While Chinese immigrants and their descendants have long been portrayed as a “model minority”, Ya-Han Chuang shows how this qualifier papers over the representations that are imposed on members of this minority in France – who are now fighting back against racism.
Can the law be broken to maintain public order? This is the question addressed in a remarkable comparative work on vigilantism and ‘rough justice’ in the security era.
From the 1980s onwards, the practice of vacationing in the Maghreb homeland became widespread, and gradually replaced any hopes of resettlement. These summer vacations allowed people to return to their roots in a family setting and temporarily escape the subjugation and social labels they endured in France.
Drawing on treatises by naturalists and doctors, as well as reports from colonial missions, historian Delphine Peiretti-Courtis examines how racialized bodies were belittled and dehumanized by medical professionals in the French Empire from the 19th century onwards.
French law defines racism in terms of discourses, not actions. Based on an analysis of 731 crimes, R. Brahim shows how physical violence is compounded by psychological violence when the legislative and judicial system denies or downplays the racist nature of the crimes.
Laurence Ralph’s ethnography explores the various systems of punishment that injure black and brown Americans’ bodies and that contribute to maintain social hierarchies that rely on the vestiges of slavery. These injuries call for healing and overcoming trauma, and also for reparative justice.
Hakeem Jefferson argues that the United States is experiencing a democratic backsliding. He calls for deep institutional reforms that aim at better reflecting the American public, such as expanding the number of judges in the Supreme Court or having a US Senate apportionment based on state population.
In a wide-ranging essay on the construction of race in Enlightenment art, Anne Lafont tracks down the responsibility of images in the naturalization of racial difference and the justification of colonialism.
Books & Ideas is slowing down for the summer and will be offering weekly selections of reviews and essays published over the last year. This week’s selection questions the social construction of racial identities, and the history of domination.
As protests against racism break out all over the world following the murder of George Floyd, Books & Ideas gathers a selection of texts examining the history of these multifaceted discriminations and of the struggles for racial justice.
Discrimination against the Burakumin people has infiltrated Japanese society for centuries and still exists today, proving particularly difficult to stamp out as the ways in which members of this minority group are marginalised change from one era to the next.
Few histories of the African American fight for equality manage to shed their ideological bias. Caroline Rolland-Diamond offers an impressive overview that goes beyond oppositions to highlight the structuring lines of a two-century-old struggle that continues today.
Can journalism advance knowledge in the field of social science? Two investigations published by the New York Times have highlighted racial inequalities and their links to prison. By contrast, these rigorous investigations emphasize the lack of knowledge of this situation in the French context.
What responses does racial stigma awaken in its victims? Researching in Brazil, the United States and Israel, a group of sociologists sheds new light on the experience of discrimination and collective sources of resilience.
French law is not always very clear when it comes to punishing racist speech. Judges, aware that this prohibition is crucial in a democracy, are forced to interpret the law with the utmost rigour.
Judging by the opinions of the Front National’s members and supporters, no matter what its president says, the party has never stopped being racist and xenophobic. This is clearly shown by the French National Consultative Commission on Human Rights’ annual survey.
According to journalist and critic Jeff Chang, Trump’s appeal partially lays in culture war politics dating back to the 1990s, when the ideas of multiculturalism and post-racialism clashed intensively. It now remains to be seen whether justice movements activated on the ground can come together to resist the new president’s policies.
Most analysts have portrayed Trump as the candidate of economically insecure white Americans. Sociologist Isaac Martin discards this “economic anxiety thesis” as inaccurate: most poor white people won’t vote on Tuesday. This explanation has much less to do with the data than with a long American tradition of blaming racism on the white poor.
Michael Brown’s death and the Ferguson unrest signal a change in the condition of Black people in American society since 2000. This new condition is marked by the culmination of the penal state’s power over Black people’s lives, and an increase in socio-economic inequalities between races.
Michael Jackson was a lot more than just a singer: Sylvie Laurent recounts the story of the pop star who became a “monster,” whose quest for white-skinned androgyny reveals in several respects the agonizing indecision of the African-American community in the face of racism and sexism.
Although we know today that Ancient Greek art was rich in colour, a mistaken belief in its whiteness has prevailed since ancient times. Philippe Jockey retraces the colourful story of this myth of a white Greece and examines its aesthetic, moral and ideological implications.
When the social mobility of black citizens disturbs the dominant racial and spatial order, the members of the minority are sometimes abruptly put back to their place. An article by Elijah Anderson shows how the black ghetto, in its social and symbolic dimensions, contributes to the exclusion of African-Americans. What would be the American ghetto’s French equivalent?
Elijah Anderson focuses on the black ghetto as a major source of racial stereotypes and discrimination, and explains how it operates within the framework of changing race relations.
Almost two decades after the end of apartheid, South Africa still displays high levels of racial segregation. Studying the South African Indian minority, Thomas Blom helps us understand why maintaining boundaries with other groups has become crucial to individuals’ attempts at reimagining themselves in a new free and uncertain society.
At a time when a supposedly “post-racial” America is becoming increasingly polarized over its first black president, historian Thomas Sugrue proposes a badly needed perspective on Obama’s attempts to negotiate between color blindness and race consciousness. Despite the depth of his historical perspective, he understates how destructive Obama’s religious moralism is for the cause of racial progress.
In his new salvo, Olivier Le Cour Grandmaison seeks to lay bare the imperial essence of the Third and Fourth Republics. His criticism of the myth of a benevolent French empire is achieved at a fairly high cost in terms of nuance and analytical value.
Douglas Massey’s book, Categorically Unequal, draws up an instructive inventory of inequality in the United States. A classic study of social stratification, it is complemented by a discussion of the production of the categories by means of which individuals and groups are hierarchically organized.
