Ahistorical Antiracism: Understanding French Blacks' Opposition to Affirmative Action

• In Event: 409 - Regular Session. Affirmative Action

Abstract

In this paper, we explore French Caribbeans’ perspectives on affirmative-action. In so doing, way attend to the role of temporality and historical consciousness in shaping how social actors conceptualize present-day racism and remedies for racial discrimination. While public opinion polls in the early 2000s showed the French population to be evenly split on implementing ethnoracial preferences or quotas, opposition to the policy has been building over the last ten years.  We move beyond existing quantitative data on French opposition to affirmative action to explore how minorities view the relative merits and potential costs of such a shift in French racial norms and institutional practices.  We focus here on the perspectives of French Caribbeans in the Paris region, marshaling evidence from in-depth interviews conducted between 2008 and 2010.  We find that the majority of the respondents either opposed or had mixed feelings about affirmative action. Only a minority of inteviewees expressed unqualified support for the policy.  While French Caribbeans generally agreed that racism is a present-day problem in contemporary France, they did not generally ground their understanding of racism in a historical framework and were not convinced that racial or ethnic policies could effectively address discrimination and prejudice.  Overall we argue that respondents’ ambivalence toward affirmative action is, in part, related to their lack of historical consciousness, as respondents did not routinely describe racial and/or ethnic minorities in France as members of historically discriminated or oppressed groups.

Authors

• Crystal Marie Fleming, State University of New York-Stony Brook

• Hewan Girma, State University of New York-Stony Brook