Discrimination 3/4

These endless debates about values and laws may well be interesting, but they do not help us to resolve the real problems of everyday life. Theoretical – and idealist – philosophies can, with the best intentions in the world, become real diversionary tactics. Core issues, practices and real life are avoided. We therefore have to promote a ‘philosophy of everyday life’, or in other words an applied philosophy that can evaluate both the content of the law and its psychological and symbolic projections. We need a philosophy of an ‘active we’. The picture then becomes less edifying. The colours fade, and countless contradictions and inconsistencies appear. Nelson Mandela quite rightly remarked one day that the way it treats its ‘minorities’ is the standard by which a democracy should be judged. In doing so, he immediately posed the debate in practical, political concrete and everyday terms. The concept of a minority then becomes both legal and psychological: ‘minority’ status is usually given to those who, in legal, psychological and even symbolic terms, are regarded, either formally or informally, as not being part of the original society, its culture or its ‘collective psyche’. A cultural community whose small numbers make it a minority may also be seen as such in the eyes of the law.

As sociologists from Weber to Bourdieu remind us, we also have to remember that outdated economic and social categories can determine the way individuals are treated in both modern and traditional societies. Discrimination and injustice are primarily, and above all, a matter of ‘social class’, even though discourse now tends to ‘culturalize’ the debates and to turn them into religious issues. Social exclusion, unemployment and the marginalization of the poor, and women, are still the main evils of contemporary societies. There is obviously nothing new about this phenomenon, but the way we approach these questions turns socio-economic and political power relations into the so-called ‘new’ problem of cultural or ‘civilizational’ differentiation. The most disturbing thing is that the unemployed concur with this new reading of social problems and, rather than emphasizing that they all share the same fate of exploitation and poverty, are tempted to invoke the cultural and religious differences between their own marginalization and that of others. Psychology and social and media representations have an unrivalled ability to split the ranks of any potential resistance movement. Religious and cultural factors may well be grafted on to socio-economic realities, but they can never totally replace them: they are aggravating factors in the sense that cultural and religious discrimination can compound social exclusion and make it even more complex. The economic, political and sociological theories that try to explain the mechanisms of exclusion still provide our initial and objective analytic framework. We are still talking about classic relations of domination.

Armed with these tools, we can begin to study the new phenomenon of discrimination on the basis of culture and religion. Anyone who is now poor, ‘African, Arab or Asian’ (or perceived as such) and ‘Muslim’ (or perceived as such) is disadvantaged in more than one sense. In day-to-day life, this may means that he or she faces spontaneous and/or institutional racism in the form of bad treatment and may find that access to jobs and upward social mobility is blocked (representatives of cultural diversity who have reached a certain level are assumed to have reached the natural limits of their competence). The letter of the law says otherwise, but practices are, as we have said, bound up with representations, projections and fears. Structural racism and institutional discrimination set in insidiously, but in the long term they result in a very negative twofold phenomenon. On the one hand, they have an effect on their victims – and they really are the victims of discrimination and injustice on a daily basis – who develop a very negative ‘victim’ attitude. Everything is explained and justified in terms of racism, and not in terms of their lack of competence or their failure to understand institutions and codes. The ‘symbolic majority’, on the other hand, comes to justify unequal treatment in terms of a difference of origins. The result is the normalization, on a large scale, of the stigmatization of the other and a mass racism that recalls the darkest hours of history.

Women and men may well have internalized the four ‘Ls’ principles that should grant them recognition as citizens (respect for the law, knowledge of the language, critical loyalty and a sense of liberty), but they still have to justify themselves and prove that they are not dangerous and are assets to the society in which they live. Citizens ‘of immigrant origin’ who look like Arabs, Africans or Asians are not faced with these problems so often if they are wealthy, musicians or high-level sportspersons . The application of the law and collective representations give them a very different welcome: ‘they belong with us’, and represent us if we like their music and if their talents help ‘us’ to win in sporting contests. Here, we are in the realm of psychology and representations, which is not really surprising given that we live in the era of global communications, of media supremacy and perpetual migrations. We now have to get used to the idea that values and laws do not protect us from anything unless we make the effort to educate ourselves, critically evaluate the information we are given, and learn to understand representations. The means of mass persuasion are so powerful that anything is possible: even the most educated people and the masses are increasingly vulnerable and are potential objects of the most hateful populist campaigns and media manipulations. Sixty years after the ratification of the Declaration of Human Rights, nothing can be taken for granted, and everything is possible. As former Prime Minister Tony Blair once said, ‘The rules of the game have changed.’ That was an understatement. Surveillance, the loss of the right to privacy, summary extraditions, ‘civilized’ torture camps all over the world, places where the writ of law does not run. The normalization of violence appears to have desensitized us, and we are more and more indifferent to the inhuman treatment we see all around us. It is true that we have often lost the ability to marvel at the simple things in life, as a result of either pessimism or lassitude, but we can only conclude that we have also – and to a dangerous extent – lost our capacity for outrage and revolt. Our representations are becoming standardized just as our intellect and sensibilities are atrophying. Our fine laws may still delude us, but they will do nothing to protect us or to promote respect for human dignity unless our conscience does not imbue them with substance, meaning and humanity.