Abdellali Hajjat

The rising number of racist speeches in the public sphere is a source of concern for French governmental organizations–such as the Ministries of Interior and Justice, the National Consultative Commission for Human Rights (CNCDH)–, antiracist movements and community organizations, above all Jewish and Muslim ones. Many researchers agree that there’s a general unleashing of public "racist speech", to the point that trials related to libel, insult or incitement to hatred have multiplied, in particular against Dieudonné Mbala Mbala, Alain Soral, Éric Zemmour, Marine Le Pen, Ivan Rioufol, etc. Moreover, the number of racist acts has been skyrocketing since the beginning of the 2000s. The available statistical data show indeed an unprecedented increase of racist "actions" and "threats", from 60 in 1979 to 2034 in 2015. Such rise concerns all forms of racism identified by the Ministry of Interior’s statistical system: anti-Semitism, anti-Maghrebi racism and/or Islamophobia and racism against "other" groups.

However, this general trend measured by official statistics has been controversial both from a scientific and political perspective as there is an ongoing public debate regarding the measurement, the interpretation of the data available ("new Arabo-Muslim Judeophobia", "new Islamophobia", etc.) and the State repression (idea of "double standard" in favor of the fight against anti-Semitism). The purpose of our research project is to renew the socio-historical analysis of racism by raising some research questions and appropriate methodology to overcome the intellectual paradoxes of these controversies that, unfortunately, tend to focus on one form of racism at the expense of others, without trying to understand all forms of racism (anti-Semitism, Islamophobia, anti-Arab racism, anti-Black racism, anti-Roma racism, etc.) in a global analytical framework. Instead of segmenting studies on these specific cases and to simply answer the questions that are imposed by the political and media field, scholars of racism shouldn’t just be answering political injunctions and should instead formulate their own research questions independently. The ambition of this project is to carry on a thorough investigation through four dimensions: the repression of racist discourse, the measurement of racist acts, the sociology of the perpetrators and the sociology of the victims.