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Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes institutional whiteness through ethnographic research with public officials in Marseille’s banlieues. It shows how colorblind norms, participatory policies, and racialized interactions produce discomfort and self-doubt, contributing to institutional forms of white fragility.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the fragilization of institutional whiteness (Ahmed 2007) through the everyday practices of public officials working in French banlieues. It draws on six months of ethnographic fieldwork with agents responsible for implementing so-called participatory welfare policies in several neighborhoods of Marseille (France), where poor and immigrant residents are concentrated. The study is based on more than twenty interviews with municipal and metropolitan project managers occupying diverse racialized positions, as well as observations of formal meetings and informal interactions with residents, documented through ethnographic drawings focusing on bodies, practices, and spatial arrangements.

First, the paper shows how project managers are caught between a French colorblind context (Mazouz 2021) and circulating activist critiques of race, generating internal tensions over their differentiated legitimacy to intervene in such neighborhoods. It then analyzes how the “new” participatory funding mechanisms they mobilize can be interpreted as strategies to distance themselves from the image of a contemptuous and racist institution that haunts their professional identities. Finally, close observation of encounters between those officials, community partners, and residents reveals patterns of avoidance, discomfort, and emerging injunctions that shape the multiple ways in which these project managers (struggle to) embody the state in their neighborhood encounters.

By examining the emergence of whiteness-related discomfort and its effects on state action in the French postcolonial context, this paper contributes more broadly to extending the analysis of ‘white fragility’ (DiAngelo 2018) to the institutional level.