The communitarian stigma: Stigmatization as a mechanism of institutional racism in France

Abstract

This article examines minority citizens’ attempts of civic participation in the working-class banlieue of Tiercy in the Paris area by considering the double-bind they are confronted to: their efforts to perform as active and locally engaged citizens are readily abrogated by suspicions of violating what public authorities understand as appropriate modes of civic participation. By zooming into the chain of events that caused a minority leader of West African origin to be disqualified as a civic actor based on accusations of ‘communitarianism’, it develops a relational analysis of stigmatization as a meso-level mechanism of institutional racism. The analysis shows that competing definitions of ‘civic’ and asymmetrical social relations together engender racially differentiated principles of interaction that prepare the ground for the emergence of stigma in organization settings.