Contenu du sommaire : Racisme, antiracisme, étranges, étrangers

By « naturalizing» a foreigner and denying him his natural identity, if racism is contemporaneous, it is as for nations : the only mark of an historic continuity is thus erased. The three attempts to explain racism starting from the very point of origin : that of colonial racism by slavery, that of industrial capitalism by exploitation, that of western racism by biological scientism are abusive. Under different modalities, in each case the process of national identification by and within the dominant society : American independences, antisemitism of the colonial society in Algeria, apartheid in South African nationalism, etc. Antisemitism itself only becomes racism when it is instrumentalised by nationalism.

The cultural problems of the relationship between immigration and host society result in divergent political, media and scientific declarations sharing the same ground and the same formal vocabulary. Consideration of the concepts of difference and cultural distance, their meaning in the social sciences and in social usage reveals their role in concealing the political issues at stake in integration.

Based on data from research on South American political exiles, this article pinpoints some of the difficulties of life adjustments in immigrant communities. We suggest recognizing the role played by stereotypes and interpersonal social perceptions in the adjustment processes of a transcultural shift. Without ignoring political and economic determinants, we seek to show the extent to which social psychological factors are an integral part of the social differenciation sequences (grouping, rejection and exclusion) at all levels of social life. Such processes are constantly present in latent and endemic forms but are differentially activated according to such factors as the origin of the immigrant groups and their particular historic context.

Xenophobic political declaration correspond to a real preoccupation amongst the working classes ; in this paper we examine the conditions which underlie this preoccupation and the success encountered by xenophobic political campaigns. Briefly, this tendency is presented as originating in the crisis. The questions seems to have been explained by the introduction of die use of North Africans as scapegoats. However, it seems to be necessary to go further.

An ethnographic inquiry was carried out in 1977 in an H.L.M. estate — the Clos Saint-Lazare in Stains in the northern suburbs of Paris. This study — based on a stay of two years on the estate — revealed the extent of xenophobic representations within a population of low level waged workers experiencing particularly difficult living conditions. On the basis of the findings in this research, we intend here to analyse the daily modes of construction of the category " foreigner " in the specific context of the social relationships at play on this estate.

The cultural specificities of Black people are part of nature. This is the process at work in explicitly racist declarations. They refer to a « hostile » form of nature. On the contrary, the well-intentioned and often anti-racist type of declaration sets these specificities in the context of a i harmonious » type of nature. The declarations are nevertheless merely two sides of the same coin and produce identical meanings and functions. The cultural characteristics of Black people are considered irreversible by naturalising them to the utmost in a process of animalisation.

The term minority refers to two distinct semantic spheres ; one refers to a legal, customary definition, that of a state of diminished capacity — the other to a numerical definition (a smaller number). This explains the ambiguity in its usage. The latter is however (relatively) demarcated in social science as opposed to its opposite, majority. This dyssimetry of connotations obliges us to emphasize the relational nature of these concepts, rather than their designation of specific social groups.

The words ethnic group hesitates between three problematics : the first one is related to nation or region. It concerns a territory — this is a political problematic. The second one is related to class. It concerns the social structure. The third is related to race. This means that this notion hesitates between cultural and natural interpretations, which is the underlying misunderstanding — at the theoretical level — of the false concept of race. Examples are those of anthropologists in tropical Africa, sociology related to French regionalism, and the use of ethnicity in North America.

The lack of any consistant theoretical definition of the concept « migrant culture » results in considerable diversity in the usage of this term and its derivatives. This article is an attempt at clarification of these concepts which in fact express different cultural phenomena and are often amalgamated : culture of origin, ethnic culture, migrant culture or new culture... The author takes the example of immigrant women, considered both as dynamic actors of social change and as the central object of ideological, cultural issues by immigrants from traditional societies as a concrete example of the ambiguities in the ideological treatment ot their situation, both by French people and by the immigrants themselves. The lack of consistant theoretical definitions of the concept « migrant culture » makes possible to use it in several ways. This paper tries to clarify those notions which define in fact very different cultural phenomena, and native culture, migrant culture, ethnic culture, new culture... As an example of the ambiguities within the ideological treatment of the culture — not only by French but also by the migrants themselves — the author studies the immigrant women, considered both as dynamic actors of the change process and as the central object of cultural ideological stakes of immigrants originating from traditional societies.

North American cultural anthropology has reified culture, making of it an entity akin to nature. The net result is that in its critique of the naturalism in racist hypotheses it itself depicts another sort of naturalism thus corroborating the attitudes which it claims to oppose. Melville Herskovits' theory of « Africanisms » is a good example of this trend, in the context of « Afro-American studies », the specificities of the black communities in the Americas are reduced to an African inheritance. Reductions of this type have reinforced the arguments of those who in post-slavery American society declared that the former slaves who had now become citizens could not be assimilated. In reaction to these arguments, the ideology of Négritude, based on the findings of cultural anthropology, has taken the naturalisation of culture, which is the basis of culturalism to its utmost limits since, here, this naturalisation has taken the form of a racialisation. The latter, by encouraging all sorts of intolerance and sectarianism, still weighs heavily today in the ideological debate and in political life. For example, in the West Indies under French domination it could, in the future, facilitate in these countries, a neo-colonial type of solution to the crisis which they are experiencing.

There is today a Black community both in the United States and in the UK. Although the historical formation of the two communities is very different — the word black » in English does not refer to the same population in the two countries — the Black American experience has served as an example to the Black, or New Commonwealth, community in the UK, the West Indian presence in the two countries playing an important role. The campaigns against racial discrimination in the UK were influenced by the movements for civil rights in the USA ; the political movements of the Black Americans influenced Black political movements in the UK. American legislation against racial and sexual discrimination was the model for similar legislation in the UK. However, in the United States, the notion of belonging to an ethnic group predominates whereas in the UK the movement of resistance to racial discrimination has created a broad alliance of all the so-called « black » ethnic groups, the experience of a common social situation being the predominant factor.

Recent nationalist declarations elevate « immigration of non-European origin » into a « Question » or « problem » set in the sphere of the catastrophic (imminence of irreversible destruction). The treatment of the immigration- problem takes on a cultural legitimacy by ostensibly resorting to a demystifying-criticism style (denouncing the last « taboos ») and by a strategy of retaliation (private appropriation, misappropriation, reversal) as regards the « panegyric of the difference ». Some basic mechanism of the racialising arguments aimed at the stereotype immigrant are revealed in recent writings. We show how the explicit position of the « republican style » alternative « assimilation or return to country of origin » acts as a double constraint as regards the immigrants, when the postulate of inassimilability intervenes. The absolutism of difference is one principle of the dominant form of racialisation : the differentialist ideology is elaborated on the basis of a fear of mixing of the races. Finally, contemporary national racism is often presented in the guise of « direct democracy » a consensus tends to form regarding the ideology of the consensus and referendum type practices such as the « Swiss model » reveal its xenophobic advantages. The result is a French road to the political from populist xenophobia — « national liberalism ». Given the onslaught of myths of identity it is a question of re-thinking internationalism outwith the sphere in which the rival ideological instrumentalisations are articulated ; the elaboration of a post-imperial universalism.