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HUMAN ARCHITECTURE

Journal of the Sociology of Self-

A Publication of OKCIR: The Omar Khayyam Center for Integrative Research in Utopia, Mysticism, and Science (Utopystics)

I

NTRODUCTION

Civilized/Barbaric; Modern/Pre-Mod-ern; First and Third World; Mechanical sol-idarity and organic solidarity/gemein-schaft and gesellschaft; Capitalist and Asi-atic mode of production. These are just afew examples of binaries that have perme-ated social science over the last century. Theconceptualizations of influential Westernscholars of their own countries as modern(in the age in which the nation-state neededto be legitimized, if not created) have oftenbeen intertwined with homogenous depic-tions of ‘others’ who were fundamentally

‘different’ and pre-modern. In Durkheim’s

Social Division of Labor

(1947) and Bour-dieu’s

Outline of a Theory of Practice

(1972),Northern Africans were used as a counter-point. For the former, Northern Africa wasan example of the mechanical solidaritythat France had abandoned in the wake ofthe Industrial Revolution; for the latter,‘they’ were a different entity, perhaps onlysharing some similarities with traditionalpeasants in the Béarn.

1

Eric Mielants is Assistant Professor in Sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Fairfield University.He has written articles and essays on racism, social theory and contemporary migration issues. His book,The Origins of Capitalism and the ‘Rise of the West’, is forthcoming from Temple University Press.

Black Skin, White Masks RevisitedContemporary Post-Colonial Dilemmas in the

Netherlands, France, and Belgium

Eric Mielants

Fairfield University––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

emielants@mail.fairfield.edu

Abstract: Several problems beset the immigrant communities and academic scholarship in Bel-gium, France, and the Netherlands. The current politicization of higher education—who getstenure or governmental financial support for what kind of social science research—results intimid criticism of existing public policies. The greatly differential integration models used in theNetherlands, Belgium, and France have resulted in different ways of collecting data and analyz-ing the ‘other.’ This article addresses how divergent discourses about the ‘other’ have been con-structed over time: according to the French assimilationist model, ethnic minorities do not(officially) ‘exist’; the Netherlands, until recently, embraced a ‘tolerant’ multi-cultural model thatconceptualized ethnic minorities as ‘units’ that could be measured and classified according togradual progress and development; meanwhile Belgium, due to its linguistic divisions, has cre-ated another hybrid. This article, in dialogue with Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, argues thatthe social sciences and existing paradigms in these three countries will need to be de-colonizedin order to facilitate de-colonization and anti-racist practices in everyday life.

1

It should therefore come as no surprisethat ‘mere’ journalists and politicians also usebinaries of ‘us’ versus ‘them’ in a slightly moresimplistic jargon.

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It has become evident that one cannotseparate academic models and conceptual-izations about the ‘other’ from existingpublic policies about immigrants and eth-nic minorities. In the three countries thatform the focus of this article (the Nether-lands, Belgium, and France), the currentpoliticization of higher education and aca-demic productivity (i.e., who gets tenure orgovernmental financial support for socialscience research that advocates certaintypes of public policy recommendations)results in timid criticism of existing publicpolicies or related academic paradigms. Al-though the revolving door between aca-demia and political power has declinedover the last 30 years, a public debate onimportant matters such as immigrationpolicy, integration models, anti-discrimina-tion legislation, and the conceptualizationof ‘self’ and identity is rarely initiated byindependent specialists and academics, norby the immigrants and minorities them-selves (Grosfoguel & Mielants 2006). Themultiple and greatly differential ‘integra-tion models’ used in the Netherlands, Bel-gium and France have therefore resulted indifferent ways of collecting data and ana-lyzing the ‘other’ and in imagining as wellas ‘managing’ the ‘other.’

When Frantz Fanon wrote his now fa-mous

Black Skin, White Masks

(1967) in theearly 1950s, it caused such a stir because itwas written by an intellectual outside theprevailing white power structure who de-liberately took from what we would nowcall the epistemic side of the subaltern, re-jecting the notion that colonized blacks, ornon-whites in general for that matter, couldsomehow ‘evolve’ to an almost-state ofwhiteness if they only tried hard enough. Inthat book, one might recall how Fanon de-voted an entire chapter to language (de-cades before literary studies wereinfluenced by Edward Said’s contributions,the South Asian subaltern school, or thepost-structural turn) to illustrate how‘proper’ French was used and subse-

quently internalized by colonial subjects tomeasure one’s successful ‘modernization’after having been exposed to civilization, orits corollary, whiteness. It is followed by achapter on how ‘whiteness’ is subsequentlyassociated with different degrees of sexualattraction. Marrying into whiteness is con-sidered to be a (sub)conscious (Fanon1967:100) strategy of upward mobility bothwithin the colony as in the métropole. Thisupward mobility is characterized by trans-forming the self, in an age when the whiteman’s burden and the mission civilisatricewere there to assist in the transformation ofboth the colony and those living within it.

In retrospect, it should come as no sur-prise that in the 1950s the decolonization ofAfrica ushered in paradigms and relatedpolicies geared towards ‘development,’central to Modernization Theory, that wereremarkably similar to the aforementionedbelief in ‘stages’ of differential civilizationand racial-ethnic hierarchies that could beobtained by certain ‘évolués.’ (Hence, thelogic of Nazi racial supremacy in the early1940s bestowed the title of ‘honorary Ary-ans’ on the Japanese not only because oftheir need to symbolically explain a defacto military alliance with a non-Westernrace, but also because it was grounded inthe belief that specific racial and ethnicgroups had evolved more highly than oth-ers.) Modernization theory, and most nota-bly Walt Rostow’s (1960) famous stages ofdevelopment, assumed that the whiteWestern capitalist developed nations werealso at a higher stage, and that this couldalso be reached by non-Western areas ifthey copied the policies, and ultimately theway of life, of these Western nations.

Both the civilizing mission and Mod-ernization Theory have similar goals: toshed the world of barbaric, primitive andunderdeveloped traditions such as ‘me-chanical solidarity,’ remaking them in theimage of their former colonial masters—modern, developed and civilized. It is nocoincidence that Lawrence Harrison’s book

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was titled

Underdevelopment is a State ofMind

(1985). Indeed, a central question of20

th

century Western social science was:how can one reform/change the ‘other’(the ‘other’ being the colonized or, from the1950s onward, the recently de-colonized) tobecome like ‘us,’ without fundamentallychanging the status quo of privilege andpower in the world-system? Similarly, howone can ‘civilize’ and reform those ‘others’who live within the Western World, with-out fundamentally altering relations ofwealth and power has increasingly becomea preoccupation of western academics andpoliticians alike.

The latter exercise has been takingplace in a much more exposed manner inthe U.S. for decades, due to centuries ofmass migrations both of slaves and of im-poverished immigrants. There, scholarssuch as David Roediger (2005) and Noel Ig-natieff (1996) have attempted to historicizethe attempts of various immigrant groups(e.g., Jewish- or Irish-Americans) in theearly 20

th

century to ‘become white’ by sep-arating themselves from those lower thanthem on the racial-ethnic hierarchy, such asthe African-American population. But ofcourse, one cannot separate this ‘agency’from the complex reconstruction and mod-ification of the already existing social struc-ture; racial laws also played a role. If early20

th

century American law considered Ar-menians white (unlike neighboring Syri-ans), or if Italians were lynched on severaloccasions in the U.S. South, this opened up,as sociologist W.E.B. Dubois pointed out onseveral occasions, not only the possibilityof collaboration with the African-Americanpopulation against such acts, but also theopportunity to become white by distancingoneself from those ‘other’ populations.

Given the American experience, oneshould question the extent to which, morethan half a century after the publication of

Black Skin, White Masks

, the preoccupationwith ‘civilizing non-Western’ people out-side of the West has shifted for countries

like France, the Netherlands, and Belgium,to a preoccupation with controlling, moni-toring and reforming non-whites on West-ern soil. Yet few people address thedivergent ways in which colonial and neo-colonial images and discourses about the‘other’ transform the migrant from theformer colony or neocolonial periphery,into a specific ideal-type of ‘ethnic minor-ity,’ and the degree to which various immi-grant groups react to the challenges ofhegemonic discourse. How

do

each of thevarious minorities and immigrants react tohegemonic discourses? I would argue thatit depends on the way they are ‘incorpo-rated’ into each country, how they are per-ceived by the majority, and how theyattempt to cope with the existing ethnic hi-erarchy.

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In France, as in the French-speakingpart of Belgium, the assimilationist modelstill prevails: ethnic minorities simply donot (officially) ‘exist.’ The French censusdoes not give anyone the opportunity todeclare their racial-ethnic heritage and as of2004, the public display of religious sym-bols, such as veils, skullcaps and largecrosses (which some people have referredto as the ‘racialization of religion’), has beenoutlawed in public schools. Interestingly,official rhetoric has prevented any kind ofaffirmative action or any debate on the defacto existence of a racial hierarchy fromemerging. But the practices of assimilation-ism have simultaneously translated intorather generous redistributive socioeco-nomic policies: a bloated welfare state withpractically free tuition at public universi-ties; universal health care for all; and a 35-hour work week that includes generous un-employment and retirement benefits. Howthen do minority groups react to this re-ceived ‘model’?

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Interestingly, observations seem to in-dicate that it depends on the specific loca-tion of a particular group within the ethnichierarchy. African-Americans who move toFrance are considered more American thanblack and have long expressed their amaze-ment at how France is less racist when com-pared with the U.S. (e.g., Baldwin 1972).Black Frenchmen from the ‘

départementsd’Outremer

’ are usually overrepresented invarious low-skilled professions of the pub-lic sector, but still considered to be moreFrench than the ‘

pieds noirs

’ who arrivedmore recently. Nonetheless, ever since theemergence of the protest movements of the‘

sans papiers

’ (undocumented migrants) inthe late 1990s, a realignment of Afro-Carib-beans and Africans stressing a commondestiny has been noted (Gueye 2006). Themajority of the youngsters protesting in the

banlieues

in the fall of 2005 belonged to var-ious immigrant groups, but were demon-strating against their common structuralposition at the bottom of the labor andhousing markets.

2

Thus, despite an officialpolicy that refuses to recognize the exist-ence of hyphenated identities or racism forthat matter, occasional moments occur inwhich “the collective black,” as EduardoBonilla-Silva (2004) calls it, coalescesaround a specific issue, such as when theFrench National Assembly debated themerit of instructing the positive legacy ofFrench colonialism in its public high schoolsystem in 2005. But generally, commoncause has seldom occurred in France in thelast three decades.

3

Unlike France, most social scientists inthe Netherlands and the Flemish part ofBelgium are preoccupied with ‘counting’and classifying various migrant groups

(known as “

allochtones

”), attempting to for-mulate policies that might allow them to re-form them in such a way that they wouldbe able to ‘catch up’ socioeconomicallywith the majority of the (white) population.As with the colonies in the early 20

th

cen-tury or with the recently de-colonized na-tion-states in the periphery in the middle ofthe 20

th

century, expertise is used to mea-sure and scrutinize the problematized unitof analysis, be it the deviant, the criminal,the migrant, the ethnic minority, the under-developed nation-state, etc.… But rarely isthere a focus on systemic processes such asthe development of underdevelopment,the reproduction of racism and discrimina-tive practices, segregation, or unequalpower relations. As a recent example, whenthe ‘cartoon crisis’ occurred in Denmark,Belgian and Dutch newspapers did notrefuse to reprint the venomous cartoons; in-stead, editorialists immediately framed thedebate as one of Muslim minorities refus-ing to accept Western notions of freedom ofspeech. Scrutinizing power relations be-tween the Muslim world and the West, or inthe case of Western Europe, between Mus-lim immigrants and the white majority, didnot seem to be an issue.

In the Netherlands, despite an officialembrace of multiculturalism, the racial-eth-nic hierarchy has coincided with changes inthe targets of racist agitation: from Suri-namese and Antilleans in the mid-1970s, toTurks and Moroccans in the 1980s, to an ob-session with Antillean criminality in the1990s, and more recently to a racializationof Muslims in the aftermath of the assassi-nation of the artist Theo Van Gogh and the

2

It is not uncommon for these immigrantsto be discriminated against on the basis of thepostal codes in which they are located (read:segregated). In a way, the French dilemma canbe conceptualized as the “discrepancy betweenFrench republican values of equality and thepractice of forty years of state-sponsored ghet-toization” (Franz 2007:103).

3

In

Black Skin, White Masks

, Fanon(1967:103) specifically discussed how the exist-ence of the colonial Empire stimulates racial ha-tred between Jews and Arabs or between Arabsand blacks. One can question the extent towhich this is still happening today as the explo-sive issue of the Middle East and imperial de-signs in the region are imported differentiallyinto the streets of major urban agglomerationssuch as Paris, Brussels, and Amsterdam.

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death treats against

Volkspartij voor Vrijheiden Democratie

(VVD) members of parlia-ment (Buruma 2006). Yet Dutch social sci-ence research rarely acknowledges theexistence and/or impact of racism on theseimmigrants, let alone its centrality in theirsubjugation and exploitation, which onlyreflects the general Dutch taboo towardsdiscussing the significance of ‘everydayracism’ in their society (Essed 1991).

As one may recall, Modernization The-ory argues that every migration processcomes with problems that have to be dealtwith and barriers that have to be (can beand will be) overcome, just like those expe-rienced by 19th century peasants when theymoved from the countryside to urban cen-ters. It is claimed that the adaptation (andintegration) of immigrants into their newcommunity is never a smooth process butrather takes time, and excessive pessimismis not warranted; the catching up in thehousing and labor markets and in educa-tion is already under way and patience isnecessary (e.g., Vermeulen & Penninx1995). Not surprisingly, most Dutch studieson migration and immigrants presentthemselves as a-theoretically as IMF recom-mendations to third world countries. Butthe complicity of the bureaucrats whotransform themselves into academics (andsubsequently legitimize the public policiesof politicians who will later order the nextseries of technical studies from them)should not be underestimated as they haveenabled Modernization Theory and itsstructural functionalist variants to ‘colo-nize’ the entire field (Martiniello 1993). Notcoincidentally, the critical voices that ema-nate from ethnic minorities (e.g., Philom-ena Essed, Ruben Gowricharn) aresuppressed when they do not conform tothe prevailing orthodoxy (e.g., El-Fers &Nibbering 1998:92-99) and frequently rele-gated to minor and obscure alternativepresses (e.g., Eddaoudi 1998; Helder &Gravenberch 1998), effectively de-legiti-mizing those dissenting voices.

Modernization Theory, for many de-cades embraced by Dutch politicians, socialscientists and the media alike, tries to singa soothing tune by pointing out how sec-ond generation immigrants are more at-tuned to the Western consumer-orientedsociety than their parents. Given that theytend to appreciate Western culture, filmand music, their cultural identity is said tobe more ‘liberal’ than that of their parents(Buijs & Nelissen 1995: 189). For example,second generation Surinamese, especiallythose from mixed marriages, considerthemselves ‘Dutch’ (van Heelsum 1997).This display of ethnic-cultural identity,which confirms Modernization Theory’shopeful song of steady ‘integration’ and re-orientation towards more ‘open-minded’(i.e., Dutch) values, has, until recently, dis-missed pessimistic points of view. But evenif the second generation feels Dutch, hasthe same aspirations as the native Dutch,and is completely oriented towards Dutchsociety, it does not automatically imply thatthe native Dutch (known as “autochtones”)perceive these second generation immi-grants as Dutch. While some minoritieswant to be seen as Dutch among the Dutch,it remains to be seen whether this is evenpossible. Meanwhile, the ruling right-wingconservative party, the VVD, have incorpo-rated some of the rhetoric of the far right,and the intellectual heirs of Pim Fortuyn(the politician who won the Dutch 2002elections) have been promoting a more re-strictive policy regarding political refugeesand asylum-seekers, as well as taking amore assimilationist position.

In Belgium, due to its particular lin-guistic divisions, another hybrid hasemerged.

There, the process of ‘pillarization’ hashistorically been more significant than inthe Netherlands and it continues to have animpact on the identity of natives as well asimmigrants. Traditionally, people have or-ganized themselves socially and politicallyaround socialist, Christian, or liberal par-

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ties, unions, health-care providers (“mutu-alités”) and affiliate cultural organizations.Pillarization (“Verzuiling”) was a means topacify a fragmented political, linguistic,and social landscape and it allowed the cre-ation of enduring identities in Belgiumbased on parallel networks, organizationsand institutions in which Christian Flem-ish-speaking peasants organized them-selves next to, for example, French-speaking socialist atheists. Immigrants,however, were de-facto excluded access tothese vital networks, which provided infor-mation, jobs, support and various forms ofsocial capital.4 In many ways, Turkish andMoroccan immigrants have had a hardtime being accepted in any pillar or, in thealternative, creating their own pillar.Though characterized by patronizing na-tives as ‘merely Muslims,’ the reality is thatMoroccan Berber and Turkish immigrantsand a wide variety of refugees from theMiddle East and Africa are too heteroge-neous to create their own minor pillar (seeMielants 2006).

Despite an ‘official’ embrace of multi-culturalism, Belgian public opinion againstethnic minorities has hardened consider-ably, as in the Netherlands. The escalatinglinguistic squabbles between Flemish- andFrench-speaking communities in the post1970 period prevented one specific ‘inte-gration model’ from taking root. In themeantime, tensions escalated between na-tive Belgians and minority populations. OnMay 11, 1991, riots broke out in Vorst andSt. Gillis between Moroccan youngstersand the police. This was followed by moreriots in Molenbeek in 1995, in the Brusselscommunity of Anderlecht in November1997 after police shot and killed a Moroccanimmigrant, in St. Joost in 1998, and in

Antwerp in 2002. Throughout the 1990s,more far-right politicians were elected anddemanded that immigrants be returned totheir country of origin, while only a smallminority spoke out in favor of giving thesans papiers amnesty and the right to vote.Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt’s compro-mise was legislation that made it easier forimmigrants to obtain Belgian citizenship.Alas, a change in citizenship does not pro-vide protection against racial discrimina-tion.

The number of Muslims in Belgium hasgrown rapidly (numbering almost 400,000at present). Yet the religious engagement ofthe Belgian state—as opposed to the secu-lar model in France—has not been put intoeffect for Muslim worshippers who, unlikeRoman Catholics, have been blocked fromcreating a network of Islamic schools. Inaddition, there is very negative coverage ofIslam in the media (including openly racistletters to the editor that are published bymajor newspapers); conflicts in schools(e.g., concerning the head-scarf, as inFrance); and many other forms of ‘every-day racism’ such as denying people entryto dances and gyms. Yet all of this is againstpeople who are third generation immi-grants, who speak a much more raw Antw-erp-Flemish dialect than the white natives.These third generation immigrants, whoonly know Morocco or Turkey as exotic,brief holiday destinations to visit distantfamily members, are expected to return totheir ‘countries of origin,’ and are segre-gated in inner-city public trade schools andblamed for not ‘integrating themselves.’

This ‘everyday racism’ coincidentallyresults in something different for everylinguistic and municipal community in thecountry. To somewhat paraphrase Fanon,when these minorities are hired it is in spiteof their color or their religion, but whenthey are disliked it is because of their coloror what their religion represents. Nonethe-less, it is ‘they’ who are studied, classified,problematized and believed to be in urgent

4 As narrated to the author, some Muslimimmigrants saw their applications to Christianorganizations denied as they were not deemed‘Christian,’ and turned away by Socialist andLiberal ones who preferred candidates with anexplicit ‘non-religious’ profile.

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need of reorientation. When will the firstBelgian of Moroccan descent write ananthropological study about the whitenative population? The Belgian-Congolesescholar Bambi Ceuppens (2003) made amajor effort in that direction, but as religionbecomes the new signifier, somethingwhich Fanon did not foresee, we need toanalyze Christian fundamentalism as muchas orthodox secularism, and not just raisequestions about what went wrong withIslam.

THE CHALLENGES AHEAD

What all three of these countries share,but more so in France than in Belgium andthe Netherlands, is a genuine separationbetween ‘le pays legal’ and ‘le pays réel.’ Intheory, everyone is equal under the law, butin practice, Muslims are, more often thannot, racialized and discriminated againstbecause they are perceived as ‘others.’ Thisshift translates itself symbolically—withconsequences in the real world—in the factthat these ‘others’ are significantly under-represented in the political field. In NorthAmerica’s largest cities, a large portion ofthe inhabitants are foreign born (e.g., 60%of the inhabitants in Miami, as well as overhalf of the population in Toronto). Similarprocesses manifest themselves in WesternEurope’s major cities: the Dutch ‘Rands-tad,’ consisting of the cities of Rotterdam,Amsterdam, Utrecht, and The Hague, com-prises more non-whites than whites. Whatshould be noted however is that in Europemore so than in North America, in particu-larly in all three of the countries discussedabove, the collective ‘we’—the imaginedcommunity of what constitutes ‘France’ or‘Belgium,’ or ‘the Netherlands’—does notinclude its segregated minorities. The ‘we’is no longer the ‘we’ it used to be, or per-haps ever imagined to be, but that very facteludes the schoolbooks or TV networksthat impact the conceptualization of one’s

society, as well as a reading of one’s ownhistory: the presence of Muslims is not‘new’ to Europe, does not constitute a mili-tary threat or potential invasion to CharlesMartel and his underlings, and Europe’scultural, technological and economic ex-changes with ‘Muslims’ from a wide vari-ety of countries has been significant fromthe Middle Ages throughout World War II,as the movie ‘Indigènes’ (2006) recentlypointed out to an incredulous audience.5

It is only when ‘we’ become aware ofthese facts and no longer conceptualize‘others’ on the basis of their religious fea-tures as (primarily) a security threat or apotential ‘fifth’ column, that ghettoizationcan be genuinely problematized and that,in turn, collective issues such as poverty,precariousness, unemployment—and giv-en the challenges of globalization, a lack ofupward social mobility—can be adequatelyaddressed by public policy. Stepping awayfrom scrutinizing the ‘other’ and definingsocial problems in terms of various ‘inte-gration models’ may be just the step we allneed to avoid an ‘Islamization’ of social is-sues (such as the endless debates about themerit of wearing a headscarf), which onlyreinforces an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ rhetoricwithout addressing urgent social problemsthat contribute to an increase in fundamen-talism and rejection of the ‘other’ by bothnatives and immigrants alike.

5 The movie, financed mainly by Morocco,has been released in North America under the‘neutral’ title ‘Days of Glory’ and was nominat-ed for the best foreign film award at the 2006 Os-cars. It highlights the contributions of 134,000Algerians, 73,000 Moroccans, 26,000 Tunisiansand about 92,000 troops from other African col-onies that served in the French armed forcesduring World War II. About 80,000 veterans,older than 65, of which 40,000 live in Algeria andMorocco and about 15,000 in Senegal and Chad,still have their military pensions frozen at thesame level from 1959. After seeing the motionpicture, French president Jacques Chirac an-nounced in the Fall of 2006 that the French gov-ernment henceforth would attempt to undo thishistory of inequity.

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TENTATIVE CONCLUSIONS

Methods of judicial or political action/resistance to effectively counter discrimina-tion and overtly racist electoral campaignsafter 1945 are more in need than ever, espe-cially in light of the greater intolerancetowards immigrants and ethnic minorities,ever increasing flows of migration, and apotential resurrection of guest workersprograms in Europe (Castles 2006). One canargue that the social sciences and existingparadigms in Belgium, France, and theNetherlands will urgently need to be de-colonized in tandem with such activism,i.e., grass-roots developments on theground to alter the existing political land-scape. One of the ways to further this goalis to link the intellectual and political heri-tage of Frantz Fanon with post-colonialstudies broadly conceived with an appreci-ation of critical political economy andhistorical comparative social science. Thisis a task that academics should embrace infull cooperation with, and with respect for,civil society at large.

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