In her book Derrière le mythe métis (“Behind the mixed-race myth,” La Découverte, 336 pages, € 22), sociologist Solène Brun – a specialist in racial issues and researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research – studies mixed-race couples in France and their children. An essay that shows just how much mixed-race – and race – is a social experience.
What is the “mixed-race myth?”
It is the myth of happy mixed-race that completely conceals relations of power and domination and supports a certain rewriting of history by evacuating racial inequalities. It is love as a solution to racism, which is understood as hatred of the other, not as a system. But racism is not so much a question of hatred as of relationships of domination. Its matrix is rooted in Christian Europe and its blood purity laws to prevent intermarriage between Christians and Jews or Muslims.
Etymologically, [the French term] “mixité” means both mixing and disorder. This is a good illustration of what can also be seen in “métissage [race mixing]:” a mixing that disturbs the racial order. One could not be both slave and free, or native and settler. Working on the question of half-breeds provides a wealth of information on how the race was formed, and how the white group felt the need to reinforce racial boundaries out of fear of mixing. This can be found today in the notion of the “Great Replacement.”
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