Color Blind Classism. Class Distinction and Resilience Against Stigmatization Among Upper-Middle Class Minorities in France

The scholarship on social and symbolic boundaries has seen a remarkable development within sociology in recent years and has shed new light on group-making and group-sustaining processes with regards to class and ethnicity. Analyses of these two social categories, however, constitute largely separate theoretical and empirical developments within the boundary-making framework, and the interplay of ethnic and class boundaries is not well understood. Drawing on 20 in-depth interviews, this paper documents the subjective experience of race and discrimination among the burgeoning nonwhite upper-middle class in France. The mobilization of class distinction, intellectual snobbism and legitimate culture emerges as the strongest boundary making strategy to deflect stigmatization and frame racism as a form of cultural backwardness. I argue that the French repertoire of class-based cultural elitism provides powerful discursive and cognitive resources to claim membership in the mainstream and delegitimize the use of ethnic and racial categories. Empirically, the paper points to the adoption of upper-middle class culture among successful members of nonwhite minorities as part of an assimilation process. Theoretically, it emphasizes the hierarchy of different types of boundaries and calls for the formulation of an analytical sociology of social categories integrating class and ethnicity to better understand boundary work across various contexts.