How to Perform Non-racism? Colour-blind Speech Norms and Race-conscious Policies among French Security Personnel

Abstract

How do individuals and organisations anticipate or deflect allegations of racism? This problem is especially sensitive in the context of crime control. There are two strategies to perform non-racism: colour-blind and race-conscious. This article is about how French police officers and security guards perform ‘not being racist’, based on an analysis of the discourse and policies of 60 respondents in a shopping mall and in a railway station. France promotes an ostensibly colour-blind approach to being not racist, urging its citizens to avoid using racial categories. How do security people manage to perform non-racism when the majority of their clients are minority youth? The main finding is that while respondents display a strong command of colour-blind speech norms (to perform non-racism), the security policy of the shopping mall is equally strongly race-conscious (also to perform non-racism).

Keywords:

• Racism
• Colour-blind
• France
• Police
• Speech Norms

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful for the feedback and comments from Frank Bovenkerk, Rogers Brubaker, Naïma Makri, Ana Miškovska Kajevska, Mary Pattillo, Maria Reimann, Francesco Ragazzi, Eva Rosen, Clément Théry, Sudhir Venkatesh and Sharon Zukin.

Funding

This article has been financially supported by the SpaceControl project [ANR no. ANR-10-ESVS-001-01], at Maison européenne des sciences de l'homme et de la société [MESHS - USR 3158] and by the Dynamics of Citizenship and Culture programme group at the University of Amsterdam.

Notes

[1] In this article, I will speak of ‘minority youth’, unless the specific ethnicity of the people is meaningful, in which case, I will speak of ‘Arabs’ and ‘Blacks’ to avoid euphemisms or technical terms. I translate jeune de banlieue as ‘urban youth’ though, literally, jeune de banlieue means ‘suburban youth’ because, in France, suburbs refer to poor, minority spaces. ‘Urban youth’ thus best conveys both the spatial connotation and the American intuitive meaning for ‘poor and minority’.

[2] Quillian (2006, 301) writes for instance that ‘racist is used rather than prejudiced or discriminatory to signal the speaker's unambiguous condemnation of the belief or practice in question’. Lee (2002) and Pager and Karafin (2009) do not even use the word ‘racism’, and Pager and Quillian (2005) use it only once in their article.

[3] Hoodlum (racaille) is a controversial word. It may be a racist slur referring to minority youth, implying that minority youth are delinquents. It may also be a way, especially for young people, to make a distinction between delinquent urban youth (hoodlums) and ‘decent’ urban youth. It the latter sense, ‘hoodlum’ is used as a colour-blind term to disconnect hoodlumism from ethnicity, implying that hoodlumism is a lifestyle, not an ethnic attribute.

Additional information

Funding

Funding: This article has been financially supported by the SpaceControl project [ANR no. ANR-10-ESVS-001-01], at Maison européenne des sciences de l'homme et de la société [MESHS - USR 3158] and by the Dynamics of Citizenship and Culture programme group at the University of Amsterdam.