Academics solicited for participation in a “debate” about “national identity” (nov-dec. 2009)

Mail addressed to a teacher-researcher at a university in Nantes

Monsieur,
[…]
In the framework of the debate over national identity, on Friday December 11th, 2009, at 6:30pm, the prefect plans to welcome Monsieur Jean-François SIRINELLI, professor of contemporary history at SciencesPo and director of the SciencesPo history center.

The prefect, Jean DAUBIGNY, will preside at the meeting. Monsieur SIRINELLI will speak on the theme of “National and Republican Identity.” His comments will be followed by those of Monsieur MENARD, regional delegate for research. The debate will then be opened to all.

The prefect would like to see the audience composed of high school and university students. He would deeply like to see university students and teachers in letters and languages participating in the event.

He would be grateful if you could please distribute this invitation to students and teachers. You will find the invitation attached.

If you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact me at …

very best wishes, […]

---

Communiqué from the Tours section of SNESUP [the major university faculty union]
November 25, 2009

The Indre-et-Loire prefecture has solicited historians and sociologists from the University of Tours to participate in local debates over national identity, organized under the auspices of the prefecture and of the UMP deputies Claude Greff and Philippe Briand, and within the framework of the national debate desired by the Minister of Immigration and of National Identity. The SNESUP section of the University of Tours is stunned first of all that a government whose policies for years have been hostile towards the human and social sciences – not to mention towards scholarly knowledge and researchers in general – would so abruptly admit the utility and virtue of these disciplines when it deems they can serve its ends. But above all, SNESUP is obliged to state that the government’s instrumentalization of this pretended debate has reactionary and racist purposes. SNESUP therefore calls on teacher-researchers to refuse to participate in these debates.

Now, what makes this an ethnographically rich pair of texts is that they reveal a conjuncture of disciplinary politics with issues of race and French national identity. On the disciplinary politics front, what you should know as a foreign reader is that (a) it’s probably true that run-of-the-mill human scientists, under Sarkozy’s center-right UMP government, have rather seldom received official invitations of this sort, so it obviously comes as a surprise; and more importantly (b) many humanists and social scientists see their disciplines as threatened by ongoing UMP university reforms, and certainly feel little governmental recognition. This lack of recognition is certainly related to (c) a certain affinity between human and social sciences and the French left, and the affiliation between the SNESUP union and the French left in particular. They seem to be part of the Fédération Syndicale Unitaire, which Wikipedia says is linked to the French Communist Party, though the significance of any of that remains to be seen. It is clear, at any rate, that the rejection of a UMP invitation is partly due to the climate of political hostility that has developed around the last several years of university reforms.

But what might be even less familiar, for a foreign observer, is the reference to a “debate on national identity.” It turns out that on Nov. 2nd, Sarkozy’s Minister of Immigration (significantly enough) officially opened a debate on national identity, the aim being “to construct a better shared vision of what our national identity is today… to reinforce our national identity and to reaffirm Republican values and the pride of being French.” Though for the moment I don’t have a very detailed understanding of the debate, it was supposed to take place in prefectoral meetings (like the one advertised above) and online, and seems to have stirred up a fair amount of debate in the press. It is, of course, a famous cause of the French far right to claim “France for the French” (La France aux français), to intimate that immigrants weaken national identity and should be sent home. “Immigrants” in France, as I said yesterday in a comment to Mike, are often official code for “Africans and North Africans,” people who aren’t white. According to one acquaintance of mine in Saint-Denis, anxiety over “immigrants” is also and importantly code for cultural anxieties over jobs and over the racialization of working-class labor relations; I don’t know how to track this down for sure, but what good materialist would doubt that there’s some link between the economic situation and the perception of foreigners?

At any rate, a number of prominent professors have signed a petition against this Debate on National Identity, claiming that, as organized by the government, it can be “neither free, nor pluralist, nor useful.” They go on to explain: “It is not useful because this diverting maneuver is a machine for producing division among the French and for stigmatizing foreigners.” The “foreigners” they have in mind are probably largely the Africans and North Africans; there are, in fact, certain prejudices against other kinds of immigrants, such as the large English population who have increasingly bought vacation houses in France, but this latter prejudice seems to be cast less a threat to national identity and more as a kind of anger with a class of permanent, overly entitled and linguistically ignorant tourists. The British aren’t part of the job market or the national culture in the same way, and unless I’m quite wrong, these white propertyowners aren’t the kind of immigrants that the current national identity debate invokes.

SNESUP’s invocation of “racist” and “reactionary,” at any rate, invokes a French left reading of this debate as being a kind of passage towards greater nationalist xenophobia. And their overtly political rejection of the debate differs interestingly from the rejection proposed in the petition I cited, where the rejection of the national debate is based substantially on a claim that the government commits a conceptual error in trying to speak about French identity. The petitioners claim that “identity is a private affair” and thus that “The Republic does not have an assigned identity, hardened and closed; rather it has political principles, living and open.” Partly they’re trying to justify their claim that any attempt to fix national identity will elide France’s internal diversity. But I’m also struck by their conceptual claim that the Republic can be defined not by a national essence or identity, but by a kind of ongoing political process that must be defended. The extreme valorization of the political is a central feature of French left republicanism, it seems to me, with its ongoing fixation on la lutte (the struggle). I don’t know if this is something that happens in the U.S., where politics is so stigmatized and spectacular, and there’s often a sense that politics is dirty and ugly but we have to go through with it anyway. It would be good (as usual) to find a more rigorous way of framing this comparison. But for the time being, I’m curious to see what develops in this clash of university politics with national public politics. It may be that my research project will fail to confine itself to strictly academic issues and expand to examine the relation between academic politics and broader French political conjunctures.

In demographic terms, anthropology in the United States continues to be dominated by white Americans. Consider this graph of the racial distribution of anthropology doctorates over the last twelve years (incidentally, the NSF had no data for 1999, so there should really be a gap year inserted here, but I trust you can all manage without one). The enormous top segment of this graph shows the very large fraction of new U.S. anthropology doctorates that go to white Americans. This decade, on average, 65.7% of new anthro phds were white. And yet we also observe that this dominance is falling, slowly, over the years; you can see that here visually. 75% of new anthropology doctorates went to whites in 1995 but only 63.6% in 2007. And other minority groups have grown, slightly, as demonstrated by the widening of those bands that indicate black Americans, Hispanics, and Asians (which includes Pacific Islanders in the NSF-supplied data I use). But racial equity is far from attained.

To really get a sense of these dynamics, it’s helpful to look at specific groups historically and to look at groups overall in proportion to their share of the U.S. population. Consider the following data for 2007:

What this table shows, interestingly enough, is that the proportion of white Americans declines as you look higher up the degree structure. That goes against a typical demographic principle of social hierarchy, according to which a more culturally dominant group is better represented at higher levels of the social scale. (We saw an excellent example of this in looking at gender in anthropology, earlier this fall — even though men are a minority of anthropologists, they are increasingly well represented at higher educational levels.) However, it seems in the data that the lower representation of whites at higher levels, like the doctoral level, should not necessarily be understood as a promising sign of racial equality. Rather, the dip in relative white dominance seems related to the huge number of foreign students who appear at the MA and above all at the PhD level, where they constitute the largest demographic bloc (16.57%) after American whites. Very few foreign students come here for anthropology BAs (1.36%), but they do seem to come here for, in essence, upper level professional training.

Distressingly, we can also see in this data that blacks and Hispanics (the two largest American minority groups) are radically underrepresented at all degree levels in proportion to their share of the population. And their presence in anthropology is not constant across degree levels: there is a noticeable drop between the fraction of blacks and Hispanics who get BAs and the fraction who get graduate degrees. Worth noting, on the other hand, that Asian-Americans and American Indians are quite well represented in proportion to their fairly small fraction of the American population. I tend to suspect that class is a hidden variable in the relative success of Asian-Americans, since they are (at least ostensibly) better off in the American class system, but the NSF’s national statistics are beautifully and outrageously silent on the question of students’ class origins. So that has to remain pure hypothesis for the time being.

To get a clearer image of the slow decline of general white dominance, you might consider this:

The overall pattern — where bachelors being the most white, doctorates relatively the least white, and masters are in the middle — appears to have been fairly constant throughout this data, in spite of the masters’ line fluctuating somewhat between the two. The overall spread seems fairly consistent; whatever sociological processes lead certain sets of white people to go into anthropology appears somewhat consistant. If we look at the situation for black Americans, however, we can see a strikingly different sociological picture:

This one I had to format in terms of absolute numbers instead of percentages, since at very low absolute numbers, small changes translate into large proportional changes and the graph becomes unreadable. But actually, I think it’s helpful to have the absolute numbers here. They serve to remind us that in the United States, a country with some 34 million black inhabitants, the discipline of anthropology, which ostensibly prides itself on its progressive understanding of race, is graduating barely two dozen black anthropologists per year. You can see it here with your own eyes: the PhD line in this graph is just barely halfway to the line that would mark 50. And the number of MAs is above that, but pretty similar. To depress you a little and bring the point home, if in 2004 there were 34,772,381 black Americans (per the Census data linked above), and the same year there were 26 new black anthropology PhDs, that works out to one new anthropology PhD for every 1,337,399 black Americans. By contrast there was in 2004 one new (white) anthropologist for every 551,183 white Americans — that’s more than twice as much, though of course still tiny. (Anthropology, I can’t stress enough, is still a tiny field in a large world.)

Now, it seems to me that a very interesting demographic phenomenon here, and a striking departure from the parallel lines on the graph of whites above, is the fact that black Americans are in fact growing quite substantially as a fraction of the anthropology bachelors’ population — the population has almost doubled since 1995 – and yet things seem to be changing very slowly at the doctoral level. Of course, there can be a time lag between these two lines — if more of group X suddenly get more BAs, it would still take that same group of new BAs most of a decade to get PhDs, if any of them want to — and yet I’m still struck by the extremely low numbers at the graduate level. Still talking about black anthropologists, then, one does notice a climb at the PhD level from 5-6 (total for the year) in 1995-6 to a couple of dozen on average this decade, but at the master’s level, things are about constant. As we know, affirmative action is not doing so well these days; and although we can guess that diversity fellowships play a role in the small increases we do see, it’s hard not to think that it’s radically insufficient.

(I guess this is the time to acknowledge that it’s possible that things are not as bad as they seem; the “unknown” category in this data is quite large (7-9% of all anthro degrees), far larger than the black or Hispanic category, and so I suppose it’s at least likely that there are greater numbers than get reported. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough yet to do a proper error analysis of this data.)

In lieu of a conclusion, let me just note that it would be good to look at racial statistics among American anthropologists at large, on the AAA membership, on graduate students (are there major race-related selection effects that function within graduate education? it seems quite possible)… I can’t do that now, but I would love to have thoughts on what else might be worth examining. Other disciplines? Other countries? But for the time being, I confess I find this set of data somewhat disheartening. There’s progress towards racial equity, but it’s slow, and not enough.