Racisme et préférence pour l'identique : du clonage culturel dans la vie quotidienne

Abstract

Racism and Preference for Sameness : About Cultural Cloning in Everyday Life. Over the past two decades we have come to the understanding that different forms of discrimination merge and reinforce each other. But (converging) discriminations are also indicative of normative preferences for imagined perfections consisting of a combination of such characteristics as : masculinities, whiteness, Europeanness, physical abilities, high intelligence. The concept of cultural cloning is useful to analyze and explain the taken-for-granted desirability of certain types, the oftenunconscious tendency to comply with normative standards, the fear to deviate from peers. In focusing on normative preferences for sameness as instruments of cultural cloning the paper shifts the emphasis away from an exclusive differentialist approach – where difference and how to incorporate diversity are the focus of attention – towards the deeper, less articulated, problem of only scarcely contested sameness.