Decades on from the 1983 March for Equality and Against Racism, racist rhetoric is becoming increasingly normalized in France politics and the media. Esprit sets out to dissect this opaque yet palpable transformation in an issue titled ‘In the face of the racist resurgence'.
With Marine Le Pen's Rassemblement National threatening to entrench discrimination through its policy of ‘national preference', a twofold imperative emerges: to understand the changing face of racism while forging an anti-racist movement that is united without being uniform, write editors Pierre Benetti and Anne Lafont.
Rethinking anti-racism
‘Anti-racism has left its carefree days behind,' writes Michaël Fœssel. As the far right grows increasingly brazen, anti-racism can no longer afford to be complacent.
Yet detecting racism is not always straightforward. Where its public expression is criminalized, racial prejudice often masquerades as moral judgement: foreigners become ‘welfare scroungers', their supposed failings condemned without so much as a word about their ethnic origins.
Anti-racism therefore practises a ‘hermeneutics of suspicion', reading between the lines to expose hidden discrimination. Drawing on academic research and the lived experiences of minorities, it challenges the supposedly universal foundations of western modernity, revealing the implicit ‘racial contract' underpinning promises of equality.
But the far right has tricks of its own. Replacing biological hierarchies with claims of cultural incompatibility, it turns the language of diversity on its head, portraying white populations as threatened minorities. In a perverse reversal, anti-racists are branded racist for continuing to invoke ‘race'.
How, then, can anti-racist knowledge become politically effective? FÅ“ssel advocates an affirmative politics of equality that goes beyond exposing discrimination. As the far right reduces politics to alarmist battles over identity and civilization, anti-racism must reclaim its political purpose: defending equal rights and solidarity without privileging one group over another.
The anti-racist vocabulary
Anti-racism is itself an ambiguous term, explains Magali Bessone: at once a conceptual tool, a normative principle and a political movement. Such ambiguities make anti-racist terminology problematic, undermining dialogue and weakening the struggle. Bessone therefore examines three contentious terms, asking which to keep and which to restrict or discard.
‘Islamophobia' is worth keeping precisely because of its ambiguity. While critics argue that the term risks undermining legitimate criticism of Islam, Bessone counters that it aptly captures a complex reality: Muslims face an amalgamation of hostility and discrimination in which race, culture and religion intersect, with racial prejudice sometimes hiding behind criticism of religion.
The term ‘racialized group' highlights that ‘it is not race that justifies racism, but racism that produces racialized groups'. Yet while useful analytically, the term risks reinforcing such externally imposed categories in political activism, where the emphasis should be on agency and self-definition.
Finally, ‘systemic racism' can give the impression that racism is so deeply embedded in society that resistance becomes futile. Bessone instead advocates ‘institutional racism', shifting attention to the everyday practices through which discrimination takes root, and which can therefore be challenged and transformed.
Gendered racism
‘How do you do it, as a Black woman?' This question, posed by a 22-year-old master's student, became the starting point for Sarah Fila-Bakabadio's new book, Être une femme noire en France. Interviewed by Anne Lafont, the historian explores the distinctive forms of racism experienced by Black women in France. For Maëlys, one of the book's interviewees, racism manifests as a ‘fracturing' of the self: labelled ‘Black' or ‘mixed-race', she identifies with both her Breton and Guadeloupean heritage, illustrating what W. E. B. Du Bois called ‘double consciousness'.
Fila-Bakabadio warns that focusing on extreme manifestations risks overlooking everyday discrimination, ‘less spectacular but just as harmful', while conveniently distancing racism from our own lives. With gendered racism, race and gender ‘feed into each other' to construct and pathologize ‘difference'. The bodies of racialized women are subject to stereotypes that maintain social and economic hierarchies. The Black nanny exemplifies this enduring colonial stereotype: supposedly possessing unparalleled maternal instincts, her body is imagined as made to nurture white children.
Drawing on Étienne Balibar and Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Fila-Bakabadio challenges supposedly ‘colour-blind' societies, where ordinary people's passivity can perpetuate discrimination while silencing its victims. She traces the distinctive history of anti-Black racism to slavery and racial capitalism, describing ‘anti-white racism' as a political construction used to discredit anti-racist struggles. And rejecting the notion of a homogeneous Black community, she favours the metaphor of a ‘constellation', capturing both the diversity and interconnectedness of Afro-descendant worlds.
At a time of rising racism and mounting threats to democracy, on both sides of the Atlantic, discussing the experiences of Black women may seem of little import. Fila-Bakabadio thinks otherwise: ‘In these troubled times, we must explore the everyday realities of people's lives to understand how to resist these upheavals.'
Anti-racist expression
In the face of racist intimidation, minority groups find ways to affirm their identities and make their voices heard, not least through art. Reviewing anthropologist Michel Agier's study, Racisme et culture: Explorations transnationales (2025), Anne Lafont explores the power of artistic expression as a political response to racist violence.
Agier's book begins with a study of the Afro blocos of Salvador's carnival. These carnival groups serve not only as an escape valve, temporarily inverting social and racial hierarchies, but also as ‘an extraordinary and enduring form of collective political expression', through which an African identity is forged in opposition to the essentializing or even degrading labels of ‘Black' and ‘Negro'.
Agier adopts an anthropological lens to reveal the erasure of Black figures in classic literary works, before drawing on Stuart Hall's concept of race as a ‘floating signifier' to explore how the meanings attached to race shift across different contexts.
The influence of Frantz Fanon on Agier's book is evident: the title is a nod to the text of the same name that Fanon wrote for the Congress of Black Writers and Artists, held at the Sorbonne in 1956. In it, Fanon developed the idea that racism is the ideological counterpart to colonial exploitation, while artistic creation can become a means of emancipation.
Agier explores the fluidity of mixed-race identities, showing how racial classifications vary according to social context and over time. He contrasts Sartre's and Fanon's views on ‘strategic essentialism', the assertion of a collective identity in defiance of historical denigration. What Sartre sees as a temporary strategy of resistance, Fanon sees as a necessary process of rebuilding a damaged sense of self, paving the way towards a shared, post-racial humanity.
Review by Cadenza Academic Translations
Published in cooperation with CAIRN International Edition
