Antiracism without Races: How Activists Produce Knowledge about Race and Policing in France

Abstract

Scholars have argued that anti-racialist ideologies – which deem racial categorization dangerous and racist – are an obstacle to antiracism, because they make race and its effects invisible, and obscure institutional and structural racism. This paper reexamines this argument empirically, by analyzing how activists resist “racial ignorance” and produce knowledge about race in anti-racialist contexts. Drawing on race scholarship, social movement theory, and sociology of knowledge, I ask: How do social movements produce knowledge about the role of race in policing in France? What are the implications of different epistemic practices for activists’ racial conceptualizations and political practice? The article is based on an ethnography of three mobilizations contesting policing in France. The comparative methodology reveals that epistemic practices play a role in shaping how mobilizations reach a shared understanding of race and racism. Specifically, how knowledge projects determine racial difference, the methodologies used to capture racial inequality/oppression, and the level of analysis, all matter for the understanding of racism that activists are able to substantiate. Mobilization’s epistemic approaches provide some activists with additional resources to promote their preferred racial conceptualizations and can produce the evidence needed to change the mobilization’s dominant discourse, from individualistic to structural and systemic conceptualizations of racism.