Contenu du sommaire : Élites minorisées : comparaisons internationales et circulations transnationales

How does racialisation operate at the top of the social ladder? This question, a long-standing one in American sociology, focuses attention on the way in which race and class dynamics interweave in the trajectories and practices of individuals. Based on four case-studies of “elites” circulating and residing in various geographical contexts, this special issue aims to elaborate upon a well-established research tradition across the Atlantic on the Black middle classes by shifting the focus to other national configurations. Ultimately, this issue calls for a re-reading of the race-class debate, exploring the ways in which racial, religious, and cultural cleavages are recomposed within privileged social strata.

The concepts of aesthetic and emotional labour have been central to analysing the ways in which the service industry reinforces and reproduces gender inequalities and more generally commodifies emotions and aesthetic norms. By focusing on the experience of Asian “businesswomen” in multinational corporations based in France, this article explores the racialised logics that underlie these two notions. First, I highlight the everyday racism experienced by Asian women in the workplace, despite a specific French legal and social norm of colourblindness. In the second part of this article, I explore the aesthetic prescriptions present in the workplace and how Asian women navigate them. Finally, this article demonstrates that if conforming to implicit professional norms implies racialised aesthetic labour, it simultaneously involves racialised emotional labour, unfolding in three distinct patterns: reassuring white executives about the globalised economic markets, justifying non-white presence in a white professional space, and silently enduring experiences of racism.

This article explores the racial mobility of Arabs in Chile during the twentieth century. In a society where the elite bases its power on whiteness, this mobility takes on the form of whitening. It gives access to the group that enjoys the privilege of ignoring its race and monopolises decisive capital in good conscience, as since inequalities are naturalised. Drawing on decolonial and critical theories of race, as well as the sociology of social classes and gender, the article takes a closer look at the conceptualisation of the notion of racial mobility, tracing the driving forces of this process through an exploration of the professional and economic sphere, lifestyle, and the couple. This article identifies five boundaries, inextricably linked to class, race, and gender, at the top of the social space, and as many ways of crossing them. In so doing, it shows the contemporary effect of the coloniality of power within Latin American societies.

This article explores the socialising effects of professional downgrading on the presentation of the self in postcolonial migration. Combining standardised questionnaires, semi-directive interviews, and publications by respondents, it focuses on higher education members of the advantaged urban classes of the Maghreb and West Africa who migrated to hexagonal France as adults. Their aspirations to remain in the middle and upper professions, or to gain access to them through education, were compromised by the devaluation of pre-migratory diplomas. On the one hand, the norms of discretion embodied in operational jobs in the country of arrival has led them to deal with racial stigma by silencing their previous experience. On the other hand, the material or symbolic resources acquired through relative stabilisation in Europe enable them to euphemise professional downward mobility in the eyes of relatives.

The circulation of diasporas is often overlooked in scientific literature on privileged migrations and expatriation to the Global South. This paper analyses the trajectories of highly qualified professionals who hold French, Western, and African nationalities, and who leave France for Senegal. Their route is part of the history of the black diaspora's elites from North America, Europe, and the Caribbean who lived in Sub-Saharan Africa. Like other Westerners in Senegal, these diasporic residents accumulate privileges, which are strengthened by sociabilities and professions in international spheres. Despite this upward mobility, they face racial minoritisation in Western environments that is not compensated by social integration into the host society. Postcolonial dynamics indeed produce mechanisms of social whitening highlighted by local language practices. These mechanisms nurture diasporic fragmentations, returns to France, or international capital reoriented towards other African countries.

One week after she was appointed chief economist at the European Commission's DG Competition in July 2023, Fiona Scott Morton resigned due to the controversy her appointment generated. This controversy is analysed as a moment of clarification of the social expectations that must be met in order to occupy the role of an economist in a specific administration and, inseparably, of the tensions that run through this institution. Based on a socio-historical study of the European executive and ethnographic materials specific to this controversy, the article shows how the refraction of such tensions led to the problematisation of two social properties of the American economist (her consulting activities and her nationality) and led to her ouster. This micro-sociological perspective thus links the short and long life of an institution to describe how one of its agents appears out of tune in a particular social configuration.