Identity Building through a Sense of Injustice for Housing Estate Kids Historical Transmission, Segregation Processes and Radical Stances

Abstract

Made up for the most part of children of blue-collar workers and immigrants, the youth of French housing estates is yet denied the social organization of the labor community. The legacy of its working-class past is all the more heavy to carry that its present is as uneasy and uncertain as ever. This is why these young people have developed, over two generations, a way of life that is partly specific to them, from creating their own “street culture” to practicing Islam with varying degrees of assiduity, to starting a career in petty crimes – the latter aiming to counteract unemployment and general precariousness. While most are not delinquents, they are faced, as the “inheritors of the working-class neighborhoods,” with economic hardship and discrimination, making them the scapegoats of a country that yet is a democracy. That is why within less than 30 years, as a response to both social frustration and the contempt shown by elites and administrative institutions alike, a sense of collective injustice permeates the youth-and those who are now adults-in these neighborhoods.