Contenu du sommaire : Racisme, antisémitisme, discriminations

The invention by Western science (natural sciences, anthropology, eugenics) of the concept of race made possible three mental operations—exclude, enslave, purify—which were applied to the management of human populations, paving the way for crimes and genocides in colonial empires and fascism. By examining the social uses of these mental operations in the modern world, this article seeks to grasp the epistemological obstacles and the mythological and religious backgrounds that allowed such a concept to be invented.

Following a sociological perspective, this article offers a documented overview of issues of racism and discrimination in the digital context, particularly since the emergence in the 2010s of a series of advanced technologies related to artificial intelligence. The functioning of certain algorithms (those using machine learning) is questioned, and a reflection on the training data, the algorithmic biases and the social choices behind the development of these technical tools is carried out. Particular attention is paid to the content recommendation algorithms of social media platforms, considered as the tools of artificial intelligence posing the most important social challenges today. This work was carried out in light of the productions and definitions established by the sociologies of racism, discrimination and race. We also exploit the technical literature in security and reliability of machine learning.

This paper explores the hypothesis that elderly people are discriminate in the face of dying, by not having access to adequate medical and mainly palliative care, due to their age. The factors proposed to be at the origin of this discrimination are three: (1) The way death is approaching and can be detected as coming soon, are not the same than in other clinical situations, due to illnesses as cancer for example. There is still a deficit of medical knowledge, about what biologically and physiologically means to become very old and dying of aging. Palliative care has not been developed for assisting people dying due to old age and remains quite inappropriate for that in their current conception. (2) Old age is a risk factor of not being as much respected in one's autonomy as young people. Indeed, elderly are frequently considered as heteronomous and vulnerable, deserving to be protected, even against themselves and what they express. (3) Lastly, if becoming very old without getting a fatal disease can be considered as a privilege, it can indeed come with difficulties to have access to active assistance in dying. Actually, the laws that open the access to such a procedure autorize it only for people whose vital prognosis is compromised at short term because of a terminal illness fatal or for people who suffer without possibilities to be relieved, all conditions that are usually not part of the picture of dying from aging.

The terms “race" and "racism" originated in Europe and were imported into the vocabulary of modern Japanese. How did Meiji Japanese intellectuals react to the classification of the Japanese people as the “yellow race”? Was Japanese identity constructed through the appropriation of white civilization, including colonialism? To what extent are the notions of "race" and "racism" applicable to the analysis of discrimination of various kinds in Japanese society?

The struggles against colonialism, capitalism, white supremacy and heteropatriarchy by Black and Aboriginal movements in Quebec tends to foster new solidarities between these actors, who were previously confined to defending specific demands. By pressing society to adopt a new way of looking at itself, these anti-racist actors are redrawing the internal boundaries of the Quebec civil sphere, not without being the object of rejection through processes of social disqualification that need to be analyzed. The contestation of two plays by Black and Aboriginal actors, and their subsequent cancellation, serve as empirical cases for understanding the values and moral dimensions underlying these processes of disqualification. An analysis of Quebec's print media also enable us to reconstruct the dynamics of the construction and positioning of left and right in Quebec, and to understand the foundations on which political demarcation lines are reconfigured.

Catholicism has long been hostile towards Jews. It has even been claimed that its anti-Judaism was the matrix of twentieth-century anti-Semitism. This contribution sets out to show that the pontificate of John Paul II marks a break in the history of the Church in this respect. A relative break perhaps: the Polish Pope is following in the footsteps of the Second Vatican Council, one of whose major texts, the declaration Nostra aetate (1965), revokes the idea of the Jewish people's guilt in Christ's death sentence and accepts that the Jews are still part of the Alliance with God. However, there was one decisive break: influenced by his education between the wars, which brought him into contact with nineteenth-century literature favourable to an inclusive nationalism, he accentuated the “philo-Judaism” of the conciliar period by developing a new approach to the Jewish community, linking recognition of the State of Israel with a request for forgiveness for the sins of Christians addressed to the “Jewish People”.

Racism and anti-Semitism are constantly evolving over time, while also demonstrating continuity, and vary from one society to another, which does not preclude a global approach to them. The article begins by examining the question of whether and to what extent these two phenomena should be distinguished. It then goes on to show how contemporary racism and the struggles it provokes are evolving beyond the changes of the 1960s to 1990s, when it was necessary to consider first institutional racism, then the new, differentialist racism. Today, the universalism of anti-racism is questioned, and the article takes the measure of its possible identity-based and relativist drifts towards a “race war”, which should not be exaggerated. While anti-Semitism has been massively attributed by the most right-wing currents on the intellectual and political scene to Muslims of immigrant origin, the article shows that its reality is more complex.