Insiders Vs. Outsiders: Racial Social Control in Paris and Beyond

Existing research has revealed how citizenship status is a salient boundary marking insiders and outsiders within a society. In this paper, I challenge this notion by showing how even those individuals who are citizens can remain marginalized within mainstream society. Based on ethnographic research in the Paris metropolitan area, I focus on the middle-class segment of France’s North African second-generation, and use the framework of cultural citizenship to explain why these individuals continue to experience exclusion based on their North African origins. Despite their French citizenship, they are often perceived as foreigners and have their “Frenchness” contested by others. I argue they are denied cultural citizenship which would allow them to be accepted by others as part of France. 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.” This is particularly relevant as according to the French Republican model, citizenship is something that is supposed to supersede all markers of difference. Applying cultural citizenship as an analytical framework provides a better understanding of the ethnic underpinnings of citizenship and how it operates as a marker of difference. It is another way of addressing how France is undergoing a racial project, per Omi and Winant’s 1994 formulation, in which non-white individuals are racialized and marked as other.