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Paper short abstract

From Europe’s rhetoric of green exemplarity to ordinary exemptions, what is the role of environmental norms in reproducing whiteness? Drawing on ethnographic research with farmers, from protests to everyday accounting practices, I examine how the racial contract is (re)negotiated in times of crisis.

Paper long abstract

“French farmers are food leaders, not dealers”: these words were posted on Facebook during a protest organized by Coordination Rurale, a rising far-right farmers’ union, in June 2025. In response to the so-called “police of the environment” checking their farms, farmers denounced the criminalization of their practices, claiming they are legitimate and dedicated to the nation’s food sovereignty. In 2024, the Prime Minister raised a similar concern, questioning the necessity for biodiversity inspectors to carry firearms, calling the practice “humiliating” for farmers.

In this paper, I propose to examine farmers’ political demands and relationships with the French State – and to some extent, the European Union – through the lens of institutional whiteness (Ahmed 2012). By claiming that they are not “dealers” and by displaying fraternal solidarity with the (regular) police instead, I argue that farmers are turning their whiteness into an argument to benefit from special treatments by state officials. Drawing on ethnographic research with cereal farmers, I analyze how the conditions of the racial contract (Mills 1997) are (re)negotiated in times of market crises and conflicts over environmental rules, from recent farmers’ protests to everyday environmental accounting practices.

Building on studies that have highlighted the limited power of the French “police of the environment” (Magnin, Rouméas & Basier 2024), I will explore (1) the specific position of farmers within the French State and the European Union, and (2) the ambivalent role of environmental norms in the reproduction of whiteness, from the rhetoric of ecological exemplarity to ordinary exemptions.