The Experience of Discrimination, Brake or Support of Citizenship in Working-Class Neighborhoods? a Comparative Perspective France-Quebec

The experience of discrimination challenges the identity of individuals as well as their conception of social and political order and hypothetically provides as many reasons for action and ordinary "epistemic resources" to face them. However, the denunciation or acceptance of discriminations is more than a matter of individual dispositions and resources: the feeling of belonging to a group, as much as the political imaginings that portray this collective identity, are important variables to make account of the greater or lesser propensity of individuals to denounce these practices.

As a follow-up to these reflections, this paper proposes to examine more specifically the conditions of commitment in anti-discrimination associations in working-class neighborhoods, as well as in low-noise resistance practices of "politicity" or infrapolitics of subordinate groups. The gathered data confirms the importance of cultural capital and family socialization in engaging in conventional forms of politicization, but other factors related to individual trajectories also play a catalytic role. The horizontal and inclusive nature of collective actions (attention to lived experience, to humor, to care, etc.) seems to be particularly conducive to commitment, while at the same time reflecting a particular relationship to politics.