This chapter is central to the question this study poses about the role of race in French school choice. In the previous chapter, I took a necessary conceptual detour to examine the role of global risk and parental anxiety in school choice. Though varied somewhat by the four types, parental anxieties largely did not translate into changes in children’s schooling plans, following the theories of Ball (2003) and Beck (1992). Instead, these parents exhibit complicated and intertwined patterns of thinking and behavior that fall along three spectrums of individual dispositions, philosophical to psychological, collectivistic to individualistic, and resolute to uncertain. The question that remains is, what is the role of race in school choice?
In Chapter 5, I find that parents only twice bring up mix on their own as a criterion in school choice, though they are split over its importance when I raise it as criterion. In Chapter 6, many of the parents reject the idea that immigrants are a cause for anxiety. Feelings are on immigrants are generally supportive. The evidence at this point is these parents display no ferocity in school choice that suggests that anxiety over class reproduction leads to trampling blindly over minorities to obtain the best schooling. Parents have achieved social advantage, though, by which schools the children attend and in which courses they are enrolled.
The U.S. sociological literature establishes that race has a strong hand in parental
decisions about children’s schooling (Saporito and Lareau 1999; Goyette 2008; Mickelson et al. 2008; Goyette et al. 2012; Saporito and Hanley 2014). U.S. schools remain highly segregated by race and ethnicity, perhaps even more so than when racial segregation was legally practiced (Orfield and Frankenberg 2014; Reardon and Owens 2014). Racial attitudes affect parental beliefs about what schools are considered desirable (Goyette 2008; Mickelson et al. 2008; Roda and Wells 2013; Saporito and Hanley 2014). I cannot turn to a similar body of French literature,
however, because of prevailing cultural conventions and the dominant social and political ideology around race limit research and the collection of racial data (van Zanten 2006).
I approach this topic from several directions. Following Bonilla-Silva (2013), I attend to how the parents see race within the French society, the language they employ on race, and the explanations they use to explain societal outcomes. The questions are structured, too, to give parents an opening to explain how the countries have come together on race and segregation through the diffusion of social ideas in line with Omi and Winant (2015). Given the deeply imbedded social and ideological limits around race in France, the topic is not one that can be approached directly because of social desirability. As I note in Chapter 2, I cannot simply ask parents about the role race plays in schooling decisions or probe too deeply into family behavior. I approach this topic instead through three open-ended questions that ask parents to compare the United States and France on attitudes and segregation. I use the phrase couleur de peau (color of the skin) to avoid direct racial terminology, and then refer to ethnicity in the questions about place and school segregation. Using parents as sociological informants on French society, I take up the issue of race subtly, listening carefully to how they understand race, use its language, and to what they attribute societal outcomes.
Despite my approach, parents sometimes hesitated to answer, especially the first question that asks parents to compare the United States and France on attitudes around the couleur de peau. They use interjections as pfft and wow. One felt it was still too personal:
M. Silvestre, a business executive with one child at Legacy, an Avoider
A question like this is very particular when you ask it in France … We talk about people, we do not talk about us. It's very general.
Sometimes their responses are inarticulate, perhaps either because the questions are difficult to answer given prevailing conventions and the dominant ideology or because parents
have no thought-out, pat answers to deliver on issues of race. In addition, a limitation of this research strategy is that parents may not be answering how they see the differences between France and the United States from what they know but answering from negative sentiments they harbor about the United States and its global economic and cultural hegemony (Lamont 2000a; Tin 2008). These sentiments are real in France, often cast as anti-Americanism. However, they are infrequent and not evident to any large degree in the interviews.
Overall, the parents display reasonable knowledge of the United States on racial matters. For example, parents immediately refer to differences that exist between the countries on such matters as the use of official categories of race and the different histories of race.
Mme. Bossuet, a doctoral student with one child at Legacy, an Assenter In the United States, it's necessarily much more marked because they define people according to their racial origin when filling out forms, while in France that does not exist. In France, we are not going to ask if you are of Vietnamese origin ... I believe, therefore, that there's already a mentality. I think also there is a history of racism … that is very present in the United States. In France, we're not going to talk the same way, which does not mean that it's not important. We're going to talk about the suburbs, we are going to talk about religious problems, and the difference between communities.
The collection of racial data is forbidden in France, not only on school forms, but in the national census and in surveys, which means that racial data are unavailable (Simon 2008b; Tin 2008; Simon 2011). The purpose of the restriction on racial data is to prevent the validation of racial concepts through official categories, as happens in the United States (Simon 2008a). Moreover, the legacy of Marxian philosophy means that social class is the only legitimate form by which social stratification is to be understood (Lamont 2000b; van Zanten 2006; Lamont and Duvoux 2014), and not by ethnicity or race.
and the United States is not to be downplayed. France does not have a lengthy history of
legalized and violent internal racial subjugation as the United States. Since the late 19th century, and particularly since World War II, public policies have largely worked to stymie racialization, not to promote it, while the United States has promoted racialization for much of its existence, a nation that is arguably hyper-racialized (Alba and Foner 2015; Omi and Winant 2015). Social and political institutions channel the course of racial socialization in a different direction in France than in the United States where such socialization remains intense and promotes racialization (Winant 2009; Bonilla-Silva 2013).
This is not to obscure individual or group racism in France or the country’s long and lamentable colonial legacy. France did not permanently abolish racialized colonial slavery until 1848, and though France never allowed slaves inside its boundaries at any point, the country still profited from when slavery was present in its colonies (Fredrickson 2005). Bonilla-Silva (2013) contends that Americans use slippery language to evade direct racial references, if not obscure racism, or what he calls the “now you see it, now you don’t” persistence of race. I contend in this chapter that given the parental accounts and how France and the United States diverge in their cultural and racial legacies, these French parents do not obscure the existence of race as a social distinction as much as they are unable to recognize its import as a social distinction. They instead engage in “how you see it, how you don’t.”