Teachers’ Perceptions and Behaviours in Front of Racial Question: A Perspective from France

In France, teachers are in front of a contradiction: on the one hand, they grow in a racialized society, in an occidental and postcolonial area, on the other hand, they are trained as professionals in a logic of “indifference” to these issues, with regard to the sacred principle of a State’s representatives’ “neutrality”. One can add a context of invisibilisation of social classes and visibilisation of religious, migratory and racial questions. This double phenomenon provides from the foundation in situ of family nuclei by the migrants originally imported to rebuild France, and from the successive economic crisis, which were the object of discourses and politics crystalizing always more the tenses around a “youth came from immigration’s integration’s problem”.

I will show here how teachers, in their diversity, interact with pupils and face reel or fantasied ethno-racial expressions: according to their social background, race, religion, sex, if they have received the state’s training or not… I will illustrate my speech partly with interactions in reaction or about attacks of Islamic extremists. Talking about religion indirectly permitting to ask for racial question.

My study mainly uses the Racial Studies, Sociology of Education and Sociology of deviance (especially labelling). It draws on a monograph in a secondary school for vocational training, in a Parisian suburb and which took place from October 2014 to July 2017. I did about one hundred fifty cumulative days of observation, completed with semi-structured interviews of thirty-two pupils, six teachers and two other persons from the staff. Above all, I had a lot of informal talks. The observation took place as well inside the classrooms as outside: corridors, playground, staff room, dining hall, outside the school...