"To be French is to be white": children’s uses of ethno-racial categorizations in France

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the wake of sociological studies showing that social hierarchies’ uses are constituted from the first years of schooling, this article intends to understand how young children draw a distinction between “being French” and “not being French” based on the criteria associated, in adults, to the race relations. Based on an ethnographic fieldwork carried out in three very different schools it emerges that many children overlap between the four criteria that participate, in adults, in the processes of racialization. The use of these criteria and their ordering is much more important in schools where there are more children of minority groups. Staff plays a significant role in this clarification process. Moreover, this more or less advanced child's work of deconstructing entanglements is largely explained by the influence of their parents’ social position on the way in which they grasp the child's experiences within the school.