The Varying Use of Racial Frames by French Social Movements

• In Event: 2183 - Section on Race, Gender, and Class Refereed Roundtable Session
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 10. Race and Gender in Movements

Abstract

In France there is a well-noted reticence to discuss race. While Americans often attribute white French reluctance to talk about race to a disingenuously color-blind republican ideology, this study looks at the framing, by activists of color in metropolitan Paris, of issues in non-racial ways. Based on 35 interviews of residents, community organizers, and activists, the paper looks at three issues that are framed non-racially that would be almost inevitably racially or ethnically framed in the US context. In the French case, an organization for the descendants of slaves; an anti-police violence group inspired by protests in Ferguson, Missouri; and local-level ethnic politics are all framed by activists in nonracial ways. The research finds that activists have several strategic reasons for not adopting a racial frame, including the use of citizen-based claims, experiences of discrimination that vary within racial groups along other lines (such as citizen/noncitizen), and left political commitments that discourage patronage politics. The research dramatizes how culturally specific seemingly common sense racial frames are in the US and France, and the insight that can be gained from taking different racial and nonracial framings seriously.

Author

• Gregory Smithsimon, City University of New York-Brooklyn