Marginalization and Middle-Class Blues: Children of North African Immigrants in France

Based on ethnographic research, including 45 interviews in the Parisian metropolitan area, I focus on the middle-class segment of France’s North African second-generation. These are individuals who were born in France to immigrant parents from the former French colonies in the Maghreb. They are well educated, have professional types of employment, and are upwardly-mobile vis-à-vis their immigrant parents. While their middle-class status might suggest a triumph of France’s Republican ideology that downplays differences among her citizens, this population’s continued experiences of exclusion and discrimination belie this straightforward conclusion. This French-born population often finds that they cannot escape their assigned otherness. I argue that this population is denied cultural citizenship, which would actually allow their claim to French national identity to be accepted by others, due to their Maghrébin origins. Cultural citizenship signifies a claim to belonging that is accepted by others that would, in this case, enable children of North African immigrants in this case to be seen as truly “French.” Considering cultural citizenship reveals the tensions in being both middle-class and a racial and ethnic minority, as well as how full citizenship remains a continual negotiation for marginalized populations. It also addresses how individuals are racialized and marked as different in France despite a state-level denunciation of racial and ethnic categorization. This research has implications for the continued significance of race and ethnicity in French society and how France’s minorities remain linked to minority populations worldwide.