Research director at France’s Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), anthropologist Michel Agier examines in his new book Racisme et Culture: Explorations Transnationales (“Racism and Culture: Transnational Explorations”) the political revival of racism in cosmopolitan and globalized societies.
At the beginning of your book, you point out that scientific proof of the non-existence of races does not prevent racism. How do you explain this?
In the 1970s, biologists, epidemiologists and archeologists showed that race was not a scientific concept that could explain the truth about human populations. At the same time, sociologist Colette Guillaumin (1934-2017) showed that what existed was not races, but a fact of domination, followed by a discourse that gave this domination a natural character.
What we need to remember is that race does not exist biologically, but that the race created by racism exists socially. It is this race that must be studied in order to address the racist dimension of domination.
You note that references to race are being revived by the elites, particularly politicians, who, in your view, rely on a racist mindset. What do you mean by that?
I use the expression infrapensée [meaning an underlying racist mentality] to describe the legacy of colonial and imperial history in France and Europe. This history has created a specific language with its own words, ideas and representations. It can be found in the literary works of Joseph Conrad or Louis-Ferdinand Céline, but also in politics with terms such as “migrant,” “ethnic” or “second or third generation immigrant.”
All these terms directly reflect this underlying racist mentality that links French identity to whiteness. When you talk about “third-generation immigrants,” you exclude certain French people from the national community because you consider them to be eternal foreigners.
Are politicians responsible for producing racism?
Yes, they are when they rely on this racist mentality to make otherness appear natural and, in doing so, create a kind of national or ethno-national core. Even though the world has changed considerably since decolonization and we now live in a cosmopolitan world, they are unable to answer the admittedly difficult question of how we can coexist on a global scale. They tend to keep blaming the same people, the other, be it the “foreigner abroad” or the “foreigner within.”
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