Manufacturing a Black Minority in 21st Century France

For many decades, the issue of race raged in the American and British societies. At the same time, it was casted out the French society due to the tragedy of the Second War World. But, from the late 1990s on, France has become the theater of a heated debate about racial minorities. Initiated by so-called “French of foreign descent”, this debate eventually permeated the entire public space and involved academics, politicians and the media. A handful of studies have appeared whose purpose is to examine the rationale of this debate. This literature is basically divided in two approaches. One is concerned with the analysis of the social, political and economic origins of this debate. As a result, critical writings have been published which focus on the mechanisms of discrimination in French society, from the school system to the job market and housing. The second approach, mostly historical, aims essentialy to analyze the manifestation of the racialization of 18th and 19th century French society.

Taking stock of the wealth of information and of the analytical propositions of those studies, the purpose of this paper is to add a dimension to this debate. Indeed, it seeks to account for the manufacturing of racial minority, with a particular attention on blackness in twenty first century France. This objective implies the elaboration of an integrated sociological approach, viz one that looks at the aspects of social life as connected each to others.

I argue that blackness is less an essence than a sociological outcome. The formation of blackness is the result of a propaganda plan. It operates at the intersection of three major realms of meanings: discourse, belief and material production. In other words, to bring blackness into existence is to say that it is real, to make people believe so, and to display material facts conducive to support and fuel this belief.