Racism and transnationality

Abstract

“When you are in Europe, people say to us, you are not European, you are African. And when we are in Africa, African people say to us, you are not African, you are European.” The above quote is from an interview with a young woman who was born in the West African country Benin and moved to France with her family. She has been living in France since the mid-1980s and identifies herself as a Frenchwoman and a Beninese. On the European con- tinent and in Africa, the young woman (as well as many others like her) experiences denial: her belonging to Benin and Africa as well as to France and Europe is denied her. She is not treated as an equal. In France, skin color is the marker of denigration: “people show you, you are not really French, you are African - I am black.” In Benin, it is her sporadic visits to her country of origin that lead to a denial of belonging. This case demonstrates the dominance of a kinship and decent principle (jus sanguinis) based on the idea of race: Being French is asso- ciated with fair skin color. In this context, dark-skinned people are considered non-French. The light skin color is a place of structural advantages and privileges (Pokos, 2009, p. 113) as well as a dominant culture which negotiates who supposedly belongs to a country and who does not. Globalization, with its attendant increase in movement, has simultaneously intensified and normalized strangeness, raising normative and subjective questions of belonging and exclusion (Anthias, 2008).