CIAO DATE: 12/2008
Volume: 26, Issue: 1
Spring 2008
French Color Blindness in Perspective: The Controversy over "Statistiques Ethniques" (PDF)
Daniel Sabbagh, Shanny Peer
In the United States, while some race-based policies such as affirmative action have faced often successful political and legal challenges over the last quartercentury, historically, the very principle of official racial classification has met with much less resistance. The Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, according to which “no state shall deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws,” was not originally intended to incorporate a general rule of “color blindness.”1 And when in California, in 2003, the “Racial Privacy Initiative” led to a referendum on a measure—Proposition 54—demanding that “the state shall not classify any individual by race, ethnicity, color or national origin,” this restriction was meant to apply exclusively to the operation of public education, public contracting or public employment, that is, the three sites where affirmative action was once in effect and might be reinstated at some point, or so the proponents of that initiative feared. In any case, that measure was roundly defeated at the polls.
In France, by contrast, the issue of whether one ought to infer a rule of color blindness from the constitutionally-grounded principle of equality was not left open for the courts to decide: it was settled beforehand, and the answer was incorporated into the text of the Constitution itself. Article 1 of the 1958 Constitution thus provides that "the Republic ... ensures the equality of all citizens before the law, without any distinction of origin, race, or religion."2 As a result, corrective or "remedial" uses of race by state authorities, legally speak-ing, are put on the same plane as invidious ones and simply ruled out. Moreover, this difference of constitutional framework arguably reflects a difference of public culture. In the United States today, the vocabulary of race remains in wide use, although "race" arguably denotes less the formerly predominant pseudo-anthropological classification of human beings into a set of genetically distinct and hierarchizable collectivities than the subset of groups having experienced the most severe forms of racist discrimination-in an implicitly derivative and self-referential way. In France, in contrast, the delegitimization of racism has entailed the disqualification of "race" as a descriptive category altogether. As a matter of fact, the word "race" will only be used in a very limited number of settings: by the most radical fractions of the extreme right, by social scientists looking into the history and the effects of racism, and by lawmakers concerned with prohibiting distinctions based on that disreputable concept....
The Choice of Ignorance: The Debate on Ethnic and Racial Statistics in France
Patrick Simon
For more than a century, statistics describing immigration and assimilation in France have been based on citizenship and place of birth. The recent concern for racial discrimination has given rise to a heated controversy over whether to introduce so-called “ethnic categories” into official statistics. In this article, I make an assessment of the kind of statistics that are available today and the rationale behind their design. I then discuss the main arguments put forward in the controversy and argue that antidiscrimination policies have created a new need for statistics that outweigh the arguments against the use of “ethnic statistics.” In fact, beyond the technical dimension of this controversy lies a more general political debate about the multicultural dimensions of French society.
Who is Afraid of Blacks in France? The Black Question: The Name Taboo, the Number Taboo
Louis-Georges Tin
In 2005, black people in France decided to create a national organization: the CRAN. The country had lived for decades on the myth of human rights and equality, and as a result, minorities were invisible, and were expected to remain so. Therefore, the two most important goals of the CRAN have been: to give a name, to give a figure. The taboo of the name was broken when black people decided to stand up for what they are, to call themselves “black,” however unusual this might sound in French public discourse; the taboo of the figure was also broken when the CRAN decided to launch the issue of ethnic statistics in France. Until then, blacks would not exist as such in this country, and racial discrimination would remain ignored for the most part. But since this campaign was launched, ethnic statistics have become an important issue. The debate is still going on.
From Measuring Integration to Fighting Discrimination: The Illusion of “Ethnic Statistics”
Alain Blum, France Guérin-Pace
In this article, we engage in a debate that first took place in France ten years ago, but that has revived today. This debate concerns the question of whether to introduce ethnic categories in statistical surveys in France. There is strong opposition between those who argue for statistical categories to measure ethnic or racial populations as part of an effort to fight against discrimination, and those who argue against such statistics. The latter, including the authors of the present article, discuss the impossibility of building such categories, their inadequacies, and the political and social consequences they could have because of the way they represent society. They also argue that there are better, more efficient ways to measure discrimination and to fight against it. After describing the history of this debate, the authors present the different positions and explore the larger implications of the debate for French public life.
Diversity Measurement and Protection of Confidential Data: The Ten Recommendations of the CNIL (Commission nationale de l'informatique et des libertés)
Discriminations: Engagement républicain contre les discriminations
Point De Vue: Statistiques contre discriminations
La séparation des Églises et de l’État en France et à Genève (1905-1907): une solution pour deux histoires
Valentine Zuber
The comparative history of secularization in France and in Geneva can shed fresh light on the separation of church and state in France in 1905 and in Geneva in 1907. Similarities in the timing of events and in the laws of separation in these two settings mask sharp differences in how laïcité was understood and how it was interpreted politically. The establishment of laïcité had neither the same causes nor the same political effects in France and Geneva. Nevertheless, as two examples of “total” laïcisation, the French and Genevan separations of church and state raised the same question about religious liberty and its safeguard by the state. Should a state that is “separate from religion” play an active role protecting the liberty of the different denominations in its territory, or should it uphold a prudent and distanced neutrality?
French Secularism in Debate: Old Wine in New Bottles
Véronique Dimier
This article deals with two debates at two different moments in history: the recent 2004 debate on a law proposed by the Chirac government that aimed at forbidding any religious signs (including the Islamic headscarf) worn in an ostensible way at school; and the 1892 debate on native education in Algeria and the opportunity to have a Koran teacher at school. At stake in both debates were two conceptions of Republican laïcité (secularism), one assimilationist, the other more pragmatic.
Jewish Identity Politics and the Scarf Affairs in France
Judith Vichniac
Much has been written about the scarf affairs in France and the subsequent legislation banning large religious symbols from the classroom. Less has been written about the major religious leaderships’ responses from 1989 when the first affair took place until the debates surrounding the Stasi Commission in 2003. This article traces the evolution of their thinking with special emphasis on the splits within the Jewish leadership within the context of a rise of anti- Semitic acts.