The status of France's ethnic minorities has become a major issue in recent years owing to the riots in October and November of 2005, as well as the National Assembly debates on the Taubira law, ethnic statistics, affirmative action, and...
moreThe status of France's ethnic minorities has become a major issue in recent years owing to the riots in October and November of 2005, as well as the National Assembly debates on the Taubira law, ethnic statistics, affirmative action, and the memory and commemoration of slavery and the slave trade,2 and communautarisme 3.The present paper shows how, against the aforementioned backdrop, the black community is creating itself as a visible group ‘endowed with value systems and representation systems’ (Champagne, P., 1984. La manifestation: La production de l'evenement politique. Actes de la Recherche en Sciences Sociales, 52–53(1), 18–41), and how the positions taken by the various actors (associations, journalists and politicians) have contributed to this process of legitimation. Thus, it appears that although France's Blacks are still a largely fragmented group, they are constructing an identity for themselves in the republic via a process that is a reaction to the apparent rigidity of France's republican system and to the real (albeit denied) stigmatization and discrimination that some Blacks say they are subjected to on a daily basis.
This work is a revised version of a paper accepted for presentation at the ‘Strangers, Aliens and Foreigners’ conference organized in Mansfield College, Oxford, UK, between Tuesday 22 September and Thursday 24 September, 2009.
