Abstract: This paper examines the forms of antiracist praxis which have developed among Maghrebi communities in France. The significance of these interventions, it will be argued, derives from their inscription in a tradition of political struggle inspired by black militancy in the overdeveloped world. Their conscious incorporation of “race” as an analytical category and a political stance despite the republican ban on the use of “race” goes against the grain of mainstream antiracism embodied by local state bureaucracies and civil society organizations that claim to be steadfastly colorblind and race-neutral. Its political significance has been muffled by a monolithic republican antiracism where race is abstracted from the politics that constitute antiracism. Because of its informal style and its primarily cultural aspect that has significantly resisted institutionalization this movement has hardly been accepted as anti-racist; also, its distance from the political institutions of liberal democracy, being led by beur youths as a marginalized cultural force, carves out new modes of action that redefine the realm and the contours of the political. Rap music is explored here as a circuit for antiracist intervention whereby young beurs anatomize the structures of racial privilege and discrimination and ponder on the way race is implicated in power dynamics and serves as an organizing aspect of their social world.
Keywords: anti-racism, France, beurs, republicanism, race, rap, hip hop.
Title: “T’appelle ça du racism?” French-Maghrebi Youth Culure and the Politics of Anti-racism
Author: Mohammed Agzar
International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research
ISSN 2348-3156 (Print), ISSN 2348-3164 (online)
Research Publish Journals
