By Sonia PlansonSonia Planson is a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Notre Dame and a sociologist of race, immigration, and culture. She is currently working on a book manuscript developing a comparative and cultural sociology of assimilation(ism) in the United States and France. Her other projects include a study of legal citizenship and naturalization law, with a focus on postcolonial migrants in France. and Yannick CoendersYannick Coenders is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Washington University in St. Louis. As a historical sociologist of race, space, and politics, he’s interested in the reproduction of racial difference despite the decline of the colonial institutions that brought it into being. He’s currently finishing his forthcoming book, Dispersal: Governing Against the Ghetto in Post-World War II Europe.

Transnational exchange in scholarship can be both remedial—moving across disciplinary silos and blind spots—and controversial. Transatlantic conversations about race and assimilation are a case in point.

Antiracist thinkers outside and within Europe have, justifiably, critiqued the lack of attention given to race in much European sociological scholarship. More than an oversight, European scholarship about nonwhite populations, nationalism, migration, far-right politics, etc. is often marked by a denial of the relevance of race. In France, for example, prominent social scientists have recently dedicated a book to pushing back against the use of “race” as a category of analysis supplanting social class as their privileged lens (Beaud and Noiriel 2021). This argument is typically paired with the mistaken assertion that the concept of race is a US import and that it does not have analytic utility in European contexts. Of course, this assertion is itself a reaction to existing, if marginalized, scholarship and activism that have demonstrated the continued relevance of race on the European continent (examples of such scholarship in recent years include the work of Beaman 2017; El-Tayeb 2011; Hawthorne 2022; Wekker 2016).

These scholars have also wrestled with the assimilationist politics that are at the heart of Western Europe in lieu of openly racial discourse. Echoing this tenor of scholarship from a rare US vantage point, critical race theorist Moon-Kie Jung (2015) has argued that dominant assimilation paradigms have naturalized processes of racial differentiation by theorizing immigration through taken-for-granted notions of difference and similarity as well as the groupness of populations. Yet critical scholarship theorizing assimilationist politics has mostly centered Europe. Some might perhaps be mistaken to suspect that assimilationist ideology is a European import, contrasting the illusory US melting pot?

Against the methodological continentalism that structures race research, we propose that critical scholarship on assimilation in Western Europe (e.g., Hajjat 2012; Schinkel 2017) can shed light on overlooked continuities with the United States. We couple this scholarly tradition with Philomena Essed’s seminal theory of everyday racism (1991) to show how nationalist discourse about belonging structures the everyday lives of nonwhite populations on both sides of the Atlantic in surprisingly similar ways. We anchor our analysis in Essed’s own interview data from the 1980s Netherlands before extending it to interview materials collected thirty years later with 94 immigrants and children of immigrants from various backgrounds in France and the US.

Across these contexts, we examine “racialized assimilationism”: a discursive formation that essentializes cultural difference and demands migrants’ cultural conformity and adherence to nationalist ideology as a condition of belonging. We focus on its relationship to the denial of everyday racism and theorize two major processes: (1) the responsibilization of nonwhites for their own marginalization; (2) a pedagogy of disavowal. In our recently published article in Ethnic and Racial Studies, we conceptualize racialized assimilationism in depth and exemplify through vignettes how both processes structure the denial of racist encounters that individuals and families experience.

For example, an Algerian professional in Paris explicitly affirms her need to showcase proper “assimilation” as a way to avoid discrimination. She asserts that instances where she was discriminated against based on her perceived alterity are not racist, but a fact of human nature. Thus, she assumes individual responsibility to push back against them rather than “victimize herself”—echoing assimilationist discourse that simultaneously denies racism and makes individuals responsible for overcoming it. Elsewhere in Paris, highlighting the pedagogy of disavowal, a French teacher expresses discomfort when her students attempt to draw connections between histories of slavery, colonization, and Nazism, and dismisses her Black students’ viewpoints as moralistic. By asking her students to espouse her Eurocentric narrative, she teaches them to disavow racism.

But these processes are not confined to the European context. In Chicago, a Nigerian father of two shares comparable views and illuminates both processes. For him, maintaining distinct racial identities is what holds people back, and he actively instills color-blindness in his children as if to inoculate them against racism. This is not for lack of available antiracist frameworks. Indeed, immigrants in the US are more likely to encounter critical discourses on racism, but assimilationism can still disable antiracist interpretations. As our Chicago-based respondent says: “people who patronize me, who want to talk about how Black people are not getting the best and all of that . . . they find out that I’m not an easy customer.” These cases of self-denial of racist experience highlight a particular form of double consciousness that requires bringing together insights from scholarship on both race and assimilation.

If assimilationist politics weren’t already at the forefront in the United States, they now are. The US government has started redefining policy for what it considers desirable immigration with a renewed emphasis on “assimilation.” Take the president’s decision on the first day of the new administration to suspend refugee admissions until their entry “aligns with the interests of the United States,” citing the country’s inability to “absorb large numbers of migrants” in a manner “that ensures the appropriate assimilation of refugees.” In subsequent months, federal agencies proposed policy reforms based on immigrants’ assimilability that stressed “respect for cultural norms” and required classes on “American history and values.” They also advised prioritizing Europeans, specifically those expressing views aligned with the government’s, aiming to alter previous policies that made the country “too diverse,” and thus dysfunctional.¹

At the same time, the US government has been working to curtail entire domains of education and critical pedagogy, notably around race and racism. In this context, it is urgent that we see “racialized assimilationism” for the counter-heuristic that it is. Assimilationist politics are powerful means of quelling antiracist dissent: they shift the responsibility for racism onto its victims and condition their national belonging on expressly embracing nationalist narratives of racial innocence and a denial of their own experiences of racism. By swapping notes across theoretical traditions and comparing cases, we point out a familiar sociological tale: cultural processes can depoliticize inequalities by turning them into matters of individual responsibility. Yet, when it comes to race, transnational continuities are frequently obscured by European and American exceptionalisms that overlook how “racialized assimilationism” is durably shaping racial politics across the Atlantic.

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This post is based on our article in Ethnic and Racial Studies.