The research question I ask in this study is about the role of race in school choice among French middle-class parents. While Ball explains school choice as founded on class and anxiety, most U.S. literature directly faults parental racial perceptions and racialized structures for the negative societal and educational effects of school choice, including segregation.
Because social class is the orientating principle in French social research and public policy, the investigation of race is underdeveloped there. One of the difficulties of researching race in France is the absence of theory. I carry to France as an U.S. sociologist a concept of race drawn from a national discipline in which race is broadly accepted as a social construction, and its destructive effects on interactions, social groups, and society are widely studied (Bonilla-Silva 2013; Bessone and Sabbagh 2015; Omi and Winant 2015). In France, the wariness of the social sciences on race means indigenous race theory is sparse (Amiraux and Simon 2006; van Zanten 2006; Simon 2011). Critical race theory is well-developed in the United States but mostly spurned in France (Wieviorka 1997; Wieviorka 2000; Heilbron 2015). Postcolonial theory is similarly resisted academically, though gaining some adherents (Amiraux and Simon 2006; Moura 2008; Baneth-Nouailhetas 2011; Stoler 2011). Exceptions are the newer work of Safi (2013), Laurent and Leclère (2013), and Fassin (2011).
This sparsity of work should not be taken to mean that racism is not present in France. It is. It is well-noted, is felt, and it raises social anger (see, for example, Begag 2007; Wacquant 2007; Pager 2008; Bertossi 2012b). Racial ideas between the two countries rest on different social, cultural, and political bases, however. This study is foremost not about if racism exists in France, or how it is constituted, or why it persists there, all of which is beyond this study’s scope, but only about its role in school choice. Nor should racism be conflated with xenophobia and
religious intolerance, both of which are present in France (Laurent and Leclère 2013).
Social science concepts and theory are one thing. Popular concepts of race are another thing. As Appiah (2015) contends, studying race in a society is similar to studying sorcery in a culture. We know neither sorcery nor race are real, but it is necessary to understand what sorcery (or race) means in a culture to investigate its influence. That requires sensitization to race as a social and popular concept, to the discursive clues of what constitutes that racial formation and/or diffusion. To do that, by necessity, I employ theory that are mostly American in content and scope. They are the critical theories of Bonilla-Silva and Omi and Winant, and the cultural model of Lamont and Molnár. I have not included the critical perspective of Feagin (2006) because his work on systemic racism is entirely focused on the United States.
1.4.1 The racialized system
Bonilla-Silva (2013) directs us to the importance of racial ideas, racial language, and racial outcomes in the study of race. He purports powerfully that racist effects result from a racial ideology that has emerged since the 1960s, that of color-blindness. They no longer flow from the prejudice and actions of racists, as once common. This politically formidable but loose dominant ideology relies both on the fluidity of its conceptual content and on its facility to be represented as outside of racist notions for it to exist and persist. It metamorphizes as dominant and subordinate groups endlessly struggle to obtain social, economic, and political power.
The ideology is embedded in a racialized structure. Though pliable, the structure is a daunting wall between minority groups and whites. The color-blind ideology explains the persistence of racial inequalities as the result of economic forces, natural phenomena, and
among many whites that explain inequality and create blindness. First is the concept of abstract liberalism, a combination of political and economic philosophies that stress equal opportunity and individualism; second is the assumption that racial group inequalities are natural or normal; third is the contention that any inequalities are the product of a faulty minority culture; and fourth is the minimalization of racism in which economic, social, and political discrimination is held no longer important or relevant. These beliefs are constituted in overlapping racial frames, discursive ways of explaining how life is or should be, largely posited by and apportioned among whites. Finally, the racial structure is covert and its processes are invisible, functioning in a way that means “now you see it, now you don’t” (Bonilla-Silva 2013).
1.4.2 Race as a global process
Omi and Winant (2015) call attention to the ways that ideas of race are diffused globally, infecting other societies and their social structures. The possibility exists that race is being globalized, entering national societies such as France that do not share the racial history of the United States. These authors advance an overarching global theory of race that views the
construction of race and the effects of race as a historic, deterministic sociopolitical process. The authors assert that the United States is not an exception as it is a “pioneer” in the process.
Racialization is defined as “the extension of racial meaning to a previously racially unclassified relationship, social practice, or group” (Omi and Winant 2015, 111).
Race is a fluid social concept that arises from the embodiment of social conflicts and interests, signified and symbolized by and within the human phenotype. The construction of race follows a societal trajectory that both structure and representations steer. That trajectory brings racial formation, in which racial identities are formed, cemented, and dissolved through historic
processes. Racial projects are the cases within a society of racial formation in which multiple social elements are assembled together to produce racial identity, meaning, and activity, and from which material and non-material resources are then allocated racially. Racial formation shifts through religious to scientific to political themes, the latter of which is dominant now. The politicized theme draws on neoliberal and colorblind ideologies, of which colorblindness is an emergent and highly unstable hegemonic social belief. Attempting to ground their overarching theory within national contexts, Omi and Winant supply few concrete clues observable
discursively on the processes of racialization, racial projects, or of racial formation.
Theirs is not the only theory with transnational implications. They include other works of Winant (2006; 2009; 2014) and that of Bonilla-Silva (2000), but which are not applicable to this study because they are insufficient as frames for qualitative inquiry or analysis.
1.4.3 Social boundaries and groups
Lamont and Molnár (2002) focus on how social groups form boundaries against the “other” and originate collective repertoires that justify and defend those boundaries. They define social boundaries as social and cultural distinctions that are, in a sense, made plain in discourse. The formation of social boundaries arises from such symbolic boundaries held at the individual level, such as racial or class attributes. Symbolic boundaries may be more likely to create social boundaries when they are brought into a binary opposition to an “other,” an out-group (Lamont and Molnár 2002). These social boundaries lead to social inequality by controlling access to resources and through differentiated and unequal opportunity. The theory explains how othered groups manage and resist racial and ethnic stigmatization and foster social resilience through their cultural repertoires (Fleming, Lamont and Welburn 2011; Lamont et al. 2016). Though the
theory explains the responses of subjugated groups, it also explains the boundary-making and opportunity hoarding of the potential perpetrators of that racism and discrimination, as Lamont and Duvoux (2014) have done in assessing the shift in symbolic boundaries among the French middle class, an explanation which is pertinent to this dissertation.