Muslim Girls and The Other France: Race, Identity Politics, and Social Exclusion - Introduction

Introduction
I was born French, but for me, the way I see

it, it’s only in France that I’m French because
our parents are foreign. But [in France] you
have to be French. You have to be French to
do anything here, like at school, or how
you’re educated. But in my head, I’m a
foreigner.
—Mariama (of Malian origin)1
Me, I find myself totally integrated in France,

so I feel at home everywhere. Given that I
was born in France, that I speak French, that
my culture is French, that I learned French
history, France is my country . . . My identity
is French of Algerian origin, of Muslim
religion.
—Fatima (of Algerian origin)
[W]e are French and Muslim and proud of it.

—Protester against the law banning
headscarves in schools2
Individuals or groups are objectively defined

not only by what they are, but by what they
are reputed to be, a “being perceived” which,
even if it closely depends on their being, is
never totally reducible to this.
—Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice
When people think of France, they do not typically attribute the

racialized3 forms and formations of violence, so commonplace in the
United States, to the French urban landscape. However, the targets
and effects of identity politics, educational inequality, blighted pub-
2 Muslim Girls and the Other France
lic housing projects that risk becoming little more than feeders for
prisons, and generalized feelings of insecurity are very much a
different “normal” in multiethnic France and Europe. Though ur-
ban violence (both real and anticipated) derives from a variety of
sources, image-savvy politicians and media “experts” have identi-
fied, shaped, and honed “suitable enemies,”4 enemies whom the
public is taught to fear. In France, they are youths of immigration
and of color from the outer cities—those high-rise public housing
complexes on the periphery of urban centers. The sum and summa-
tion of all such enemies are Muslims, and most visibly headscarf-
wearing Muslim girls. However, the underlying factors contributing
to the public’s alarm have less to do with reported increases in urban
violence over the years and more with one glaring realization. Be-
cause France has failed to discern its grown and evolving popula-
tions of non-Europeans—an estimated four to five million of whom
are Muslim5—its carefully crafted nation-state is now a more diverse
state of ethnic nationals whose French-born or -reared children
have come home to roost . . . permanently. That is, the consequences
of history are making themselves felt in France. More importantly,
these youths are shaping a “new” France and are one face of the Eu-
rope of tomorrow. Therein lies the actual source of the public’s fears,
which are now amplified by the attacks of September 11, 2001, in
the U.S. and of March 11, 2004, in Spain, suicide bombings in Mo-
rocco and the Middle East, the expanding war on terror, and memo-
ries of wars and attacks previously visited upon French shores, such
as the bombings of the mid-1980s and the summer of 1995. These
memories are roused by threats of more attacks, spurred by the 2004
law banning “Islamic” headscarves and by the deportation of “radi-
cal” Imams allegedly for “spreading extremist Islamic thought,”6 and
by the kidnapping and subsequent release of French journalists in
Iraq toward the end of 2004, also in response to the headscarf ban.
In the absence of a necessary conversation about the systemic
causes of urban violence, a politicized rhetoric conjures an imag-
inary hydra of immigration, itself seen as the threat to France’s
coveted “national identity.” Yet the real challenge to the national
representation and culture is posed by stigmatized youths of non-
European origins who assert that they are French and expect to be
treated as such in their country: France. As young people from the
outer cities, they are typecast as violent delinquents, feared as ter-
rorists in the making, and objectified as criminals—the fodder of
prisons and the targets of racialized profiling, secular laws, and cur-
fews that apply solely to their neighborhoods. While they are made
Introduction 3
to be seen by the public as living manifestations of every social ill,

what they are not perceived as is French. Born or raised in France,
the only country that they know well, they did not become French
through any conscious social movement or through political de-
mands. Rather, they were made so through social structures and
more directly through French national education, whose historical
and expressed objective remains franco-conformity—an arrogant
assimilationism toward the “national identity” in keeping with the
interest of national unity (Noiriel 1988, 1992; Weil 1996, 1997;
Bleich 1998).7 Such youths are not, however, accorded the social
recognition and currency that assimilation presumes.
Drawing from a multiyear study, this book examines this para-
dox in the lives of Muslim girls of African origins, and of youths of
color in general, living in the French outer cities. The literature on
the topic of Muslims in France continues to expand, though it typi-
cally focuses on North African or Maghrebin Muslims, and is often in
French (Ben Jelloun 1984; Leveau 1986; Sayad 1991; Kepel 1991;
Etienne 1989; Lacoste-Dujardin 1992; Hargreaves 1993, 1997; Ce-
sari 1994; Raissiguier 1994; Khosrokhavar 1997; Wihtol de Wenden
and Leveau 2001; Venel 1999; Gaspard 2004).8 This attention to
Maghrebin experiences is largely due to sociohistorical factors that
drive a type of “Algerian exceptionalism.” These factors include the
fact that Algeria was a settler colony from the 1830s to 1962, as op-
posed to a protectorate; its bitter, bloody war of independence,
which reached French soil; massive immigration and family recruit-
ment from Algeria; and the fact that many Algerians hold dual Al-
gerian and French nationality. Thus “Muslims” and “Muslim issues”
become quasi-synonymous with the Magrebins and more specifi-
cally Arabs in discourse, writings, and public perception. The head-
scarf ban, for example, is portrayed as affecting only “Arabs,” and
not West Africans or Asians.9 Nonetheless, anti-Arab violence and
sentiment have been on the rise in France for more than two dec-
ades, as have intolerance and violence toward those identified as mi-
nority groups in general (Taguieff 1987; Tribalat 1995; Geisser 2003;
CNCDH 2000–2002; 2004; Bleich 2003).
Although the majority of my focal participants10 are of North
African origin, they represent a range of ethno-national origins, col-
ors, and color consciousness. In fact, in the U.S. context, some would
be identified as “black,”11 not Arab. This study seeks, then, to bridge
that gap somewhat, by focusing on teenage girls of North and West
African origins whose experiences merge through the politics of na-
tional identity and social exclusion in France. While these youths
have highly diverse national origins, their ways of being and know-
ing are fashioned toward “ethnic sameness and differentiation: a
changing sameness,” as Paul Gilroy (1993, xi) describes it. Here, the
African Diaspora is understood not merely as a brutal dispersal, but
more as a site of separation and interconnection of Africans and
African descent groups throughout the world, converging in places
like the inner and outer cities. It is from this context that their self-
understandings emerge. The accent in this analysis is placed, then,
on that which unites them rather than what distinguishes them, in
order to render more transparent the mechanisms fostering “unity
within heterogeneity,” as Stuart Hall (1990, 235) correctly phrases it.
As outer-city youths, they have been constituted as a social
problem, and as youths of color, a denied racialized question in a
French society that posits itself as operating out of a type of human-
ist universalism, a society that purports to be color-blind and race-
free. Moreover, they are living expressions of a decidedly French
dilemma in being simultaneously socially excluded and culturally
assimilated while being defined as a threat to the “national identity.”
The creation of legislation targeting and banning the so-called Is-
lamic headscarf—identified with a supposed rise in fundamentalism
and intolerance in the outer cities—effectively illustrates this point,
especially since educational policies have been in place to address
this very issue since 1995. And yet few actual cases of Muslim girls
wearing a headscarf in the public schools have been documented,
though the law is likely to increase that number, as girls resist it. The
headscarf has been made to symbolize something antipodal to French
values and culture, which then triggers those statist practices (i.e.,
laws and policies) aimed at franco-conformity. Resistance triggers
other actions, namely the expulsion from the schools and the coun-
try of youths whose life chances are already compromised by a dys-
functional educational system. But, more to the point, these youths
expose fundamental contradictions between that highly abstracted
notion of universalism and the lived reality of ethnic distinction and
racialized discrimination against people of non-European origins
and of color.
Indeed, these youths and their assertions that they are French or
“French of ‘x’ origin” (e.g., of Senegalese or Tunisian origin) become,
then, the litmus test for ideologies of inclusion and models of assim-
ilation, because their self-understandings pose an acute challenge to
popular perceptions, discourses of belonging, and a “national iden-
tity.” Muslim girls have been fashioned as the quintessential other
vis-à-vis French culture and the national representation in the courts
Introduction 5
of public and private opinion. Their complexities are often reduced

to tropes of gendered oppression associated with controversial acts
such as honor killing, imposed veiling and seclusion, forced mar-
riage, polygamy, repudiation, and excision, forms of violence that
have also become the stuff of urban legends. Speciously attributed
solely to Muslims, these acts frontally clash with the idea of human
rights and tolerance taught in French schools, schools that ironically
expel headscarf-wearing Muslim girls should they refuse to remove
their head covering on the school’s grounds. Moreover, these mea-
sures diminish the importance of other pressing social problems af-
fecting the life chances of these youths—including poor living condi-
tions and educational inequality. They also serve to reinforce a
seemingly inelastic notion of a “national identity,” itself buttressed
by subjective interpretations of French secularism, la laïcité (Barbier
1995; Coq 1999; Poulat 2003).
To be defined as a problem, in the language of W. E. B. Du Bois,
is not without its effects. For some youths a type of double, if not
triple, consciousness emerges that leads them to measure them-
selves through the contemptuous eyes of others.12 The “psychologi-
cal wage of Frenchness,” to slightly alter Du Bois’s phrase, compels
certain youths to distance themselves from negative representations
and practices identified with their presumed cultures in favor of the
national representation nurtured in their schools, which is equated
with gender equality. High-profile cases in the media are instructive
illustrations of this point, such as that of Hawa Gréou, a fifty-nine-
year-old French resident from Mali who received a stiff prison sen-
tence for having excised forty-eight girls in France, which I discuss in
chapter 5. To the Malian community’s surprise and dismay, she was
denounced by a French-raised girl whom she had excised. Then
there is the case of Fatoumata, a French high school student of Sene-
galese origin whose father held her in Senegal against her will pend-
ing a forced marriage, taken up in chapter 1. The more tragic cases
include the murders of Nazmiyé, a fifteen-year-old girl of Turkish
origin, and Sohane Benziane, an eighteen-year-old of Algerian ori-
gin, over questions of shame and honor, patriarchy, and machoism,
issues I develop in this analysis in relation to the experiences of my
focal participants.
The backdrop to this entire scenario is a sexually liberal, media-
oriented Parisian society, to which these teens are exposed wherever
they go. Going for a walk, riding the metro, or watching television
can be a challenge for the more modest among them, since they may
be faced with life-size billboards and advertisements wherein nudity
and sensuality sell anything from lingerie to car insurance. More-

over, unlike in their parents’ countries of origin and in their homes,
nudity is not taboo on French television. These in-your-face kinds of
media make the expectation of modesty more complex for some
Muslim girls who continually walk a swaying tightrope in being the
transcultural teenagers that their social locations have fashioned. In
this light, their narratives merit greater attention not because they
represent the totality of Muslim girls’ lived realities, but because
their stories reveal valuable and alarming developments within na-
tional identity politics structured by social exclusion and reinforced
by gender constraints.
In sharing their stories, I cannot stress too much that the vio-
lence experienced by some of my participants and documented in
this study should not be generalized to all Muslims or Africans.
Some are, nonetheless, subjected to unspeakable crimes and have
been silenced by the forces responsible. It is my hope to give voice to
such youths, particularly the ones whom I have come to know. It is
also my intent to place a very real human face on a host of pressing
problems affecting the life chances of youths from the French outer
cities, ranging from dashed hopes and dreams to the broader, inter-
nalized effects of residential and educational segregation in French
society. Despite long-standing affirmative action initiatives, an aver-
age of sixty thousand youths left the French schools between 1990
and 2000 without any meaningful certifications or diplomas. An es-
timated 40 percent of the diploma-less are without work in a coun-
try where unemployment rates hover around 10 percent (at times
higher) nationally (DEP 2003; INSEE 1999, 2004).
On Race and Classifications
In this context, the self-understandings of Muslim youths sig-

nify critical change in a French society clinging to its “national iden-
tity” amidst unanticipated and often unwanted social mutations
that these young people come to represent. Ill-prepared to embrace
these youths as French, France finds itself facing several pressing so-
cial questions, most notably, what will be the effects of stigmatized
youths of color’s claims on a social fiction termed a “national iden-
tity” in a society that constitutes them as perpetual outsiders or im-
migrants? And what happens when public institutions attempt to
level cultural differences among youths of varying African origins in
schools while those differences are amplified outside of schools? One
clear implication is that these youths lay bare the flawed nature of
Introduction 7
the classifications used in France, while making the social reality of

race—contingent upon struggles over classifications and structures
of meaning—salient in a French society hostile to this notion. It is
also a society in which social race comes to justify and explain exist-
ing divisions and differences, much as “racialized barriers,” to use
Stephen Small’s (1994) term, and color consciousness operate in the
U.S. and England. Indeed, U.S. understandings and applications of
“race” are rejected in France and measured against notions of uni-
versalism. Moreover, U.S. notions of hypodescent (the “one drop
rule,” according to which any traceable African ancestry makes one
black) do not obtain in a France that eschews categories defined and
described in terms of “race” and ethnicity. Nonetheless, these “suit-
able enemies,” anchored in the French context, play a pivotal role
in the racialization of the “national identity.” Because of this, this
racialization permeates social structures and more specifically those
elements of urban social life with which youths of color and immi-
gration are identified, such as dead-end vocational tracks, prisons,
and the outer cities themselves.
Already, “race” discourse is prevalent in French society, so much
so that one commonly hears people describe themselves and others
as noir (black), beur (Arab), or blanc (white), and use “ethnic roots”
(e.g., Gaulois) to mark distinction and difference. Some even identify
as “black” rather than noir, and this usage connects them to a U.S.
type of consciousness permeating France and parts of Europe. The ti-
tle alone of Gaston Kelman’s (2003) controversial book mocking
identity politics in France speaks volumes: Je suis noir et je n’aime pas
le manioc (I’m black, and I don’t like yams). The putative markers of
“race”—skin color, hair, features, language varieties, and by exten-
sion family name, religion, and ways of being—have long-standing
social meanings in France, underpinned and enlivened by ideologies
and policies acting on them. Scientific racism, which legitimized
chattel slavery and colonization, is the most obvious example. And,
clearly, views such as those espoused by Arthur de Gobineau in The
Inequality of the Human Races (1853) structured both racialist thought
and policies in and beyond France, despite Haitian anthropologist
Anténor Firmin’s fierce rebuttal, The Equality of the Human Race
(1885), which went largely ignored.
In many ways, there exists a “French dilemma,” similar to what
Gunnar Myrdal (1944/1975) identified as an “American dilemma,”
having to do with the patent contradictions in France between the
cherished national values of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Secu-
larism” (Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité, and Laïcité) and the consistent prac-
tice of targeted racialized discrimination. In the French context, such

discrimination, as a social problem, is frequently subsumed in issues
of social inequality and immigration, or conflated with xenophobia.
In other words, people of color are supposedly discriminated against
because they are “immigrants” or feared foreigners, not necessarily
because they are African or Asian or “black” (De Rudder, Poiret, and
Vourc’h 2000). But the fact that a thing is not racially named does
not mean it is not racialized. The twist in the French context, com-
pared to the United States, is that it is much more difficult to prove
racialized discrimination within the population identified officially
as “French,” because their ethnic origins are not documented (Si-
mon 2000; Tribalat 1995; Simon and Stavo-Debauge 2002). Various
anti-racist organizations13 have acknowledged that it is necessary to
“un-mix” the official category of “French” in order to document and
more effectively combat racialized discrimination, despite state and
public resistance to this prospect.14 It is critical to emphasize, all the
same, that documenting ethnic origins (implying “race”) is consid-
ered discriminatory according to the French constitution, and cut-
ting against those universalist principles inhering in the construct of
a citizen-individual attached to a nation-state. Moreover, such clas-
sifications are viewed through perceptions shaped during the Vichy
regime and still conjure up dreaded memories and images of ethnic
labeling in France during the Nazi era.
And yet, anti-racist groups, both statist and independent of the
state,15 continue to show that racialized discrimination manifests it-
self in the most basic social structures, including employment, hous-
ing, education, social services, the criminal justice system, and rela-
tions with the police. While I examine these issues vis-à-vis the lived
experiences of my participants, such realities are, in effect, what con-
stitute social race as a persistent entity, despite the discrediting of bi-
ological “race” and the decoding of the human genome. In his study
of international race politics, sociologist Michael Banton reminds us
of the danger of reproducing through connotation the very thing
one seeks to dismantle: “the international anti-racist movement has
never known quite what to do about the ways in which the lan-
guage of race can reinforce the identification of biological and social
difference” (2002, 3). And yet, as sociologist Loïc Wacquant rightly
states when comparing these young people to similar “suitable ene-
mies” in the United States, “foreigners and quasi-foreigners would
be the ‘blacks’ of Europe” (1999b, 216).
Appearances, however, are deceiving, and reality is quite an-
other matter. To ascribe a black/white paradigm to the French con-
Introduction 9
text or frame human relations in such neat terms is to err. Although

extremely powerful, such reasoning applies only problematically to
these youths, whose origins lie on the continent of Africa, where his-
torical migration, invasion, partition, and mixing—indeed, geopoli-
tics—disrupt attempts to identify them in neat black/white terms,
despite popular discourse. To uncritically view Arabs as “white” (as
do the U.S. census and popular understandings) and sub-Saharan
Africans as “black,” or to desire (s)kinship with people on the basis of
their physical appearance or “looks” (as people commonly do who
are conditioned by black/white paradigms) is equally to err. It fur-
ther leaves little room for people to self-understand outside narrow
categories reified into representations of culture. The point is that
the supposed markers of “race” can be erroneous indicators of ethnic
and national origins, and do not signify culture. After all, people
who self-understand as African or Arab have a variety of complex-
ions and features. More to the point, being perceived as African or
Arab in French society has never carried the same advantages as be-
ing perceived as French, which signifies European ancestry and, in-
creasingly, “whiteness.” The formation and claiming of a self-repre-
sentation articulated as French or “French of ‘x’ origin” by youth of
color and immigration become, then, a signpost in France. It an-
nounces what may be a transformation in the official classification
system, should these youths continue to be distinguished, and dis-
tinguish themselves, from the français-français (“French-French,” the
supposedly unequivocal or “old stock” French).
“National Identity” and Nationality:

Symbolic Struggles over Representation
In France, the politics of identity exist within a state of tension

between an ideology of national unity and a reality of ethnic diver-
sity. At the nexus of this tension lie stigmatized youths of color as-
similated toward the “national identity.” Culture, those historically
accumulated and socially formed, embodied, and transmitted ways of
being and knowing, is a very real stake in this context, in which the
authority to name or constitute who is French (and who is not) in an
exclusionary fashion contributes to perceiving the “national identity”
as being reserved for a select(ed) group. Understood in this manner,
“national identity” becomes a social fact and a highly coveted form of
symbolic capital having the quality of nobility. That is, it is morphed
into an entity within French society that legitimizes belonging upon
its acknowledgment, or disqualification when breached:
In the symbolic struggle for the production of common sense or, more pre-
cisely, for the monopoly over legitmate naming, agents put into action the
symbolic capital that they have acquired in previous struggles and which
may be juridically guaranteed. Thus titles of nobility [like nationality] rep-
resent true titles of symbolic property which give one a right to share in
the profits of recognition (Bourdieu 1990a, 134).
Constituting a nation-state demands that it be recognized as such

by society, and the nation-state is consecrated through de jure titles
designating a “nationality.” It demands, too, a corresponding na-
tional representation attached to entities such as an official language
and culture, vague notions of common descent, “ambiguous identi-
ties” (to borrow from scholar Étienne Balibar), and mechanisms for
incorporating diversity (Noiriel 1992; Balibar and Wallerstein 1991;
Thiesse 1999). Challenges to the national representation have im-
portant social and political implications for the national educational
system in France, whose expressed goal is to reproduce and transmit
a unitary, irreducible “common culture” to which all young people
are expected to conform in the interest of the nation.
French “national identity” and nationality are products of the
revolution and the forging of the nation-state. Through colonialism
to the period of economic euphoria known as the trente glorieuses
(thirty glorious [years], 1945–1974) to the present, these entities
have remained central to political debates and struggles over com-
plex issues and problems, such as immigration, social exclusion, and
racism. The social movements of the 1970s and 1980s were spear-
headed by youths of immigrant origin who rallied to bring attention
to these concerns, while militating to have citizenship rights ac-
corded to long-term immigrant residents in France (Wihtol de Wen-
den 1999; Wihtol de Wenden and Leveau 2001). Though they failed
in their efforts, this debate periodically reemerges in local elec-
tions.16 More critically, these multiethnic movements highlighted
the contradictory principles embedded in the concepts of French
“national identity,” nationality, and citizenship, which manifestly
hinged on having and asserting rights attached to a representation
from which youth of immigration and of color were excluded. In
other words, a principal aim of such movements was to validate a
new type of French citizen, a product not of one culture but of mul-
tiple cultures who insisted on le droit à la différence (the right to dif-
ference) without being assigned different rights. Moreover, since
belief in a French “national identity” and national culture have be-
come a concern of politics and public opinion, the symbolic strate-
gies of these youths were an attempt to disrupt a singular notion of
Introduction 11
Frenchness by intentionally seizing a self-representation that devi-

ated from this popular idea. It should also not be overlooked that, as
Tahar Ben Jelloun rightly asserts, “Among certain Maghrebins, no-
tably the Algerians, becoming French is considered . . . a type of
treason” (1984, 142), an assertion also articulated by West Africans
that shapes and informs how these youths self-understand (Poiret
1996; Quiminal et al. 1997; Diawara 2003).
The symbolic power that inheres in the authority to determine
what constitutes a “national identity” necessarily expresses itself
at both macro and micro levels of French society, and is enforced
by the state through its National Codes. As important as the belief
in this representation is, what has become more critical is the need
to be documented and to have French nationality: symbolic capital
at work. In 1986, for example, legislation was enacted that placed
greater emphasis on defining French nationality and a “national
identity,” which historically hinged on the socialization of potential
nationals through institutions such as the schools. In France, as po-
litical scientist Patrick Weil argues, “One’s bond to the nation no
longer results from a personal allegiance to the King, but rather from
having been educated in French society, and from one’s past resi-
dence.” He further states that “Republican law bases nationality on
socialization more than on ethnic background or on a voluntary or
contractual act, [and] on the acquisition of social codes more than
on origin and place of birth” (1997, 19–20). So important was the
belief in the socialization process that it was determined that birth on
French soil, rather than only blood descent (as was the case in such
countries as Germany), would determine nationality in France. In
his analysis, Weil clearly outlines the important history of immigra-
tion and naturalization legislation in the country, from the Constitu-
tion of 1791 through the Fifth Republic, in order to demonstrate
how these laws set the tone for contemporary reforms to naturaliza-
tion legislation.
Notable among these reforms were the 1993 Méhaignerie and
the infamous Pasqua laws. Together, they rendered it more difficult
for children of foreign-born immigrants from undesired countries to
acquire French nationality, and they created an inhospitable climate
for their parents by making it more difficult to enter the country,
unite families, and attain residency. These measures also sanctioned
random ID checks of those perceived as “immigrants,” treating peo-
ple as criminals because of their appearance, because they were
seen as “immigrants,” even if they were not. One particularly con-
tested aspect of these laws was their requirement that the children
of immigrants, who are predominantly of African and Asian ori-

gins, establish their nationality by formally expressing a desire to
be French, making a declaration of intent between the ages of six-
teen and twenty-one. Although the 1993 law was overturned in
1998, it nonetheless wreaked havoc in the lives of youths who were
forced to live in a nebulous, liminal space in the only country that
many knew and called home until reaching their majority.17 Fur-
ther, requests for nationality could be denied if a person had a crim-
inal record, which is not unlikely among those outer-city youths
who are also engaged in alternative economies, and some have
been deported to their parents’ home countries. Then there are the
sad cases of youths who believe they already are nationals simply
because they have no memories of a life outside of France. In this
book, I highlight cases that illustrate the lived consequences of this
legislation, whose current incarnation is unsurprisingly viewed with
suspicion and contempt by people from stigmatized groups seeking
naturalization. Picking up on this point, Weil argues that one critical
reason for requiring young people to demonstrate their desire for
French nationality was to avoid the recurring problem of their not
knowing whether they were actually nationals of the country. Yet
in actuality, as Weil argues, by requiring youths of this generation to
make such a declaration, France was asking more of them than it
did of former immigrants of European origins, thereby “breaking
with the egalitarian and universal practice upon which [the coun-
try] is founded” (quoted in Venel 1999, 103). Much of the confu-
sion derives from the multiple changes in the naturalization laws
and the lack of informed personnel to explain these changes to a
public that is equally ill-informed.
These destabilizing laws, coupled with existing educational pol-
icy that proscribes the wearing of “conspicuous” religious symbols in
the schools—and potentially in other public arenas, such as hospi-
tals—are shaping how youths of immigrant origin self-understand in
contemporary France. In this context marked by high unemploy-
ment, feelings of frustration, and generalized disenchantment, the
politicization of a “French national identity” renders it a scarce com-
modity to which employment, even in those jobs once shunned by
the français-français, is attached. As Tahar Ben Jelloun affirms, “peo-
ple are afraid of no longer corresponding to the image they have of
themselves” (1984, 24), afraid—perhaps—of seeing turned against
them the violence that a colonial past and current cruel social pat-
terns have unleashed. While calling oneself rebeu (Arab) or kebla or
renoi (Black or Noir), terms common in popular youth culture, can
Introduction 13
be interpreted as a form of resistance against disparaging representa-

tions, calling oneself French (and believing it) appropriates the rights
attached to both citizenship (e.g., the right to vote) and nationality
(e.g., the right to be and work in France, in security) in both mater-
ial and symbolic ways. Ironically, despite the multiple barriers that
they confront, these young people (like others of their generation)
exhibit practices and opinions traditionally associated with a French
“national identity.” After all, they are products of one common insti-
tution that begins at the formative age of two or three in France: na-
tional education. On the one hand, the French school teaches them
that they are French through its ideology of a “common culture” in a
system whose gatekeepers are hostile to multiculturalism and
change.18 On the other hand, young people are reared in segregated
neighborhoods and schools that clearly belie those very teachings.
The assertions by France’s “suitable enemies” that they are
French, and that the country they live in is their country, are a clear
expression of symbolic power, to borrow a concept from Pierre
Bourdieu (1990b), that is, practices aimed at preserving or trans-
forming social reality by shaping its representations in ways that can
perpetuate the status quo. Their assertions become symbolic vio-
lence (i.e., more disguised, subtle forms of violence exercised with
complicity) when they derive from “the categories of perception that
the world imposes” (but whose imposition is not perceived) (Bour-
dieu 1990b, 141). Although “national identities” are reified social
fictions indicative of a legitimized domination à la Weber, their sym-
bolic force resides in the cultural distinctions believed to be held by a
powerful and privileged few. When constructed as a precious and
limited commodity allowing exclusive access, these representations
become all the more valuable, desirable, and contested. Because they
are largely unquestioned in the contexts where they are imposed
(the schools and society) these classifications, expressed as “identi-
ties,” appear universal, or simply seem natural to the general public,
including these youths. Again, therein lies the violence. It becomes,
therefore, not only interesting but critical to connect identity politics
with social institutions in order to demonstrate more broadly how
those very politics—structured by those institutions—contribute to
maintaining a status quo, despite resistance to them.
Beyond “Identity” to Identity Politics
What terms can be used to denote and analyze how people self-
understand without violating a fundamental tenet of social science:
never use one social fact to analyze another (Durkheim 1993)? The
use of the term “identity” exemplifies this thorny problem in being
derived from commonsense discourses that make the existence of
an “identity,” national or otherwise, possible. In this analysis, I grap-
ple with just this problem in framing my work in terms of identity
politics, which implies using concepts, themes, and interests that are
conditioned by institutional contexts and lay understandings. Yet, in
an attempt to name such phenomena, one set of connotations is ul-
timately replaced by another, and the signifiers and concepts obfus-
cate as much as they clarify. This appears to be the case with the
term “identity,” as opposed to other signifiers such as “self-identifi-
cation.” As social scientists Rogers Brubaker and Frederick Cooper
argue,
The problem is that “nation,” “race,” and “identity” are used analytically a
good deal of the time more or less as they are used in practice, in an im-
plicitly or explicitly reifying manner, in a manner that implies or asserts
that “nations,” “races,” and “identities” “exist” and that people “have” a
“nationality,” a “race,” an “identity.” (2000, 6)
These social scientists zero in on the ambiguity attached to the lan-

guage of “identity,” which is expected to serve as both a “category of
social and political practice” and a “category of social and political
analysis” (2000, 2). In other words, this single term is expected to ac-
commodate so many purposes that it ultimately becomes diluted,
thus meaningless.
While one can find truth in these arguments, one must also
question a fundamental issue at the heart of this debate. That is, in so
ardently attempting to name the rose, are we overlooking the real
work of analyzing the phenomena that account for the rose’s exis-
tence, and, more important, its acceptance as social reality? What is
at issue is the necessity for epistemological clarity and the necessity
to “deconstruct the notion of identity” in order to carry out the very
real work of refuting “myths of insularity,” cultural singularity, and
the authenticity of a particular group (Benoist 1977, 16). This point
was central in discussions of these themes in Claude Lévi-Strauss’s
seminar on identity at the Collège de France in Paris in 1974–1975
(Lévi-Strauss 1977). In attempting to analyze how the “other” is
constituted (with the realization that one is always someone else’s
other), one must account for both the subjective and objective di-
mensions of the dynamic that results in the formation of the so-
ciopolitical self. In the debate rightly foregrounded by Brubaker and
Cooper, however, is the focus on the terminology obscuring other
Introduction 15
important issues? Such issues would include understanding how the

dialectic of identification operates within struggles over cultural le-
gitimacy between peoples and groups through the act of assigning
oneself and one’s “other” to socially distinct categories. The exami-
nation of others’ social worlds necessarily compels the scholar to
practice a level of epistemological vigilance that most lay people,
such as those in the media, can and do ignore. However, the scholar
must perforce attempt to break from preconceived ideas, and espe-
cially from the reification of culture expressed as an “identity.” This
is not easy.
Fundamentally, I examine the sociopolitical construction of self:
that is, what Craig Calhoun terms “the politics of identity” (1994).
This process of person formation is complex, as it involves ideologi-
cal descriptors (e.g., French, immigrant, or Muslim, and even girl)
that are recast in terms of a prescribed culture that is presumed to
connote a common heritage and shared modes of thought, values,
dispositions, and even, perhaps, physical appearances. As Calhoun
compellingly argues, the politics of identity “involve[s] refusing, di-
minishing, or displacing identities others wish to recognize in indi-
viduals . . . politics either starting from or aiming at claimed identities
of protagonists” (19, 21). However, this process is not the result
merely of individual will; it is an “implicit recognition of a range of
authoritative others [based on] the unquestioned acceptance of the
apparent order of social categories,” as Calhoun argues further (11).
Thus, affirming oneself as French carries with it a tacit understand-
ing that there is power attached to this classification, a power that, in
a stratified France, is transformed into rights and economic opportu-
nities. By the same token, to be a demonized Muslim of non-Euro-
pean origins and aver that one is French is to transcend the narrow
representation of the “authoritative other” while consciously or un-
consciously appropriating the categories of dominance and distinc-
tion that command recognition within French society. The equation
of “Muslim of non-European origins” with “French” also defies the
simplicity of these categories, and therein lies the complication. An
important aspect of “identity” struggles, for those people seeking to
preserve a given representation, is the capacity to maintain author-
ity by publicly stigmatizing an undesirable population, as the pre-
vailing U.S. and European trope of the immigrant as invader, job
stealer, and leech on the public funds effectively shows. The effi-
ciency of such a maneuver expresses itself in the ease with which
such amalgams come to manipulate public opinion such that the
stigmatized become the sole authors of their stigmatization.
The concept of identity politics, as I employ it, accurately applies

in this context simply because it draws attention to the authority,
and thereby complicity and interests, aimed at formalizing and nor-
malizing a social fact called an “identity.” And yet the waters of iden-
tity politics are never quite as clear as one would wish, as the polem-
ical voice of bell hooks reminds us:
a totalizing critique of “subjectivity, essence, identity” can seem very threat-

ening to marginalized groups, for whom it has been an active gesture of
political resistance to name one’s identity as part of a struggle to challenge
domination. (1994, 78)
Challenging domination through naming “one’s identity” is the

essence of a dialectic of identification, a dance involving the naming
and renaming of self in response to an “other.” hooks’s observation
applies tellingly to the French context and those young people who
are averring that they are French by challenging (knowingly and
unknowingly) the fundamental terms of inclusion in their econom-
ically and socially troubled homeland. Protesters against the cur-
rent law banning religious symbols in schools drive home this
point. Headscarf-wearing protesters draped in the French flag,
marching down the streets and singing the Marseillaise (the French
national anthem once claimed by the extreme right), defiantly man-
ifest the contested image inscribed on their signs: Françaises, Musul-
manes (Frenchwomen, Muslim women). If it were not an issue,
there would be no need to proclaim it. On one level, such assertions
are forms of resistance to rejection and exclusion that speak to these
women’s desire, if not demand, to be recognized and accorded the
same dignity as any other French person. On another, their claims
and assertions further reify as much as they describe a social pre-
scription of a “national identity” whose symbolic force resides in its
regenerated and unanalyzed use.
Thinking Globally and Seeing Locally:

Why Care about France?
In many apparent and not so apparent ways, these young people

resemble many teenagers that one could readily encounter in one’s
communities, classes, or homes, or simply on the streets. This “come-
along generation,” as I once heard the acclaimed Haitian novelist
and scholar Edwidge Dandicat describe the children of immigrants
during a conference in Paris, did not choose their exile. Although
Introduction 17
Dandicat was referring to young people who accompanied their par-

ents to foreign, sometimes hostile lands, I found that this statement
harbors some truth for urban youth of color in France. That is, they
did not choose France per se, but France is often the only country that
they know well, the one that they call home. A certain recognizable
familiarity resonates in their experiences and connects their lived re-
alities to those of similarly marginalized young people in the African
Diaspora who face intergenerational, socioeconomic exclusion that
is furthered by their schooling. To enter into their world and bear
witness to their struggles (and successes) is a way of understanding
the interconnections between local and global contexts, indeed be-
tween the periphery and the metropolis. What better exemplifies
this point than educational systems wherein the children of immi-
grants and other unpopular groups find themselves at odds with
people and policies that oppose their ways of being, which are not
truly understood nor particularly valued? Because often precious lit-
tle is known about the complex backgrounds of such young people
or what is expected of them socially and culturally (and the forces
guiding those expectations), it becomes all the more critical for the
general public to learn more about their actual experiences, from
their perspectives.
Another important point to keep in mind is that the educational
system can work remarkably well in France, as it can elsewhere.
However, the people for whom it works most poorly are the ones
with the least power to counter its devastating and long-term effects.
And, as elsewhere, there are controversial policies in France that fur-
ther complicate how young people are received and schooled in
French society. Among them are residential and educational segrega-
tion, affirmative action, high-stakes testing, academic tracking, and
selection biases in school choice, measures derived from broader po-
litical forces operating at the state level. Moreover, the very real ef-
fect of many of these policies is that the school becomes the surest
means of reproducing social inequality. While social reproduction
theories most associated with Pierre Bourdieu have been heavily
criticized for being overly mechanistic, denying resistance, and as-
serting a preexisting, unbreakable social order, inequalities are re-
produced all the same through educational structures. The result is
that the most vulnerable members of society are further subordi-
nated by these forces, that is, the young who inherit their parents’
socioeconomic precariousness and disadvantage. And yet they do re-
sist those forces, as Bourdieu argues in responding to those criticisms:
I do not see how relations of domination, whether material or symbolic,

could possibly operate without implying, activating resistance. The domi-
nated, in any social universe, can always exert a certain force, inasmuch as be-
longing to a field means by definition that one is capable of producing ef-
fects in it. (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1992, 80)
Rather than being mechanistic, the process is dramatically dy-

namic, since people of and in social structures of power, privilege,
and prejudice seek to both preserve and transform their positions
within those structures. My point here is that social relations—in-
deed acts of resistance and agency themselves—cannot be abstracted
or disconnected from the historical, ideological, and institutional
context in which they are embedded and which they also shape.
Further, as I will show, the young people in my study exercise
resistance and agency in multiple ways, which include defying patri-
archal expectations or battling to remain in coveted non-vocational
studies and ability tracks, at any cost, against the verdicts of their
communities and schools that attempt to neutralize such acts of de-
fiance. These efforts can, however, wind up producing the opposite
effect. That is, rather than emancipating them, these actions can also
further entrench these young people in their conditions of poverty
and marginalization, the very things they are intended to combat.
Secular national education is the centerpiece in these complexities,
whose ideological force serves to assimilate youths in ways that are
not unlike the mission of the common schools formerly advocated in
the United States (Tyack 1974). The very real difference, however, is
that the French model remains largely intact, and the idea of a “com-
mon culture,” transmitted through the schools, is not the loaded is-
sue that it is in places such as the United States. In fact, issues of cul-
tural literacy and multiculturalism are only beginning to emerge as
curricular questions with the growing presence of young people of
non-European origins in French schools. Coupled with these fac-
tors are antagonisms between various racialized groups (i.e., Afro-
French, Euro-French, and migrants of differing national origins)
who share common neighborhoods that are marked by long-term
economic misery. During this period in which the volatile discourse
of nationalism perpetuates notions of French purity, popular myths
concerning a French “national identity” become especially appealing
to working-class français-français who have been conditioned to see
their non-European neighbors as simply beneath them (Garcia,
Poupeau, and Proteau 1998). Consequently, so-called immigrants
become identified in political and popular discourses as the cause of
personal economic lack, if not of all the general woes of the country
Introduction 19
(Miles 1982; Small 1994; Wieviorka 1995; Taguieff and Tribalat 1998).
These woes become defined in terms of racialist ideologies, them-
selves recast as nationalistic interests, and used against those per-
ceived as usurping scarce resources, such as housing, jobs, social ser-
vices, and even the “national identity.” The perspectives of France’s
“suitable enemies” converge, then, at the intersection of local and
global contexts with other racialized young people defined as social
problems. Further, their cases force us to rethink some pertinent so-
cial questions in this new millennium, in which we walk on shifting
sands of belonging and are forced to ask ourselves less who we are
and more how we are perceived.
Reflections on Paris and the Craft of

Fieldwork in a Parisian Outer City
Urban cities are complex by definition. Paris is complex in its

own way. In the summer of 1995, I began fieldwork in the City of
Light, which was reeling from the worst urban violence of that
decade, attacks for which France’s Muslim population, then more
than three million, was collectively held responsible for the actions
of a few. Having already experienced the panic and fury wrought by
the bombings in 1986, I found a certain irony in returning to Paris at
a time when the city was rocked once again, this time by a series of
bombs planted in commuter trains.19 While a young man of Algerian
origin, Khaled Kelkal, was blamed and subsequently martyred once
the media aired images of him being shot and killed by the police
during a botched arrest attempt, those tragedies tainted all Muslims
in their wake (as have more recent ones). My participants, their
families, and their friends were collectively tried in the courts of
public opinion for crimes in which they were not involved and over
which they had no control. Their visible appearance, or as they say,
their tête, made them “suitable enemies” for a public seeking revenge
for these acts of violence, a French public that appeared not to com-
prehend why, yet again, they had been targeted by those identified
as “Islamic fundamentalists.” And while many Muslim groups and
individuals denounced these bombings as inhumane and cowardly,
some even expressing an enormous sense of shame over such vio-
lence, this shame was second only to the fear and hatred that these
acts would unleash in a country where Muslims were already on
such tenuous ground. France and its Muslim communities are joined
at the hip by a long, often violent relationship, conditioned by colo-
nialism and war, but public rage at the time of those attacks (assisted
by irresponsible media imagery) rendered it difficult to abstract indi-

vidual innocence in a climate where guilt was easily assigned to
Muslims in general:
After these bombings, we were all suspects . . . If you come through an air-
port or a train station, all eyes are on you. People are picked up according
to their complexion or because they have frizzy hair. (quoted in the Inter-
national Herald Tribune, September 8, 1995)
World events, as they stand, have exposed these old wounds,

resurrected submerged bigotries and hate, and aroused mistrust on
all sides. And suspicion continues to be the order of the day, espe-
cially of anyone making inquiries about the experiences of Muslims
and Muslim youths in France. Every category to which researchers
are assigned comes into play in contexts such as these. My appear-
ance and nationality made me suspect, as much as did my asking
questions or having views that deviated from the public’s outrage
over the suffering brought about by attacks that touched so many.
Indeed, it is often overlooked that Muslims were also victims of
these attacks.
When I entered this field of lived tragedies, other relevant events
were also unfolding, including the violent expulsion of African fam-
ilies (including babies) from the country (reminiscent of Interior
Minister Charles Pasqua’s deportation of more than a hundred Mal-
ian immigrants, shackled hand and foot, in 1987).20 Educational pol-
icy proscribing “proselytizing” symbols of religious affiliation was
also instituted in 1995, which portended current legislation designed
to do the same thing. And as if that were not enough, matters inten-
sified when France was hit by extensive public transportation strikes
that paralyzed the city for a record number of months. I found my-
self walking, hitching, and pondering inventive ways to get to my re-
search sites, as frequent metro strikes and slowdowns became part of
the experience of living in Paris. Shortly thereafter, in scenes remi-
niscent of May 68, came the massive protests by university students
against educational inequalities. Demonstrations were not often
peaceful, and confrontations with the police sometimes erupted into
physical violence engulfing anyone in its path. These themes would
reemerge during large-scale demonstrations and strikes involving all
sectors of national education beginning in 1998, which continue and
will continue as long as the systemic causes of inequality go unad-
dressed. In short, it was the worst and the best of times to be in Paris,
and the best and the worst of times to explore the lives of Muslim
girls in the outer cities.
Introduction 21
Over the years, I would come to know this “other France” quite
well, thanks to the forces of serendipity that helped me gain access.
Researchers often describe gaining entry to their site as one of the
main difficulties they face in fieldwork. For me, gaining access was
the result of having quickly glanced at a dissertation lying on the
desk of one of my former professors (Bennetta Jules Rosette) during
a visit. Almost nonchalantly this professor added, “Marie-Ange is a
teacher in Paris.” Well, that was like a sweet melody to my ears, as I
was a bit anxious about finding reliable contacts affiliated with the
public school system who might know or have Muslim students. I
gladly accepted Marie-Ange’s address and subsequently wrote her a
letter detailing my project, along with a brief outline of my profes-
sional and personal background. Shortly thereafter, I received a
small white envelope in the mail with the notation par avion written
upon it, indicating that it was from France, and more precisely from
Marie-Ange. I immediately exhaled a huge sigh of relief, as one
seemingly formidable problem dissipated with her invitation to con-
tact her once I had arrived in Paris.
When Marie-Ange and I finally met, we almost immediately dis-
covered a type of sisterhood, though we hailed from very different
parts of the world—she from the Antilles and I from a small town in
northern Ohio. Though the places we called home felt lightyears
apart, we were, nonetheless, walking expressions of the African Di-
aspora. Marie-Ange often mused that with my hair in braids I could
“pass” for any number of people of African origins living in Paris,
especially since I speak French. In fact, her reflections were also
warnings, because my looks and that very fluency made me subject
to the same treatment that non-European-looking people suffer in
France. Manthia Diawara poignantly documents this treatment us-
ing “reverse anthropology,” a twist on colonial models that consti-
tutes Europeans and European cities as objects and fields of study to
be investigated by Africans, as opposed to the other way around. Di-
awara’s aim is to examine the “silences of the Parisians about the
brutality against African immigrants [who] traveled to France to find
work, [and] . . . find only shame and humiliation at the hands of the
French police” (2003, 43). Diawara has had such experiences him-
self in both the U.S. and France. He argues further from personal and
observed experiences: “Every encounter with a CRS policeman, an
immigration officer, a racist cabdriver or café waiter, or patronizing
French intellectual at a reception or a dinner sends me back to my
poem ‘The Stranger,’” a poem about the rejection and hostilities ex-
perienced by African immigrants in France (153).
This ugliness manifested itself to me in two typical ways—denial

of housing and racialized profiling. At times, I and friends of African
origin were selectively made to show our tickets on commuter trains,
or were followed in supermarkets or department stores by Black
men (who are increasingly employed as security guards and police
officers in the belief that they can manage and control other African-
derived people). And then there are those memorable occasions
when we were stopped dead in our tracks with demands for our pa-
pers, when we were doing nothing more than, like anyone else, be-
ing on the streets of Paris, in the metros, or in a taxi (where Diawara
was also accosted). Ironically, Paris, which so many expatriate and
exiled Black Americans from the nineteenth century to the present
have perceived as a haven from U.S. racism, has rarely been a safe
and liberating sanctuary for the descendants of those enslaved and
colonized by France (Gondola 2004). To be sure, U.S. race terror, its
structural manifestations, and the threat of physical violence—
lynchings, random beatings, and rape—fueled emigration to Paris
during the pre–Civil Rights era. Moreover, migration narratives im-
bued with tales of an all-embracing Parisian society where neither
Jim nor Jacques Crow resided were compelling, and played decisive
roles in the formation of an image of a color-blind France that con-
tinues to pull U.S. Blacks to the City of Light (Robeson 1936; Drake
1982; Irele 1981/1991; Fabre 1993; Stovall 1996; Wright 2003). Al-
though Black internationalists worked to dispel this notion from the
turn of the century through the 1960s (for example, René Maran,
Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté, Claude McKay, Alioune Diop, W. E. B. Du
Bois, Mercer Cook, James Baldwin, and William Gardner Smith),
Paris has been and remains significant to African Americans pre-
cisely because of that myth. More importantly, Paris has been an es-
sential meeting ground, a space for Black cosmopolitanism, intellec-
tualism, and border crossings seemingly available nowhere else,
despite the reality of inimical treatment of people of African origin
(Jules-Rosette 1998; Julien 2000; Edwards 2003). And while Black
Americans were once shielded from this treatment by their national-
ity or by speaking English or French with an American accent, dis-
tinguishing themselves from the Afro-French (or Black French),
these resources offer little protection today. Fake passports are easily
obtained, and African Americans are not the only Blacks with Amer-
ican passports. Neither are we the only speakers of English in this di-
aspora city where transcultural cross-fertilizations make it difficult to
know who is who, and from which part of the diaspora people hail.
Introduction 23
Because I am both a Black woman and a researcher, my desire to

document what I feel to be an important shift in identity and cul-
tural politics in France also exposed me to much of the same dis-
crimination and antagonism confronted by people of African origin
in Paris. Yet, with that said, I cannot stress enough that I also had a
relative freedom of mobility, thanks to identification cards showing
my affiliation to some of the more prestigious universities in Paris. I
also had the aegis of my nationality, although it was not always an
asset in doing fieldwork of this nature, particularly when anti-U.S.
sentiment was running high or when I faced anti-black discrimina-
tion and hostilities from people ranging from the neighborhood
baker to personnel at the American Embassy, who never immedi-
ately took me to be American. Otherwise, I was a “being perceived”
from any number of African countries or the Caribbean, or as some-
one trying to “pass” as a Black American, subject again to the same
disregard and disdain. And while I have spent a number of years
learning French and have taken pride in masking my U.S. accent,
such diligence came with unanticipated costs. That is, in concealing
that notorious linguistic marker, I also exposed myself to the uglier
side of human relations in urban France. However, what was a hard-
ship for me personally was, interestingly, an asset for me as a re-
searcher. Living the experience of racism necessarily sensitized me to
the hostilities and incivilities typically reserved for those with whom
I’m assigned (s)kinship relations and with whom I desire greater
kinship. But certainly my experiences pale in comparison to docu-
mented examples of outright violence experienced by people of
African origin and other “suitable enemies” in France. Through their
eyes and my own experiences, Paris is both appalling and sublime,
like a number of diaspora cities. It is perhaps for those reasons that I
am continually drawn toward the complexities of these places, de-
spite the hostile reception I may receive, a reception predicated on
the prevailing despised categories of the day, be they defined by
class, “race,” color, gender, nationality, or national origins.
In negotiating those difficulties and complexities of space and
place, I approached this work from an interdisciplinary perspective.
I see social reality as being structured by sociohistorical forces and
constitutive of systems of relations (both symbolic and material) that
have been shaped by human activity on social institutions. This per-
spective invites a type of relational thinking about research design
and methods in both theory and practice. That is to say, it encour-
ages the researcher to view the whole of her project reflexively, un-
derstanding that her tools, her self, and her set of propositions are
interlinked in the crafting of her object of study. Within this context
my appearance, color, hairstyle, presumed nationality and religion,
gender, situated knowledge, and methods were all interconnected, a
fact often revealed to me during fieldwork. To illustrate this point, as
a non-Muslim, U.S.-born and -reared Black woman, a scholar, and a
descendant of African captives enslaved in the United States (as op-
posed to other parts of the African Diaspora), I am the product of
multiple systems of education, some more formal than others. Every
aspect of my being became, therefore, a non-neutral, active element
in each phase of my research, which continually surfaced as a factor
in its negotiation. For example, I was frequently taken for a Muslim,
because of my topic and perceptions of what a “Muslim” presumably
looked like. In fact, it was pointed out to me that the headbands I
wear, which cover the front of my hair, suggested as much, and when
I dined out, waiters often warned me when a dish I had ordered con-
tained pork. Alternatively, I was considered a living example of tele-
vised American culture (given my nationality), and sometimes (less
incredible these days) either a CIA agent or an inspector from the
school district (since I was taking notes and making observations in
troubled classrooms and schools). Clearly, the role of the researcher
is neither neutral nor ideologically free. And, as I have learned, re-
searchers are also research tools operating under assumptions and
limitations that inhere in the process of doing fieldwork, particularly
in a foreign country. For me, it was sometimes difficult to observe in-
teractions between different groups and individuals without imme-
diately attributing them to the black/white schism that typically
frames racialized relations in the U.S. Though certain American and
French situations and events appeared identical on the surface—for
example, public housing in France vis-à-vis the U.S.A.—clear dis-
tinctions emerged between them on a deeper reading, as I elucidate
in this book. Although startling similarities exist, it is critical to move
beyond surface appearances, and this was one of the many struggles
I faced in doing fieldwork in the French outer cities.
Methods
This study is as much about my journey, my observations, and

my participation in a familiar yet foreign country as it is about the
Muslim girls and numerous others who shared their lives and sto-
ries. This has been a long, exciting, yet often very painful multiyear
adventure involving fieldwork and other methods of data genera-
Introduction 25
tion (e.g., ethnographic observations, interviews, surveys, and jour-

nals) put to the test in exploring this “other France.” I began this
study in the fall of 1995 and continued into the following summer. I
returned in December 1997, in the 1998–1999 and 2000–2001 aca-
demic years, and during the summers of 2001 and 2003. In February
2004, I returned to spend five months in the neighborhoods high-
lighted in this study, to record any further transformations and de-
velopments, especially in light of world events in which Muslims
held, once again, center stage. This has allowed me to situate and re-
situate my findings within that context.
My primary research sites were a middle school, a multitrack,
general studies high school, and a vocational school, all located just
outside Paris in Pantin, a borough of the economically depressed dé-
partement of Seine-Saint-Denis. I attended the same classes my par-
ticipants did and participated in their curricular and extra-curricular
activities, ranging from class discussions to philanthropic pursuits.
Through guided tours of the sprawling public housing complex, la
cité des Courtillières, where the majority of my participants live, and
through my volunteering in events in this neighborhood, my access
and presence became “normalized.” This process seemed to be aided
by my origins and “looks,” since most of the local population ap-
peared to be of African descent.
I was initially introduced to my participants by Marie-Ange, who
was a teacher at the middle school. She invited me to classes whose
student populations, as I learned from student self-introductions,
were entirely of North and West African origin. She also introduced
me to one of her former students, Aïcha, who was attending the
general studies high school I discuss in chapter 4. After I had estab-
lished trust and rapport with Marie-Ange and Aïcha, and with their
assistance, my contacts snowballed at all sites. In Marie-Ange’s mid-
dle school class, I focused on four girls (Habiba, Rima, Fatou, and
Su’ad) whose willingness to participate, coupled with the consent of
school officials and their parents, made them ideal for this study. I
remained in contact with these girls through written correspon-
dence after my return to the U.S. in 1996 and again in 1997, and
when I came back to France during the academic year 1998–1999,
they agreed to continue working with me, giving a measure of con-
tinuity to the study. In this analysis, I focus on fourteen youths, who
form a cross section of the Muslim students whom I have met during
the course of my fieldwork. However, since 2000, I have remained
in close contact with only those five students, Aïcha, Habiba, Rima,
Fatou, and Su’ad, whose growth and coming of age I have witnessed.
In addition to informal and formal interviews with them, I for-

mally interviewed members of their families when possible, educa-
tors and staff at their high schools, members of community advocacy
associations, and just about anyone else who was willing to talk with
the américaine, as I came to be generally known. Though these meth-
ods yielded a wealth of data, I also wanted to find a way to document
students’ private moments, outside of our immediate interactions, in
order to access their thoughts and activities that were eclipsed dur-
ing observations and interviews. Providing the girls with personal
journals addressed this concern and served multiple purposes be-
yond their intended use. For example, not only did I obtain written
excerpts of their writing styles, I additionally had examples of their
language varieties, including home, peer, and national languages,
which certain young people unconsciously conflate. Through these
journals, I became privy to more reflective critiques of difficult issues
raised during interviews or noted during observations. In order to
probe more deeply into their practices and views, I additionally at-
tached a series of questions to the inside cover of each journal, along
with excerpts from books, blind copies from previous interviews,
and newspaper articles that spoke to concerns of a more personal
nature. In many cases, these stimuli allowed students to discuss sen-
sitive topics about which they felt shame or that they were reluctant
to broach during a recorded interview, such as polygamy, excision,
seclusion, lying, or veiling requirements. Moreover, these texts served
to lower their affective filter once they realized that I was already
aware of these issues and that someone else had revealed practices
that could threaten the positive self-image that they initially sought
to convey.
Equally instructive were data from students’ cumulative files at
their schools, which contained valuable socioeconomic and family
information, grades, birth certificates, and medical histories. For ex-
ample, certain students had turbulent home environments that the
schools documented together with disciplinary problems. One strik-
ing example is a participant I call Anita, who was removed from an
abusive family environment with the help of the school’s social ser-
vices representative. Another example is Amina, whose father peri-
odically threw away her books and class notes during the school
year because he believed that she had received enough schooling.
Using data constructed through these methods, I was able to cor-
roborate responses and compare them with answers to a multiple-
question survey that I developed and distributed to nearly one hun-
dred students.21 This tool proved highly useful in eliciting succinct
Introduction 27
information from participants about their background, self-under-

standings, and interests. More importantly, I was able to verify par-
ticipants’ nationality in school records and gain insights into how
their self-representations compared with the formal demographics
of their schools and neighborhoods, whose populations, in educa-
tional discourse, were both characterized as predominantly North
and West African and Muslim. It should be noted all the same that
school records and census data indicate that the majority population
in these areas is officially French.
Limitations of the Study
Like many other researchers, I also took fieldnotes, although I

have found that they can be as disruptive as they are useful in the
school context. I noted conversations and information conveyed
throughout my fieldwork, and I also drew diagrams of class configu-
rations and how students regrouped during their free time. I espe-
cially recorded important events or incidents that I intended to pur-
sue later, either in interviews or in informal conversations. However,
I found that there are significant drawbacks in keeping fieldnotes.
That is, it is difficult to record and observe events without interrupt-
ing or missing other important happenings unfolding at one’s site.
Moreover, taking fieldnotes is conspicuous and can, therefore, be
misinterpreted by those being observed, as when an instructor be-
lieved that I was evaluating her teaching because I was copying part
of her lesson from the blackboard. After class, she cornered me in
the hallway and said, “Listen, I just want to tell you that if you’re
looking for a specialist in pedagogy, I’m no specialist.” I later had to
harness all of my persuasive powers to convince her that my notes
were for my own use and would not be shared with school inspec-
tors. A similar incident occurred with one of her students, who was
part of a class characterized as débiles (dimwits or morons), an in-
sulting label that I heard certain outer-city teachers use to describe
difficult students and through which some students had learned to
see themselves. While taking my usual notes one day in a class
where I had not been introduced, I noticed a girl glancing at me sus-
piciously from the front of the classroom. Agitated, she interrupted
the teacher in the middle of her lesson and stated, “Excuse me, I
don’t mean to cut you off, and you have every right not to answer,
but I think we have a right to know who this woman is. I see her tak-
ing notes, and well, is she a journalist or from the CIA or what? I
think we have a right to know.” And this student was entirely right.
She had every right to know who I was and why I was taking notes
in her classroom. The important point raised by these examples is

that the taking of fieldnotes can be disruptive and misinterpreted in
the field. All the same, doing fieldwork without them is akin to at-
tempting to conduct a formal interview without a recorder. It can be
done, but much can be lost in the process.
Throughout this journey, both my person and my personal con-
victions were continually tried and tested by events over which I had
no control, but which affected my fieldwork nonetheless. For exam-
ple, during the 1998–1999 academic year, I ran headlong into the
student-teacher walkouts and demonstrations that resulted in the
closing of public schools on several occasions—sometimes without
notice—including my sites. And then there were the bombings of
Sudan and Afghanistan, and later of Iraq during Ramadan, ordered
by President Clinton. Following the bombing in Iraq, I reluctantly
returned to my site, not knowing quite what to expect from Muslim
students. In some cases, those who had greeted me with smiles be-
fore this event turned cold and distant in its wake. At one school, a
student blocked my entrance as I approached her classroom. Stand-
ing in front of me and clearly angry, she looked me squarely in the
eyes and asked, “Do you support your president’s Monicagate?” Yes,
“Monicagate”: it had been strongly suggested in the media that these
actions were an attempt by the president to “wag the dog” in order
to divert attention from his then-alleged infidelities. Sadly for me,
after those bombings, my image shifted for some students from that
of their media-generated, popular understanding of an American to
an American as the oppressor. This was particularly troubling for
me, since I know first-hand what oppression feels like from being
raised in poverty and segregation in the U.S. It took a great deal of
work to reconnect with some students and demonstrate to them that
I sincerely wanted to learn more about them. I illustrated that sin-
cerity by participating in community activities organized in their
neighborhood and at their schools.
The most rewarding moments were those times when I was in-
vited to help with food and clothes drives for the needy, as many of
the students were also involved in humanitarian relief efforts both in
France and in North and West African countries. I also once stayed
up until the wee hours of the morning with a dear Canadian friend
at his office while his computers and computer skills generated a
website for these students, something that allowed them to share
their activities and philanthropic efforts with a broader international
community. That which is global can indeed become local, as these
experiences proved to me. Nonetheless, international news and
Introduction 29
events reverberated against this study, including the massacres in

Algeria and the horrifying “ethnic” cleansing of Muslims in Kosovo,
which risk exploding again as I write. These tragedies were broadcast
daily in the media and were taken very much to heart by many of
my participants, who did not see their Muslim selves as disconnected
from those events. I should add that not everyone was comfortable
with my presence at these sites, which are located in an area where
neighborhoods and low-performing schools have been transformed
into dumping grounds for economically disadvantaged immigrant
families and their children. Moreover, residents and teachers ex-
pressed concern and even fear about how I would convey what I
saw and experienced.
Another important challenge was created by the requirement of
parental consent, in keeping with the protection of human subjects.
While it is critical that researchers protect their participants at all
costs, having to obtain written consent from the parents of Muslim
girls hindered student participation in this project. Some parents re-
fused to let their daughters participate at all, suspicious of a foreigner
asking personal questions. Given the historical context leading to
the presence of Muslims in France and the often tenuous relations
produced from those tensions, it was not surprising that some par-
ents would not allow their daughters to be in a study that focused on
Muslims. Though many students wanted to lend their experiences
to my project, many parents refused to give their consent, which re-
duced the size and richness of the pool of participants, especially in
schools where the majority population was of African origin.
The crux of the problem in this context has much to do with
how one conceptualizes these young people, which depends on the
sociocultural lens through which one understands life experience
and age. While most of my participants were between fifteen and
nineteen years old, their status as “girls” or “young women” varies
according to context. That is, though they are of marriageable age in
many of their parents’ cultures and countries of origin, a sixteen-
year-old may be more girl than young woman at home, I learned,
and yet more young woman than girl outside of it, in school or else-
where. The importance and value of parental consent should not be
minimized, and obtaining or not obtaining it raises ethical concerns
and holds great potential for mistrust and harm. However, one must
allow a researcher some latitude in determining the criteria that de-
termine how one assigns individuals to such categories as “minor”
and “adult.” Researchers should not be forced to adhere to a nar-
rowly defined template; the internal logic of the research context
must be considered in making such determinations. In this study, I

obtained parental and student consent, in keeping with Human Sub-
jects requirements; nonetheless, the question of the emotional ma-
turity of participants remains an intrinsic and ethical factor to be
considered in doing research of this nature.
Another limitation was posed by inadequate census data and
other gaps in statistical information concerning national origins and
ethnicity in France, as previously discussed. Data were similarly
lacking on religion; such information is considered personal and po-
tentially prejudicial in France, and is therefore not available to the
public. While these limitations and challenges affected the facility
with which this project unfolded, the difficulties encountered were
also occasions for me to critically grasp how I was the architect of this
study. In other words, these obstacles were also opportunities for
learning, which illustrate the beauty of being in the field where
everything is subject to change, including the researcher herself.
Organization of this Journey
This book is organized into into five chapters, which open with
brief abstracts outlining their content. Chapter 1, “Unmixing French
‘National Identity,’” introduces my focal participants, while situating
their lived experiences within the broader dynamic of the politics of
French national identity. Their narratives describe a number of
forces affecting their life-worlds, forces that compel them to activate
a range of strategies in order to negotiate and to circumvent compet-
ing expectations. One issue highlighted in this chapter is forced mar-
riage, against which national status becomes an effective means of
self-defense. Chapter 2, “Structured Exclusion: Public Housing in
the French Outer City,” is an invitation into the neighborhood that
these young people call home. This chapter documents in detail the
oft-ignored experience of living in public housing in the famed City
of Light. As an illustration, I focus on a housing project known as la
cité des Courtillières. While it is not the worst example in the French
outer cities, city officials have allowed it to degrade over the years
into conditions of substandard living. It is also a structuring element
in these young people’s self-representation, the site where “their
French and African-born-in-France identities” merge (Quiminal et
al. 1997, 7). In chapter 3, “Transmitting a ‘Common Culture’: Sym-
bolic Violence Realized,” we move closer to the role that national ed-
ucation plays in French identity politics through its “common cul-
ture” ideology. In examining this issue, I draw upon the theories of
Introduction 31
Pierre Bourdieu, who has consistently shown in his extensive writ-

ings how the school, as an extension of the state, is the site for the
imposition and elaboration of the dominant culture and its cate-
gories of perception. I illustrate this point in relation to two core sub-
jects representative of the country’s patrimony, French literature
and history. In chapter 4, “Counterforces: Educational Inequality
and Relative Resistance,” I take up the way that national education
paradoxically includes and excludes youths in the “other France.”
While French affirmative action seeks to mitigate educational dis-
parities, other mechanisms are at work that select and sort students
toward downward mobility. The school, nonetheless, remains an in-
tegral element in shaping youths’ self-understandings, but certain
Muslim girls resist this shaping. That is, when the “common culture”
conflicts with or tests the limits of their fundamental beliefs, prac-
tices, and modesty, they are not without their own forces and strate-
gies. In chapter 5, “Beyond Identity: Muslim Girls and the Politics of
Their Existence,” I discuss my own connection to this journey
through my first encounter with a Muslim teenager, a former in-law,
who embodied the gendered constraints and very real forms of vio-
lence that certain girls both live with and die by. While I document
abuse, as my participants insisted that I do, I also challenge the per-
ception that such acts are committed solely by Muslims or Africans,
and the cultural deficiencies Muslims or Africans are presumed to
have. As I stress throughout this study, these youths resist all forms
of constraints placed upon them, but some forces are not easily over-
come. French secularism and the law banning religious symbols are
examples treated in this chapter. Finally, the epilogue, “And So It
Goes . . .” summarizes my key arguments and pertinent findings. I
must stress that this landscape is always changing, transforming it-
self as I write.

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Introduction

I was born French, but for me, the way I see

Me, I find myself totally integrated in France,

[W]e are French and Muslim and proud of it.

Individuals or groups are objectively defined

When people think of France, they do not typically attribute the

to be seen by the public as living manifestations of every social ill,

of public and private opinion. Their complexities are often reduced

and sensuality sell anything from lingerie to car insurance. More-

On Race and Classifications

In this context, the self-understandings of Muslim youths sig-

the classifications used in France, while making the social reality of

tice of targeted racialized discrimination. In the French context, such

text or frame human relations in such neat terms is to err. Although

“National Identity” and Nationality:

In France, the politics of identity exist within a state of tension

Constituting a nation-state demands that it be recognized as such

Frenchness by intentionally seizing a self-representation that devi-

of immigrants, who are predominantly of African and Asian ori-

be interpreted as a form of resistance against disparaging representa-

Beyond “Identity” to Identity Politics

These social scientists zero in on the ambiguity attached to the lan-

important issues? Such issues would include understanding how the

The concept of identity politics, as I employ it, accurately applies

a totalizing critique of “subjectivity, essence, identity” can seem very threat-

Challenging domination through naming “one’s identity” is the

Thinking Globally and Seeing Locally:

In many apparent and not so apparent ways, these young people

Dandicat was referring to young people who accompanied their par-

I do not see how relations of domination, whether material or symbolic,

Rather than being mechanistic, the process is dramatically dy-

Reflections on Paris and the Craft of

Urban cities are complex by definition. Paris is complex in its

by irresponsible media imagery) rendered it difficult to abstract indi-

World events, as they stand, have exposed these old wounds,

This ugliness manifested itself to me in two typical ways—denial

Because I am both a Black woman and a researcher, my desire to

This study is as much about my journey, my observations, and

tion (e.g., ethnographic observations, interviews, surveys, and jour-

In addition to informal and formal interviews with them, I for-

information from participants about their background, self-under-

Like many other researchers, I also took fieldnotes, although I

in her classroom. The important point raised by these examples is

events reverberated against this study, including the massacres in

must be considered in making such determinations. In this study, I

Organization of this Journey

Pierre Bourdieu, who has consistently shown in his extensive writ-

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