"To be French is to be white": children’s uses of ethno-racial categorizations in France

ABSTRACT

In the wake of sociological studies showing that social hierarchies’ uses are constituted from the first years of schooling, this article intends to understand how young children draw a distinction between “being French” and “not being French” based on the criteria associated, in adults, to the race relations. Based on an ethnographic fieldwork carried out in three very different schools it emerges that many children overlap between the four criteria that participate, in adults, in the processes of racialization. The use of these criteria and their ordering is much more important in schools where there are more children of minority groups. Staff plays a significant role in this clarification process. Moreover, this more or less advanced child's work of deconstructing entanglements is largely explained by the influence of their parents’ social position on the way in which they grasp the child's experiences within the school.

KEYWORDS:

• Children
• racialization
• socialization
• school
• France
• boundaries

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 The terms “minority groups” and “majority groups” used here require some clarification. They do not refer to a demographic but to a sociological reality: “the sociological concept of minority does not refer to less numerous collective groups, but to dominated collective groups. Just as the concept of majority does not mean the most numerous, but the dominant” (Simon 2006). When individuals do not refer to these collective entities, they are nevertheless likely to be designated, during interactions, as members of one of the two groups. They are therefore “associable” with these groups.

2 In the rest of the text, we will henceforth speak of “assigned origin” criteria.

3 These ethnographic fields were conducted respectively during one school year, six and three months, with an average 3-day per week presence in the schools. The researcher was mainly present during the two-hour lunch break. In Fontenay, he also participated two days a week in the extracurricular activities and was present as an observer for half a day in each class about once a week. In Marel, he was present one day a week in class.