYWORDS:

• Racial discrimination
• colour-blindness
• mobilization
• repertoire of action
• politics of misrecognition
• local policies
• Islam
• France

Among pluriethnic, multi-religious, post-colonial states with a long immigration history, France has long held a specific place in international comparisons. One of its distinct features is “colour-blindness” and the fact that, “[i]t does not recognize racial or ethnic groups either as legitimate social or political categories or as targets for policy” (Lieberman 2001). Regarding race, the French National Assembly unanimously erased the very concept from the Constitution on 12 July 2018, as if using the word legitimized racial theories and banning its usage could eradicate racism (Lentin 2011). While article 1 still pledges that France “insures equal rights before the law regardless of … origin and religion”, claims based on group belonging are illegitimate and dismissed across partisan lines as dangerous and guilty expressions of communautarisme – a derogatory term for cultural separatism (Dhume-Sonzogni 2016; Mohammed and Talpin 2018).

A significant symptom of French colour-blindness lies in the reluctance of institutional actors -as well as scholars - to engage with ethnic and racial issues, as pointed out by Amiraux and Simon: “there are no minorities here” (2006). The legal obligation to conceal ethnic or religious belonging in official statistics results in the impossibility for institutional actors to classify and count individuals based on those characteristics (Sabbagh and Peer 2008). Most public policies dealing with inequalities have therefore adopted an income-based or territorial approach, which led institutional actors who design and implement policies to deal with ethnic diversity “without naming it” (Escafré-Dublet and Lelévrier 2019).

While France has transposed the 2000 EU antidiscrimination directives and established an equality body (Geddes and Guiraudon 2004), large-scale surveys (TeO¹) and recent research on the experience of discrimination (EODIPAR²) show that the latter remains widespread in daily life and institutions. This issue thus asks how the French politics of misrecognition affects the mobilizations of minority groups but also local policy initiatives, and legal battles. It also highlights the limits of denying the importance of ethnicity or religion in policies such as the fight against radical Islam or Jihadism.

We surmise that the enduring demonizing of groupness, especially when embedded in laws and policies, has significant consequences on the daily life and attitudes of those concerned (Beauchemin, Hamel, and Simon 2016). Given the closed discursive opportunity structures that we have described, we hypothesize that they also constrain the ways in which minorities can react and mobilize collectively, and limit the number of available frames and repertoires of action (Lamont 2016). In brief, individuals that feel discriminated against find themselves in a conundrum. The “exit” option means silence – if not expatriation, a growing phenomenon among French racial minorities – and reinforces the view of the discriminators. “Voice” turns victims into culprits, since persons claiming to belong to a minority group are looked down upon as troublemakers disturbing the French colour-blind model and thus self-excluding themselves from the national community.

This special issue tests existing theories on the experience of discrimination, and on the diverse repertoire of collective action to fight discriminatory practices in France. We start from the premise that the mechanisms and processes of disqualification of minorities may be similar across cases yet they are revealed and exposed by focusing on a particular context. The context of the case constrains the legitimate ideational boundaries of political responses, in ways that reduce the realm of the possible in terms of mobilization and specific policies. In other words, while focusing on France, we do not believe in a national Zeitgeist that would explain everything. If France is to be a case in a typology, it is important to update what it is a case of (Elgie and Mazur 2016). Even neo-institutionalist authors such as Rogers Brubaker (1992) and Adrian Favell (2001) demonstrated a long time ago that it takes a lot of political work to make France distinctive, to impose a particular path or “philosophy” of national belonging and define Frenchness as colour-blind.

The articles in this issue draw on empirical qualitative research done at various levels of political action (city, regional or national) and focusing on various actors (inhabitants, activists, administrative, judicial and elected officials). Authors explore in particular the change in context since the 2015 terrorist attacks, a “discursive turn and critical juncture” in recent French history (Della Porta et al. 2020), which has redirected political attention on the fight against radicalization (Ragazzi 2023, in this issue). The stigmatization of Muslims that followed these events has turned efforts to implement anti-discrimination policies at local level into instruments of increased stigmatization (Escafré-Dublet and Hamidi 2023, in this issue). This however is only another occurrence of an already existing pattern of minority disqualification in their political fight and collective action repertoires (Talpin 2023, this issue). A fact that is not missed by inhabitants who are reluctantly turning to political action when they experience discrimination (Balazard et al. 2023, in this issue). Other forms of reactions to stigmatization are also explored with the polite responses of Muslim elites in search for integration (Dazey 2023, in this issue). New avenues are yet emerging when considering the possible success of an antidiscrimination case in French courts (Chappe and Keyhani 2023, in this issue).

This special issue therefore investigates the forms French colour-blindness takes and the consequences thereof. Far from disappearing, race operates at the political level and is embedded in policy design. One of the highlights of this issue is therefore the demonstration of the centrality of institutions and policies in the production of a colour-blind racial regime. The articles gathered here show that, despite the hostile character of the French political environment, the fight against discrimination takes renewed forms, from infrapolitical tactics to legal battles. While the social sciences have themselves, been under attack³, scholarship on France demonstrates the reproduction of ethnoracial inequalities and investigates the forms that resistance to discrimination take.

Discrimination in France: taking stock

Given that this issue features recent research on responses to discrimination, it is important to take stock of the most robust national data at our disposal on this phenomenon. While there are legal and scholarly definitions of what constitutes discrimination, xenophobia or racism, surveys that try to measure these phenomena capture experiences or attitudes that do not neatly fall into these conceptual categories. First, persons that narrate situations of unequal treatment will include various moments of “ordinary racism” for instance hostility and insults on public transport and sometimes vivid instances their being shunned for a job application or promotion, refused entry in a restaurant, forced to accept a school track that they did not want, or turned down for a rental. Second, pinpointing exactly the ground for discrimination is crucial in a legal procedure (Chappe and Keyhani 2023) but much more muddled in social interaction. In the French context, difference is mainly articulated in terms of nationality and descent, rather than “race” or “ethnicity”. However, the ways of speaking about group difference may vary across context, underlying beliefs do not (Maneri and Morning 2022). Identifying race, ethnicity or even religion as the reason for an unfair treatment remains difficult, even for those experiencing it firsthand (Aranguren, Madrisotti, and Durmaz-Martins 2021).

In spite of obstacles and controversies surrounding the collection of ethno-racial data, scientific evidence on discrimination has grown over the past fifteen years in France. With the supervision of the French national agency protecting personal data (CNIL – Commission national Informatiques et Libertés), Trajectories and Origins (TeO), a large-scale survey on population diversity in France, has documented how people experience discrimination. Conducted by both INED and INSEE in 2008-09 and 2019-20, the TeO survey is based on a sample of more than 20,000 respondents in metropolitan France and focuses on “populations whose life course may be adversely affected by factors linked to their physical appearance i.e. immigrants, descendants of immigrants, persons from the French overseas territories and their descendants”.⁴ The results of the second wave of the TeO2 survey shows an increase of 5 points in the feeling of discrimination. The proportion of individuals aged 18–49 declaring that they have been exposed to unequal treatment over the past five years went from 14 per cent to 19 per cent in ten years (Lê et al. 2022). Already in 2008, TeO demonstrated the extent and frequency of ethno-racial discrimination in contemporary France, whether in the labour market, housing, or access to many goods and services. It showed, for instance, that French people of African origin are 6.5 times more likely than the majority (White) population to report discriminatory experiences, and 5 times more likely if they are of North African origin (Beauchemin, Hamel, and Simon 2016). Meanwhile, other surveys have rigorously demonstrated the discriminatory practices of the French police (Goris, Jobard, and Levy 2009), which may have led to legal complaints in the absence of a substantial transformation of the institution. Moreover, studies coordinated by the Défenseur des droits, the Human Rights institution that serves as the equality body in charge of applying EU law in charge of discrimination, confirm these results. While the law now includes 25 criteria of discrimination recognized in the penal and labour codes, the hierarchy of the most frequent criteria of discrimination has not changed since 2005. The criterion of “origin” still being the most frequently mentioned (see Chappe and Keyhani 2023 on the relationship between national origin and race in the French context). In 2021, origin still represented one of the main discrimination criterion in referral to the Human rights institution with 15.2 per cent, right after disability (19.9 per cent) and health condition (16.3 per cent) and way above age (4.8 per cent) and gender (4.6 per cent) (Défenseur des droits 2022, 45).

While the increase in perception of discrimination might result both from the rise of discriminations per se and a growing awareness of the phenomenon, it is now difficult to deny the fact, or to simply reduce it to the place of residence or the attitude of the victims, as if often the case in the political sphere. When facing discrimination, individuals may turn to organizations (NGOs, trade unions or the aforementioned independent authority of the Défenseur des droits) or file a legal complaint. In France, legal recourse remains very low. According to the 2022 TeO survey results, almost half of the individuals who experienced discrimination turned to family members, friends or colleagues (46 per cent), but did not do anything else as they thought it would be useless (48 per cent). Only 7 per cent contacted an organization or association and 2 per cent went to the police. The figures remain stable over the past ten years indicating a lack of trust in the possibility to act upon discriminations in France (Lê et al. 2022). Moreover, French people of North African, Turkish and Middle Eastern background who experienced discrimination and identify as Muslims are three times more likely to declare religion as the main criteria to explain unequal treatment by contrast with 2008, indicating an increase in religious discrimination in the last decade. Nevertheless, victims of religious discrimination are the most likely to take no action, thinking that it is useless (57 per cent) (Lê et al. 2022).

While data suggests that consciousness about discrimination does not often result in taking action, there is nevertheless a demand of justice or in any case, on the supply side, number of local organizations and an emerging movement making claims for justice and equality and denouncing ethnoracial discrimination, in particular by state institutions like the police.

A new cycle of protest: the case of discrimination against the police

The French case is embedded in a broader European and global context. This includes legal norms as France is a EU member state, a member of the Council of Europe and the UN. For instance, France has had to implement two EU directives adopted in 2000 on discrimination (Geddes and Guiraudon 2004), set up an independent equality body (the HALDE now part of the “Défenseur des Droits”) and many governmental and non-governmental actors benefited from EU funds specifically dedicated to fight discrimination and promote equality. There is also a global market of non-legal norms, ideas that circulate across borders but do not float freely. While trans-European activism remains marginal (Guiraudon 2009), French activists are inspired by American models of minority mobilizations, from Malcom X to Angela Davis, from the Black Panthers to the Black Lives Matter Movement, alongside historical figures of decolonization such as Franz Fanon or Thomas Sankara. A limited circulation of activists and resources has been observed. Locally, some organizations have tried to import modes of mobilization such as “community organizing” (Talpin 2017, 2023). Philanthropic and diplomatic actors (The Open Society Foundation, The American embassy Visiting Leadership Program, The General Marshall Fund, etc.) also play a central role in these exchanges (Nasri 2019), thus complexifying the picture of weak and isolated groups fighting against institutional actors.

Following the murder of George Floyd on 25 May 2020 in Minneapolis, demonstrations took place in many countries denouncing police violence and structural racism. In France, there were several protests as the situation resonated with on-going movements against police brutality in general and racist policing in particular, as well as structural racism and discrimination. The extent of the demonstrations in June 2020 – the most numerous antiracist mobilization in France since the 1980s –, the diversity of the organizations taking part in the gatherings and the presence of many non-affiliated and young participants testify of the emergence of a new generation of activists, sensitive to the cause of racial justice. As an instance of this, there was immediate identification with what happened in Minneapolis for the Adama Traoré Committee who organized some of the public gatherings. The committee is named after a young Black man who died in July 2016 while being apprehended and restrained by the police. On the day George Floyd died, a new expertise in a years-long judicial battle into Adama Traoré’s death exonerated the three law enforcement officers involved. On June 2nd, in spite of the pandemic context used by state authorities to ban the protest, more than twenty thousand persons gathered in front of the Paris Court of justice and many others in other French cities. Assa Traoré unequivocally declared at the protest: “We are Black Lives Matter”, […] The two fights echo each other, so that we’re pulling back the curtain on France, in saying, “People of the whole world, look what’s happening here.”⁵

What happened in France in June 2020 was not a solidarity protest for an event far away nor was it a replicate of the US-based BLM movement. It drew upon older civil rights frames. There were many signs pas de justice pas de paix, a slogan used since 2017 by the Adama committee.⁶ “No justice, no peace” is a phrase that brings us back to the United States following the death of Michael Griffiths by a White mob in 1986. The slogan with its resonating frame then made its way across the Atlantic, for instance in a 2014 London march after an inquest jury ruled that Mark Duggan, an unarmed Black man gunned down by police, was lawful. It has become a rallying cry in non-violent protests⁷ And was also used in 1990s by French antiracist groups such as the Mouvement Immigration Banlieue (MIB). In brief, while we can trace back the slogan to the US, its various appropriations in specific mobilizations are so many ricochets. Its usages over time and space has allowed it to become “universal” and, in this respect, more adapted to France.

Notwithstanding, there is no evidence of a “boomerang effect” i.e. the mechanism whereby domestic activists bypass their state and directly search out international allies to try to bring pressure on their states from outside (Keck and Sikkink 1998). The Adama committee is well aware of the dangers of explicit foreign references that would de-specify the French context and dissolve into a generic “global” movement. French antiracist activists have often been attacked for importing American concepts or struggles that would not be adequate to describe the French reality (Talpin 2017). From this perspective, the globalization of the struggle can work as a hurdle for antiracist activists (Beaman and Fredette 2022).

Beyond the US, there is a clear and constant reference in the movement to past events in France involving the deaths of youths of North or sub-Saharan African origin, or deemed as such, involving the police. The banners and placards list the names of the dead, like Theo Luhaka, victim of police violence and rape in 2014, or Zyed and Bouna. The two teenagers died after a police chase in Clichy-sous-Bois in October 2005, inspiring the civil unrests that burst in dozens of French banlieues for three weeks and the declaration of the state of emergency. This creates a geography and genealogy of police violence in various French quartiers and across time. References to older movements in France such as the 1983 “March for equality and against racism” that started from suburbs outside Lyon and ended in Paris, a long march drawing from the repertoire of non-violent action à la Martin Luther King. The Adama Traoré committee includes activists from older organizations such as Samir Elyes, an activist in the MIB (Mouvement de l’immigration et des banlieues). This organization created in 1995 denounced “institutional racism” and police violence but also the expulsion of foreigners who had been in detention.

The emergence of a new generation of activists in June 2020 has generated a strong reaction from political and media elites, much more than previous movements such as the 1983 Equality March that was joined by a couple of ministers and even welcomed by the then President Mitterrand at the Elysée Palace. The Adama committee and other new antiracist groups have been accused of being “anti-French”. In June 2020, the political and media discussions focused on whether the category “police violence” was legitimate, most political actors – including on the left – rejecting it as “anti-cops” and carrying the idea that “all cops are racist”, a clear expression of the lack of understanding of the notion of institutional racism. Historical anti-Americanism that cuts across Left-Right cleavages has been activated to denounce French antiracist groups as “the watch bitches of American imperialism”.⁸ This cultural and symbolic battle contributed to delegitimatize the struggle of antiracist actors presented as too radical.

France in comparative perspective: a hostile political environment

In response to this new cycle of contention, the politics of misrecognition in France knows no respite. Political entrepreneurs are proactive; and barely a year goes by without a media frenzy centred on the “threat” posed by anyone displaying an ethnic or religious identity and some controversies, notably around veiled women, never seem to subside. The doxa against the expression of difference is transpartisan and prominent on the Left and among feminist movements. Intolerance is presented as a defence of encompassing notions such as universalism and even equality, and native concepts such as French “Republicanism” and laïcité – the French understanding of secularism that is commonly interpreted as confining religion to the private sphere.

Besides, this discourse is condoned by law. First, a 2004 bill reassessed laïcité and banned the conspicuous display of religious signs, such as a Islamic veil, in French national public schools. Then, a 2010 law banned the covering of one’s face in public, such as in the case of wearing a burqa; but also, a 2012 circular banned mothers wearing a veil from accompanying school outings. Since 2013, a Laïcité Chart is systematically on display on the walls of each public school in France, and, finally, since 2017, every NGO needs to sign the Chart if it applies for public subsidies.

While the US has witnessed the emergence of a new “racial regime” with the diffusion of colour-blind racism and the discourse of a post-racial society (Bonilla-Silva 2017), in Europe, racism has taken a “religious turn” with its focus on Islam constructed as a threat (Meer 2010; Modood 2003). In particular, the French secular context has long had a troubled relationship with its diverse Muslim populations dating back to the colonial period (Davidson 2012). Indeed, it has represented a specific breeding ground for the rise of post 9/11 islamophobia (Hajjat and Mohammed 2021). The context evolved drastically after the 2015 jihadi attacks hitting French soil, seeing a surge of homegrown terrorism. It resulted in the development of deradicalization policies, often replacing anti-discrimination programmes. This renewed opportunity structure has affected NGOs and social movements targeting minorities or operating in disadvantaged areas.

The focus on Islam and Muslims has therefore intensified since the 2015 homegrown terrorist attacks on French soil. Beyond the multiplication of laws and administrative devices to increase security, fight and prevent radicalization, the public expression of religiosity is seen as a threat. This context culminated in 2020-21 with the vote of the “separatism bill” – coined “law to strengthen the values of the Republic”. The law results in increased control and surveillance of all non-profits, even if certain will be more targeted than others. It also makes dissolution of NGOs by the government easier, thus threatening the right of association.

Beyond the passing of the bill, the media and political attention on Islam have had no respite. It resulted in a unique institutional attack on Muslim civil society, embodied by the dissolution of the Collectif contre l’islamophobie en France (CCIF) in 2020 and the Collectif contre le Racisme et l’Islamophobie (CRI) in 2021. Both NGOs were accused of legitimizing terrorism, diffusing hate speech and rejecting France by condemning Islamophobia and institutional racism. These decisions have been validated by the highest French legal court, the Conseil d’Etat. Similarly, the new charter of French Islam bans the reference to “state racism” as a concept.

This context of political backlash also affects academia. In February 2021, members of the government - including the ministry of Research and Higher Education - attacked social scientists for their lack of scientific rigour and political biases, accusing them of “islamo-leftism”, a concept that lumps together islamist extremists with left-leaning intellectuals. The French President considered that the academic “ethnicization of the social question” is divisive of the French Republic⁹ and ordered an internal investigation to the National Centre of Research (CNRS). Decried as a “witch hunt”, the CNRS refused to execute the order¹⁰. Nonetheless, this testifies of the resistance of the French state to all forms of criticisms related to ethno-racial discriminations, emanating from either social movements or social scientists. While this targeting of social sciences can be compared to the “War on Critical Race Theory” (Goldberg 2021) in the US or Australia recently, in France it stemmed from the highest levels of the state and from a centre-right government. This debate also animated the academic community itself, where the denial of the importance of racial stratifications appears relatively unique internationally. Some consider that the concept of race is an American transplant, proof of a form of scientific imperialism (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1998), others (Beaud and Noiriel 2021) arguing in the same vein that class – rather than race or gender – should be the decisive factor to be taken into account for sociological analysis. Another generation of scholars emerged however, arguing in contrast for intersectional analysis investigating in particular the articulation of race, class and gender (Hajjat and Larcher 2019; Lepinard and Mazouz 2021).

The consequences of the politics of misrecognition: identifying common mechanisms

This issue interrogates centrally the consequences of this political, cognitive and discursive opportunity structure for French racial minorities mobilizations, legal battles and the public policies that aim to fight discriminations. It highlights the processes and mechanisms whereby ethno-racial and religious minorities are designated as problematic and prevented from making legitimate claims. As in the discussion on the politics of misrecognition (Thompson and Yar, 2011), the tension between how individual or collective identity is experienced by actors and how it is socially understood lays at the core of the analysis of the dynamics of struggle against racial injustice.

Given the centrality of the State in the French context, highlighted by many contributions in this issue, we intend to bring policy back into the understanding of the politics of misrecognition. This implies that ethnoracial minorities are policy recipients in localized political contexts (Cerrato-Dibenedetti 2018). Policy recipients are individuals or groups affected by policy decisions, their framing and their implementation, either because they are identified as targets of these policies or are significantly affected by them. In the case of discrimination, there are instruments, from funding for NGOs to opportunities for legal recourse or local schemes that explicitly target specific groups that are potentially vulnerable. In the French universalist context, however, ethno-racial minorities are never targeted as such, and are the recipient of national and local policies through the proxy of socio-economic criteria.

Nonetheless, a range of public policies affects the daily lives and socio-economic prospects of ethnoracial minorities and subsequently their sense of inclusion in the polity: education, housing, policing, urban development and transport, to name the most obvious ones, but also in recent years, anti-terrorism policy. In this case, policies being are intrinsically “colour-blind” yet can yet adversely affect minorities. The latter may be aware that they are getting the short straw, if they even develop a political consciousness (Du Bois 1994). The question remains whether this leads to an organized collective response to what is sometimes referred to as “institutional racism” and if it is legitimate to do so. Several articles focus on the difficulty to voice claims as a member of a group let alone as a “victim” of policy decisions or public discourses.

As argued by Beaman and Petts (2020) France is both anti-racial – as it “rejects the use of racial terms or race is anything real or definable – and ‘non-racial’, in that it denies the reality of race”. In contrast to the US however, where meritocracy is central in providing non-racial explanations of enduring racial inequalities (Bonilla-Silva 2017), the French colour-blind ideology has, at least, four distinctive features, illustrated in the different articles of this special issue. First, it offers class-based or place-based explanations of inequalities, as illustrated by its urban policies programmes (politique de la ville) that offer specific resources to poor urban areas or “banlieues” without targeting or even mentioning the overrepresentation and specific discriminations faced by their racial minorities’ residents (Doytcheva 2009). Second, it is characterized by a unique blend of race and religion, Islam being often targeted in the name of laïcité but producing racialized outcomes and discriminations. The racialization of Islam induced by these policies and discourses is the renewed face of the culturalization of inequalities or the argument of the lack of “Frenchness” of certain groups (Dikeç 2004). Third, as illustrated by several articles in this issue, the state and institutional apparatus is central in drawing boundaries and defining the appropriate categories that actors or social movements can use. In contrast to more bottom-up models of colour-blindness, the state appears as the central actor in the French case, which requires giving special attention to the political work of administrative agents and street level organizations. Finally, colour-blindness is presented as emancipatory. It would be a way to protect minorities from communitarian oppression, a necessary condition for emancipation from tradition, community pressure or religion.

Contributions by authors

In this issue, we highlight new research by academics that take on the task of studying ethnoracial and religious discrimination as they intersect with others forms of unequal treatment linked to gender, class or place. They do so by drawing on the theoretical toolbox developed in a range of fields such as sociology of law, social movements, or urban studies. In studying discrimination, the policy contexts it is embedded in and responses to these phenomena, they privilege empirical thickness, relying on qualitative methods, including ethnography, in-depth interviews of “life courses” and the systematic analysis of first-hand material such as legal or government archives. Research designs pay particular attention to the historical and territorial dimensions of the fight against discrimination. What varies is the level of analysis, which can be microscopic by focusing on individuals or meso focusing on collectives or local authorities, or both.

This special issue focuses on the various responses to stigmatization in the French context with its emphasis on “colour-blind” Republicanism and on a version of secularism or laïcité that precludes the manifestation of religion in public space. Studying the French case therefore sheds light on broader scholarly debates in this journal, notably in the 2012 special issue edited by Michèle Lamont and Nissim Mizrachi on Responses to Stigmatization in Comparative Perspective (see also Lamont 2016). This is the case of Margot Dazey’s article on the “polite responses” of French Muslim elites, based on an in-depth ethnographic study of the largest Muslim organization in France, the Union des organisations islamiques de France (UOIF) that included observation, over forty life-story interviews with UOIF activists and the analysis of the internal documentation on the organization. Margot Dazey shows the prominence of non-confrontational tactics, such as conflict deflation and avoidance, when confronted with anti-Muslim hostility. These tactics have remained under the radar of studies on European Muslims that focus on advocacy movements involved in contentious and legal mobilization. The article also expands our understanding of non-confrontational strategies identified by Lamont and Mizrachi (2012) by focusing on class. French Muslim elites, with their educational credentials, professional careers and comfortable lifestyles, urge their coreligionists to dispel prejudice by displaying good manners and exemplary behaviour in response to stigmatization. They mobilize a middle-class set of values encompassing politeness, discretion, socio-economic improvement and self-discipline. Yet, as Margot Dazey argues, these responses to anti-Muslim sentiment and policies reinforce some of the hegemonic values of colour-blind French republicanism.

While we observe “polite” responses among elite minorities in the French context, the question arises as to the “discreet” repertoires of action to raise consciousness about discrimination. “Soft” or “quiet” grassroots forms of activism that can be termed “infrapolitical” can empower publics that are a priori distant from politics. This is the focus of the article by Balazard et al. (2023). The authors all participated in a broader project on experiences of discrimination in nine deprived neighbourhoods that confirm that, while almost all interviewees mention direct or indirect exposure to discrimination or stigma, only one in ten engage in anti-racist activities (Talpin et al. 2021). The question raised thus regards the type of collective action that can transform individual experiences into political awareness. The article focuses on initiatives in three underprivileged areas near Paris, Lyon and Bordeaux to understand what is on offer in places where inhabitants observe or feel unequal treatment. These local political contexts reflect with national official stances that deny the existence of systematic discrimination and condemn any action that openly denounces structural racism. The relative closure of the political opportunities structure shapes mobilization. Activists can quickly face repression, and very concretely lose resources such as funding, the ability to find places to meet or disseminate their activities. Local initiatives tried to circumvent these obstacles by resorting to a quiet horizontal form of repertoire and a particular framing of their actions. Initiatives include Zonzon 93 with its festival that mix dance performances with humanitarian booths and political discussions that thus do not stand out, meetings with magistrates with boxing class for women or trips to the city. Another example is the PoliCité collective that could not openly debate racial profiling by the police and organized instead discussions on “youth-police relations” on local policing with experts. Living Equality Together chose to develop community-led projects such as making short films on the history of the city or colonialism and hip hop or slam workshops on the theme of discrimination. The authors’ research not only elucidates the reasons why discreet activism was the only solution but also assesses the effects of the initiatives on the inhabitants that became involved, in particular deprived youths. These populations reluctant to engage with politics gained cognitive resources through participation in seemingly non-political activities that helped them understand how their own experience partook of larger schema of discrimination and several have since become politically active or launched their own collective projects.

Collective action remains a rare phenomenon among minorities facing ethno-racial discrimination. Julien Talpin identifies three types of factors to explain this phenomenon: individual, organizational and institutional. The research conducted in several working-class neighbourhoods includes an ethnographic study of a dozen of antiracist collectives and over 150 interviews with members of various racial minorities. At the individual level, the survey demonstrates that, while respondents express more readily and frequently that hypothesized feelings of racial injustice and stigmatization, they formulate a strong mistrust of politics and a lack of interest in collective action, thus shying away from civic engagement. In brief, in terms of supply and demand, there is not a high demand for collective action despite a growing racial consciousness. The subsequent question is whether, on the “supply side”, antiracist initiatives provide adequate responses and launch actions that correspond to the constituencies they wish to represent. Julien Talpin’s study of eleven antiracist collectives shows that in fact their dominant repertoire of action is out of tune with the mostly working-class targeted public. There is thus an organizational challenge collectives that seek to mobilize and fight against discrimination. Finally, the article points to institutional factors that impede antiracist associations. They face soft repression and channelling by public institutions. This explains activists’ tactical choices in terms of their actions and claims – similarly to what Balazard et al. show – yet limits their mobilization potential. There is a trade-off between being a legitimate representative of minorities and making relevant claims and gaining recognition as a legitimate interlocutor of public authorities.

This conflict of legitimacy or double bind is also evident in the research conducted by Angéline Escafré-Dublet and Camille Hamidi on the local implementation of antidiscrimination policy. They analyse the adoption and the implementation of an antidiscrimination programme in Vaulx-en-Velin, a city outside Lyon, referred to as a “model” to follow by national government representatives. Based on a series of qualitative interviews conducted with stakeholders over three years, they argue that there was a change in the objectives and priorities of antidiscrimination policy instruments, in part because stakeholders disagreed on the definition of discrimination. Three years after the launching of the programme, the antidiscrimination actions consisted mainly in sessions of Holocaust education and training dedicated to the principle of laïcité. Alongside the fight against discrimination, the programme focused on the need to resist separatism and attacks against laïcité. Municipal communications and events insist on the promotion of social cohesion through the exhortation to “live together” (vivre ensemble) rather than the fight against discrimination.

The “deracialisation of antidiscrimination” or “the obliteration of the ethno-racial dimension of discrimination” to prioritize broader concerns such as tolerance, togetherness and secularism has been observed elsewhere in France in the local implementation of antidiscrimination policy (Bereni, Epstein, and Torres 2020; see also Flamant 2018). However, in the case of Vaulx-en-Velin, Escafré-Dublet and Hamidi show that local actors found it difficult to consider claims made by citizens with a Muslim background after the 2015 Paris attacks.

Francesco Ragazzi’s article also shows how public policies – at both national and local levels – affect community representation. While the dominant discourse in France celebrates the neutrality of public space and denounces community belonging, in fact security policies constantly refer to group categories. Drawing on fieldwork in two suburbs on the outskirts of Paris, Pantin and Villeneuve-Saint-Georges, the article argues that current practices of everyday anti-terror policing end up enacting precisely what they are trying to avoid, resulting instead in “policed multiculturalism”. Both institutional actors and social workers use categories and frames of perceptions that highlight ethno-racial boundaries, as they aim at identifying and differentiating « good » and « bad Muslims », radicalized actors and potential terrorists. This article shows how, despite official discourses on colour-blindness, race structures state/community interactions in the French context.

While this issue mainly explores localized practices of antiracist mobilizations and anti-discrimination policies, it does not neglect key national developments in legal contention, an important yet ambivalent aspect of what Stuart Scheingold referred to as the complex “politics of rights” (2004). The article focuses on a 2018 landmark decision of the Paris Court of Appeal that convicted the French national railway company for discrimination based on national origin against 848 current and former employees. Chappe and Keyhani’s approach is ethnographic and archival with an in-depth observation of judicial hearings and legal clinics, more than thirty interviews of the different actors i. e. railway workers, organized interest groups and legal professionals, and an analysis of trade union and media archives. While the legal venue is specific and very different from others examined in this issue, some of the same questions arise, in particular how to frame discrimination claims. What the article demonstrates is that colour-blindness is not an unsurmountable master frame, and a tactical focus on national origin instead of race was successful. Studying one of the greatest achievements of the fight against discrimination in recent years, the authors show how law can embody a powerful resource in a hostile political environment.

To sum up, this issue on France considers that ethnic minorities are policy recipients and that their social position and their capacity to be represented through mobilization heavily depends on state policies, national discursive frames and local politics. One of the contributions of this special issue is therefore to show the specific flavour of French colour-blindness. In contrast to UK or the US, it might be less the product of neoliberalism and the renewed meritocratic frame, than of the State’s continued action to restate French exceptionalism embodied by its universalism. More than in other countries probably, institutions and their agents play a decisive role in applying these moral, but also legal and administrative, boundaries. This materializes in specific policies, instruments and devices that affect decisively both the experience of discrimination, the possibility of qualifying it as such, the reactions to discriminations and the opportunities of collective action against it. This issue therefore shows that, for French ethnoracial minorities, the concept of institutional channelling goes in hand with forms of soft repression such as stigma and silencing (Marx Ferree 2004). By discrediting groupness both symbolically and materially - seen as “separatist” when it concerns minorities – the state makes the very possibility of collective action difficult (Harpajaavi 2022). From this perspective, for some collectives, the very possibility of existing collectively as a group is already a victory. France’s apparent colour-blindness does not prevent minorities from taking effective action against discrimination. However, the relative closure of political opportunities often shapes activism. It encourages quiet collective actions, rather than open opposition. The articles of this issue also show, however, that despite this hostile political environment, resistance is alive and well, and that a new generation of activists might be emerging. While mobilizations in the public sphere are difficult, infra-political tactics as well as legal resources may foster social change and racial justice in the long term.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Trajectories and Origins is a survey that produces national statistics on the diversity of populations in metropolitan France and allows researchers to study the influence of migratory origins on individuals’ trajectories (https://teo.site.ined.fr/en/).

2 EODIPAR – Experiences of discriminations, participation and representation was a research project that aimed at assessing the political consequences of the experience of discrimination based on comparative ethnographies in 9 neighbourhoods of Paris, Bordeaux, Lyon, Lille, London, Montréal and Los Angeles (https://anr.fr/Project-ANR-14-CE30-0011).

3 Ishaam Tharoor, “France and the spectral menace of ‘Islamo-leftism’”, Washington Post, 22 February 2021. URL (consulted 15 June 2022): https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/02/22/france-macron-islamo-leftism/)

4 See the definition on the web site of the survey: https://teo.site.ined.fr/en/ (consulted 18 July 2022).

5 Lauren Collins, “Assa Traoré and the Fight for Black Lives in France”, New Yorker, 18 June 2020. URL (consulted 25 June 2020): https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-europe/assa-traore-and-the-fight-for-black-lives-in-france

6 Le Monde with AFP, “Pas de justice, pas de paix » : à Beaumont-sur-Oise, un défilé en mémoire d’Adama Traoré”, Le Monde, 22 July 2017. URL (consulted 28 June 2020): https://www.lemonde.fr/police-justice/article/2017/07/22/pas-de-justice-pas-de-paix-a-beaumont-sur-oise-un-defile-en-memoire-d-adama-traore_5163895_1653578.html

7 Al Sharpton, “No justice, no peace. Why Mark Duggan’s family echoed my rallying cry”, The Guardian, 10 January 2014. URL (consulted 15 June 2022): https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/jan/10/mark-duggan-family-rallying-cry-no-peace-no-justice

8 Julien Souaudau, “De quel mal français le rejet d’Adama Traoré est-il le nom ? ” Slate, 15 December 2020. URL (consulted 25 June 2022): https://www.slate.fr/story/198118/assa-traore-time-magazine-2020-racisme-france-rejet-adama.

9 https://www.lesinrocks.com/actu/macron-juge-le-monde-universitaire-coupable-davoir-casse-la-republique-en-deux-157036-11-06-2020/

10 CNRS (Centre national de recherche scientifique), “Islamo-leftism is not a scientific reality” Press Release, 17 February 2021. URL (consulted on 28 June 2022): https://www.cnrs.fr/en/islamo-leftism-not-scientific-reality-0