Global Race

January 21, 2019 - Carole REYNAUD-PALIGOT and Claude-Olivier DORON

RACE IN 19th CENTURY FRANCE

Carole REYNAUD-PALIGOT (Université Paris 1), "On the racialization of collective identities in the 19th and 20th century"

This presentation explores some of the racialization processes that affected collective identities in the 1850-1940 period among major Western powers. An actual racial culture, stemming specifically from the scientific field, structured collective imaginaries and helped fuel the national identities of these rival nation-states, while also legitimating their colonial policies.

Claude-Olivier DORON (Université Paris Diderot), "Race and liberalism in early 19th century France: the case of the Censeur Européen"

This presentation explores the understudied role of French liberals from the Censeur européen between 1817 and 1826 in introducing the issue of human races within moral and political sciences. Through their thinking, race became a central object/subject of the political arena, used to interpret both the sense of history and the destiny of societies. This talk provides an opportunity to reflect on the close relationships between a certain kind of liberalism and the race question. It shows that race was not limited to a mere "negative" issue, related to exclusion or domination. While the issue of race was for these people central in explaining inequalities of development across societies and unequal abilities to attain freedom, it was also seen as a flag to unite different struggles and provide dominated peoples with an identity, a memory and an embodied history. This presentation sheds lights on the significance and ambivalence of the race question during the liberal moment of the Bourbon Restoration.

2-4.30pm, room Alfred Sauvy, INED: 133, boulevard Davout, 75020 Paris

Discussant: Jean-Luc Bonniol (Centre Norbert Elias)

This session will be in French.

March 19, 2019 - Amade Aouatef M’CHAREK

Doing Face in Forensic Identification and Generous Methods for Studying Race

Prof. Dr. Amade Aouatef M’charek (University of Amsterdam)

The face deserves more attention. In everyday life the face is ubiquitous. Yet in social theory the face is rather absent. In this paper I want to move beyond the representational model and attend to the work that a face can do, and to what the face is capable of. I introduce the concept of the tentacular to analyze how the face draws certain publics together and how it feeds on that public to assume content and contours. My examples come for the field of forensic genetics, where DNA-phenotyping is used to produce a ‘composite face’ of the unknown individual. I will show that this novel technology is not so much aimed at the individual suspect but at a suspect population, clusters of individuals. I argue that this population is racialized through the biologization of the phenotype.

This process prompts the question: what is race? To answer this, I suggest that we need to ‘care’ for race, i.e., to invent methods that are open-ended and allow us to follow race around and examine how it shifts and changes in practice. I propose the concept of generous methods to show that the slipperiness of race is not simply a matter of ‘multiplicity’ (Mol 2002); race is not only an ‘object multiple’. As a word and a practice, race refers to different kind of things. Different realities. I will argue that the slipperiness of race can be grasped if we consider race to be an object, a method as well as a theory. Three different yet connected realities.

2-4 pm, salle Alfred Sauvy, INED: 133, boulevard Davout, 75020 Paris

Discussant: Joëlle Vailly (Iris, CNRS, coordinator of the ANR project "Fitege")

April 15, 2019 - Edward TELLES and Fabricio M. FIALHO

Edward TELLES (University of California, Santa Barbara), "Global Perspectives on Skin Color Inequality and Colorism"

A growing, interdisciplinary, and increasingly global literature concerns skin color and colorism, which are related to status throughout the world. The vast majority of research has investigated Western societies, where color and colorism have been closely related to race and racism. In Latin America, the two sets of concepts have particularly overlapped. In the rest of the world, particularly in Asia, color and colorism have also been important but have evolved separately from the relatively new concepts of race and racism. In recent years, however, color consciousness and white supremacy appear to have been increasingly united, globalized, and commodified, as exemplified by the global multibillion-dollar skin-lightening industry. My research is particularly concerned with the role of skin color in creating status hierarchies in Latin America.

Fabricio M. FIALHO (CERI/SciencesPo), "How States Make Race: New Evidence from Brazil".

The Brazilian state recently adopted unprecedented race-targeted affirmative action in government hiring and university admissions. Scholarship would predict the state’s institutionalization of racial categories has “race-making” effects. In this article, we ask whether the Brazilian state’s policy turnabout has affected racial subjectivities on the ground, specifically toward mirroring the categories used by the state. To answer, we conceptualize race as multidimensional and leverage two of its dimensions—lay identification and government classification (via open-ended and closed-ended questions, respectively)—to introduce a new metric of state race-making: a comparison of the extent of alignment between lay and government dimensions across time. Logistic regression on large-sample survey data from before the policy turn (1995) and well after its diffusion (2008) reveals an increased use of state categories as respondents’ lay identification in the direction of matching respondents’ government classification. We conclude that the Brazilian state is making race but not from scratch nor in ways that are fully intended.

Discussant: Graziella Moraes Silva (Graduate Institute Geneva)

2-4.30 pm, salle Alfred Sauvy, INED: 133, boulevard Davout, 75020 Paris

April 24, 2019 - Nancy FONER

Racialization in an Era of Mass Migration: Black Immigrants in Europe and the United States

Nancy Foner (Hunter College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York)

Comparing Afro-Caribbean and African migrants and their children on the two sides of the Atlantic highlights how social, political, and demographic contexts and historical developments influence the nature and impact of racial boundaries and barriers --- and raises some intriguing questions. Why and in what ways are the racial barriers facing black migrants more severe in the United States than in Britain, France, and the Netherlands? At the same time, how has the history and presence of the large African American population provided black migrants and their descendants with certain advantages that they lack in Europe? Why do identity struggles of the second generation take different forms in the United States and Europe?

2-4pm, salle Alfred Sauvy, INED: 133, boulevard Davout, 75020 Paris

May 6, 2019 - Race in French social sciences

Joint session of the ANR project Global Race and the journal Mouvements

Around the special issue on "Intersectionnalité" edited by Abdellali Hajjat and Silyane Larcher.

With Lila Belkacem, Audrey Célestine, Sarah Mazouz, Zacharias Zoubir (authors in the special issue) and Magali Bessone, Juliette Galonnier, Daniel Sabbagh, Patrick Simon (members of the Global Race project)

The panelists will expore how race has been addressed in the French social sciences and the debates and controversies it has fostered.

With:

Juliette Galonnier et Patrick Simon, "La question raciale dans la sociologie française"

Lila Belkacem et Zacharias Zoubir,"Prendre au sérieux les recherches sur les rapports sociaux de race"

Magali Bessone, "Le sous-champ de la philosophie dans la question raciale en France"

Sarah Mazouz, "Cartographie du surplomb. Ce que les résistances au concept d’intersectionnalité nous disent sur les sciences sociales en France"

Audrey Célestine, "Rôle des universitaires ‘minoritaires’ et des porte-parole des minorités"

2-5 pm, salle de conférence, Sciences Po-CERI: 56 rue Jacob, 75006 Paris

May 14, 2019 - Carolin Schütze

“Everyone is equal”: Colour-blind attitudes in welfare practices with migrants

Carolin Schütze: PhD candidate at Lund University

In this presentation I will present a paper that explores the relationship between colour-blind attitudes and self-reported perceptions of encounters between majority and immigrant populations in Sweden. I build on existing studies showing that colour-blindness often functions as a strategy to appear unbiased while holding prejudicial attitudes. Using original survey data of welfare workers in two Swedish welfare organisations, I assess the relationship between colour-blindness and the perception of difficulty working with migrants among the welfare workers in these organisations. Results from structural equation models show that those with greater levels of colour-blindness are simultaneously more likely to report negative attitudes toward immigrants and less likely to report difficulty in working with migrants. I propose that self-reported colour-blindness among welfare workers is part of an effort to appear unbiased and in line with the normative principles of the state to perform non-racism, but this does not mean that those who are colour-blind do not hold anti-immigration attitudes.

Discussant : Haley McAvay (INED)

4-6pm, salle 111, INED: 133, boulevard Davout, 75020 Paris.

May 27, 2019 - Béatrice DE GASQUET

Defining Jewishness in statistical studies on Jewish populations in the post-Shoah era (US, UK, France)

Béatrice de Gasquet (Université Paris Diderot, en délégation à l’INED)

The Shoah marked a major turning point in attempts to census Jewish populations, with the disqualification of any reference to race in defining Jewishness and widespread suspicion towards any State implication in surveys on Jewish populations. Yet, apart from public statistics, with the larger expansion of polls, the post-WW2 era witnessed the development of questionnaire-based surveys to count and gain knowledge on Jewish populations, especially on the initiative of Jewish organizations.

This paper examines statistical surveys based on representative samples of persons defined as Jewish in the US, France and the UK from the 60s onwards. Such surveys constitute a relatively unique case in which statistics on a minority population are compiled by the very organizations that are meant to represent such minority. I examine the various definitions of the concerned population, which usually acknowledge from the start the complexities of such an enterprise and often combine several criteria (religion, self-definition, ancestry, education, etc.). The choices made in these surveys take place in the context of larger intellectual and political debates on identity issues and of internal debates, including at the transational level, within contemporary Jewish communities on "who is Jewish".

Discussant : Paul Schor (Université Paris Diderot)

2-4pm, salle Alfred Sauvy, INED: 133, boulevard Davout, 75020 Paris

October 15 - RACE AND THE LEFT

PUBLIC CONFERENCE

2-6pm, Salle des conférences, Sciences Po-CERI, 56 rue Jacob, 75006 Paris

The conference will explore the relationships between the Left and the race question and will unfold in two parts: first, three keynote speakers will discuss how intellectual movements associated to workers’ movements have positioned themselves towards the racial issue in the US, the UK and France; then a round-table will gather intellectuals, political representatives and members of anti-racist organizations to discuss these issues in the French context.

2 - 4 pm Keynote speakers (in English)

David ROEDIGER (Foundation Professor of American Studies, University of Kansas), author of Class, Race and Marxism (2017)

Satnam VIRDEE (Professor of Sociology, University of Glasgow, Founding Director of the Centre for Research on Racism, Ethnicity and Nationalism, CRREN), author of Racism, Class and the Racialized Outsider (2014)

Françoise VERGES, author of On Women and their Wombs: Capitalism, Racialization, Feminism (forthcoming)

4.15 - 6 pm Round table (in French)

Moderated by Patrick Simon

With Hourya BENTOUHAMI

Saïd BOUAMAMA

Christine DELPHY

Danièle LOCHAK

Danièle OBONO

George PAU-LANGEVIN

The audio recordings of the 10/15/2019 day’s interventions are available below

Introduction :

Keynote Satnam Virdee :

David Roediger:

Françoise Vergès:

Discussion with the room after the keynotes:

Table-ronde: