Europe needs new means to fight discrimination – Thomas Piketty

While the trial of the murderer of George Floyd opens in the United States, identity conflicts intensify in Europe and France. Instead of fighting discrimination, the French government led by Emmanuel Macron has launched into a race with the far right to hunt for professors of social sciences and the alleged Islamo-leftism in universities. It is also a serious matter because instead it would be urgent to create a true French and European model for combating discrimination. A model that accepts the reality of racism and is able to analyze and correct it, while placing the fight against discrimination in a more general context of social policy with a universalist vocation.

Let’s start with the question of analyzing racism. Many researches have shown its diffusion, but at the moment there is no observatory of discrimination that guarantees continuous monitoring of the facts. In France, the advocate for rights (the independent authority to combat discrimination) has pointed out in his reports discrimination in the labor and real estate markets, but does not have the means to carry out systematic monitoring. For example, in a 2014 study sponsored by the Montaigne Institute, researchers sent fake resumes to employers in response to around 6,231 job offers and looked at how many job interview proposals they received. When they used fictitious names of Muslim origin, the answers were very few. Jewish names were also discriminated against, but to a lesser extent. The problem is that this study has not been updated and therefore no one knows if the situation has worsened or improved.

In France and other European countries there is an urgent need for an observatory to tell how these indicators evolve each year. It is also essential to measure where discrimination is concentrated. Like anti-Semitism or homophobia, Islamophobia is not a fatality and can be overcome. The discrimination observatory, which could be placed under the authority of the advocate of rights, should also ensure the annual monitoring of discrimination within companies (salaries, promotions, training, etc.). For this reason, questions about the parents’ country of birth must be introduced in the surveys for the census. Without these indicators, it is impossible to fight against discrimination.

The point is that all this can be done without introducing ethnic categories such as those used in the United States and the United Kingdom according to the principle of positive discrimination, the unequal treatment in favor of those who belong to a minority. The problem is not so much that this is prohibited by the French constitution but rather that using similar categories would run the risk of crystallizing mestizo identities, without their effectiveness in the fight against discrimination having been demonstrated. Since these categories were introduced in the British censuses in 1991, discrimination has not decreased in the UK compared to other countries. Furthermore, there is confusion in the answers: half of the people born in Turkey, Egypt or the Maghreb consider themselves “white”, the others “Asian” or “Arab”. If no European country has repeated this experience, perhaps the reason is not just that no one cares about discrimination in France, Germany, Sweden or Italy. Introducing questions about the parents’ country of birth in the censuses would allow for progress.

More generally, positive discrimination policies developed from ethnic categories in the United States or the United Kingdom, caste in India or territorial in France are often hypocritical. They make it possible to clean one’s conscience inexpensively, neglecting to finance the public services essential to break the cycle of inequalities.

As Asma Benhenda showed in her book All good teachers (All good teachers) The average salary per teacher in France grows in proportion to the number of socially advantaged students in an institution. In other words, the meager production bonuses given to teachers who work in schools in the most disadvantaged suburbs are not enough to compensate for the strong presence among them of precarious or inexperienced teachers. When a thousand scholarships are created in the university preparatory schools without increasing the resources for the millions of disadvantaged students in the various university paths, it is only encouraging an education system based on strong inequalities. We must give ourselves the means to fight against discrimination, but above all we must support universal social policies, without which the path towards equality will remain an illusion.

(Translation by Federico Ferrone)