Social Forces Colloquium Series: Jean Beaman, Purdue University

Citizen Outsider: Race and Racism in France and Beyond

Based on past and current ethnographic research in the Parisian metropolitan region, I discuss how racial and ethnic minorities understand and respond to their racialization in a context in which race and ethnicity are not legitimate or acknowledged. I demonstrate how racial and ethnic minorities are “citizen outsiders,” as evident of France’s “racial project” (Omi and Winant 1994), which marks distinctions outside of explicit categorization. I explore not only how race marks individuals outside of formal categories, but also how people respond to these distinctions in terms of a racism-related issue – here, police violence and brutality against racial and ethnic minorities. I discuss how activists can frame this growing social problem given the constraints of French Republican ideology.