The Overlap between Economic and Cultural Threat: Accepting Racial Minorities in the French National Community
44 Pages Posted: 19 Aug 2013
Date Written: 2013
Abstract
This article examines the willingness of majority individuals in France to accept black minorities in the national community. I use original data from a recent online survey to focus on how acceptance varies according to minorities’ occupations. The standard debate over why majority individuals are more or less likely to accept immigrant-origin minorities focuses on economic and cultural threats. In this article I challenge that juxtaposition by examining how the two concepts may overlap. In particular, I explore how an ostensibly “economic” indicator such as minority occupation may have cultural and symbolic dimensions. I do this by measuring attitudes towards minorities in four occupations: banker, chef, civil service, and winemaker. The results indicate that majority individuals are more likely to accept minorities as part of the French nation as bankers or civil servants than as chefs or winemakers. To account for this variation, there is support for both economic and cultural threat but the relationship with cultural threat is stronger. When majority individuals feel an occupation is more culturally important for French identity they are less likely to accept minorities who are employed in that occupation as part of the national community. I interpret these results as evidence that minority occupation holds important cultural and symbolic content. These findings have numerous implications for our understanding of majority-minority relations and national communities more broadly.
Keywords: identity, economic threat, cultural threat, France, Europe, race, ethnicity, immigration, integration
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