Michèle Lamont

Princeton University

*This research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Russell Sage Foundation, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the Marshall Funds of the United States, and the Institute for Advanced Study. It has also benefited from grants f rom the Center for International Studies, Princeton University

This chapter concerns definitions of cultural memberships used by working class men in France and the United States. It identifies alternative logics of social segmentation that are at work in French and American societies, focusing on categories through which members view one another as significant others who share fundamental moral worldviews and/or cultural traits. I draw on 150 in-depth interviews conducted with low-status white collar workers and blue-collar workers residing in the suburbs of New York and Paris to explore in an inductive manner the symbolic boundaries through which they define "people like us." More specifically, I analyze the symbolic boundaries that workers trace when they are asked to describe the kinds of people they like and dislike, whom they feel inferior and superior to, and whom they are similar to and different from. In the process, I identify the differences that are at the center of individual maps of perception as well as the differences that are not salient in t he way people discuss worth, status, and indirectly, community membership. The result is a comparative sociology of models of inclusion/exclusion that operate on the basis of different status cues, such color, class, and immigrant status.

This research reveals two institutionalized national "models" of social segmentation: One could argue that the French model is more Durkheimian in that it combines strong external boundaries and weak internal boundaries. For French workers, "us" includes all the French, but with increasing frequency, "les français de souche" only, while a large portion of the men I talked to view immigrants--reduced here to Muslim immigrants--as unable to assimilate to a universalistic French culture. The poor and blacks are still included in the definition of the French "us," as understandings of the social bond structuring French society continue to downplay internal divisions and to emphasize humanitarianism, collective responsibility towar d indigent fellow citizens, as well as a certain universalism qua republicanism. In contrast, American workers draw moral boundaries against the poor and African-Americans in the name of work ethic and responsibility; immigrants who partake in the American dream are more easily made part of "us" than African-Americans, although anti-immigrant boundaries are present in the interviews.

Analyzing these models is particularly urgent in a context of mounting neo-liberalism and racism, which both entail a narrowing of bonds of solidarity. Both models involve exclusion, but boundaries are structured differently across cases. In particula r, the relative decoupling of racism and blackness in the French case sheds light on the American case by putting it in perspective.

We will see that the "imagined communities" I document are not primarily framed in political terms: in France as in the United States, workers use moral and cultural arguments about differences and similarities to define "people like us. " They refer to the struggles of their own daily lives, which are central to their own concept of self, and judge negatively others whom they perceive as not meeting basic moral standards (in terms of work ethic, sense of responsibility, perseverance , etc.) In the worldview of many of these workers, moral, racial, and class boundaries work hand in hand to provide them a space for self-worth and dignity.

For the purpose of this chapter, I am concerned with national differences, and neglect intra-national variations. In fact, I am more concerned with national differences in the repertoires of argumen ts about worth and boundaries, than with the individuals who are articulating them. Without entering into a detailed discussion of the connections between mental maps and the cultural and institutional environment in which they are found (below I occasion ally use the undertheorized notions of "fit" and "resonance" (Schudson l992) to discuss these connections), in the context of this paper, I will simply offer a snap shot of the boundary patterns privileged by French and American worker s. The full picture is provided in Lamont (2000a).

Before encountering the data, I should add a few words on my method and approach (for more details, see the methodological appendix). Too often, scholars interested in identity predefine one of its aspects as particularly important and discuss it on t he basis of anecdotal evidence. In contrast, my approach is resolutely inductive: I draw on in-depth interviews to reconstruct the symbolic boundaries or mental maps through which individuals define us and them. From there, I identify the most salient principles of classification and identification that are operating behind these definitions. I asked people I interview to describe their friends and foes, role models and heroes, and likes and dislike s. I also asked them to describe the types of people, abstract and concrete, toward whom they fell superior and inferior and similar and different. Hence, I tap criteria of categorization and evaluation, and by extension, criteria used to define self-ide ntity. Thereby, I can reveal the natural order through which workers hierarchalize others when, for example, they declare that, of course, it is more important to be honest than refined or that money is not a good indicator of a person's value.

In a Durkheimian vein, Jeffrey Alexander (l992, 291) argues that "members of national communities often believe that 'the world,' and this notably includes their own nation, is filled with people who either do not deserve freedom and commu nal support or are not capable of sustaining them (in part because they are immoral egoists). Members of national community do not want to 'save' such persons. They do not wish to include them, protect them, or offer them rights because they conceive them as being unworthy, amoral, and in some sense 'uncivilized'." In contemporary France, these unworthy people are primarily the growing number of Muslim immigrants originating from North Africa, as "Islam marks the frontier of what is foreig n." (Kastoryano 1996, 63).

Between 1960 and l974, the majority of immigrants to France came from North Africa (Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia), and they arrived often under temporary permits directing them into the worst-paid, least-desirable jobs in manufacturing, mining, and pu blic work. These immigrants were a visible minority who, after l974, could establish their families in French soil. Their numbers grew rapidly and they represent now 34 percent of the immigrant population, and 5 percent of the population living on French territory. They concentrated on the outskirts of major cities where they encountered a variety of problems--crime, drugs and alcohol abuse, alienation--associated with poverty and poor housing. Many French citizens came to blame social problems and unempl oyment on foreigners, by which they generally mean North Africans. A sense of competition and the breakdown of traditional working class culture eventually translated into xenophobia and calls for repatriation of non-Europeans (Wievorka l992). This moveme nt amplified and resulted in a major breakthrough when in the l984 European parliamentary election, the Front National whose main program was to oppose immigration, received more than 11 percent of the vote. This party, which now regularly garners 15 perc ent of the French electorate (Perrineau l991), laments the disappearance of the old white and culturally homogeneous France, one where neighborhoods were safe and truly French, where popular culture and collective identity coexisted in an organic way, und isturbed by the mores, smells, and bizarre clothing of non-European immigrants (Mayer and Perrineau l989).

In the interviews I conducted, a sizable portion of native French workers draw strong boundaries toward North Africans, and in doing so, they use three primary types of arguments:

First they are viewed as lacking in work ethic and sense of responsibility, and as having access to a larger share of the collective wealth than they are entitled two. This is particularly unbearable to workers because it violates their sense of group positioning (Blumer 1958). Interestingly, whereas American workers condemn blacks for their lack of self-reliance, French workers are angry that immigrants are favored by a disloyal paternalist state, at a time when the quality of life and education in wo rking class neighborhoods is perceived as being in steady decline.

Second, French workers draw boundaries against North Africans on the basis of their lack of civility: they spit in front of people, never apologize, are rude, and lack respect for others. They also have barbarous mores (e.g., they kill goats on their balconies at Rammadan). They destroy French quality of life and should go back home.

The third and most fatal failing of North African immigrants is their inability or refusal to assimilate, which violates Republican ideals, and is perceived by workers as a major threat to their personal and national identity. Republican ideals include the Jacobean notions of equality, universalism, and national unity. These ideals negate particularism based on religion, locality, race, corporate membership, and birth. They also presume a voluntaristic or contractual approach to political partic ipation: anyone can join in the polity as long as they assimilate and come to share a same political culture. That North Africans are perceived as refusing this contract (by resisting assimilation) invalidates their right to reside in France. I n contrast, throughout French history, other immigrant groups have not been as intensely stigmatized, because they were perceived as assimilating quickly (through the army, unions, schools, or left-wing political parties), or as being there only temporari ly (Noiriel 1988). This refusal to assimilate is particularly resented because being French is one of the most high status aspects of workersí identity, and because French political culture defines this republicanism as quintessentially French, and even a s one of the most sacred contributions of the French nation to the world.

Whereas French intellectuals and social scientists often stress the role played by republicanism in limiting racism in France (e.g., Régis Debray, Alain Finkielkraut, Pierre-André Taguieff, Dominique Schnapper), in fact, this sacred cultu re draws a clear line between in-group and out-group, i.e. between those who shared it and those who do not. It simultaneously creates strong external boundaries and downplays internal stratification bases within the population that could act as alternati ve identity bases (including race and class) by making assimilation a sine qua non to social membership.

It is largely because they are Muslims that North African immigrants are construed by native French workers as either particularly resistant to assimilation, or as unable to assimilate. Indeed, as Muslims they are described as fundamentally other , and in some cases, as culturally incompatible with the French (in contrast American racists do not use culturalist arguments as exclusively, resorting also to historical, biological, and psychological arguments (see Lamont 2000b). In the words of a rail way technician:

Undoubtedly, this rejection is linked to the defense of a "true French culture" that is threatened not only from the inside by foreigners but also from the outside by Americanization. . Moreover, colonial notions of Franceís "mission ci vilisatrice" and of French superiority remains present in the mind of many workers, especially when it comes to barbaric former African colonies. Elements of these available cultural repertoires are appropriated by French workers to reinforce bou ndaries against Muslims: differences in the degree of their religious involvement are downplayed, and even "beurs" (i.e., second generation children of immigrants) who have French citizenship are widely perceived to be immigrants.

The importance of immigrants in the boundaries that the French interviewees draw is particularly remarkable when compared with the place that these men give to alternative bases of community segmentation in their discourse on "the other," and part icularly the place they give to racial others (mostly blacks) and to the poor.

Interviews strongly suggest that race is not an important basis of exclusion among French workers. Indeed, very few workers mention race when drawing boundaries, suggesting a decoupling between racism and blackness that is surprising from an American p erspective. Two interviewees pointed to the laziness of blacks, and one brought to my attention the absence of racism, offering as a piece of evidence the fact that as French citizens, black Martiniquais and Guadeloupains are by right and de facto fully and equally included in the national collectivity, again on the basis of Republican ideals. A recent survey showed that when asked which category of immigrants poses the greatest difficulty for integration, 50 percent of the French res pondents identified North Africans, far more than the 19 percent who pointed to Black Africans or the 15 percent who named Asians (Horowitz l992,19). Less recent survey data consistently provide evidence that negative feelings toward North-African immigra nts are much stronger than negative feelings toward blacks, toward European immigrants, or toward other racial minorities.

A number of factors combine with the culture of Republicanism to create weak boundaries against blacks, as compared to North Africans: 1) Most North Africans are first or second generation immigrants. Blacks are more heterogeneous: while some are rece nt immigrants from Sub-Saharan African, those from the Dom-Toms have been French for several generations. This works against defining "us" in opposition to "blacks," and partly trump the low status of blacks as formerly coloniz ed people. 2) Blacks living in France are more heterogeneous religiously than North Africans--for instance Senegalese are predominantly Muslims while the Congolese are Catholic--which also works against institutionalizing a clear distinction between " ;us" and "blacks." While North Africans include a small Jewish population, they are often presumed to be homogeneously Muslims; 3) Muslims are more salient to French workers because they constitute a larger group than blacks (again, they ma ke up almost five percent of the French population as compared to less than two percent for blacks). 4) The process of decolonization was much more peaceful in French Sub-Saharan Africa than in North Africa, which sustained less negative stereotypes of bl acks than of North Africans; and 5) Historically, a sizable proportion of black African immigrants came to France to be educated. This population was of a more elite background and was more assimilated than many North African low-skilled workers. Their pr esence worked against negative views of blacks, at a time when low-skill black Africans had less easily access to French shores than their North African counterpart due to geographical distance.

The arrival of a rapidly increasing number of West African immigrants might be undoing of this relative dissociation between blackness and racism. In particular, the policy of family reunification that was put in place after 1974 brought in large numbe r of African families, which made Muslim African migration more visible in part by focusing public attention on polygamy and traditional female genital mutilations (Barou 1996). Nevertheless, overall, the combined characteristics of blacks living in Franc e work against a clear polarization between "Frenchness" and "blackness" in a manner unparalleled for North Africans. Racial "others," such as Asians, have had a very successful assimilation. They contribute to the playing do wn of racial differences as a basis for internal differentiation within French society.

French workers also downplay the internal segmentation of their society by integrating among "people like us" individuals located in the lower echelons of society. Indeed, they rarely express feelings of superiority toward the poor . These categories of individuals are often simply relatively absent from their descriptions of boundaries. A detailed analysis of the interviews suggests that the majority of the French respondents are indifferent toward or silent about the poor, while t his is the case for only a quarter of the American workers (a majority of them draw boundaries against the poor). Also, a number of French workers explicitly express solidarity toward people below them in the social structure, drawing on a vocabulary of c lass struggle and class solidarity to point that "we are all wage-earners, we are all exploited." References to welfare recipients and the unemployed are often accompanied by critique of the capitalist system. For instance, a bank clerk says, "I think it is unacceptable that some people are unemployed while others can work as much as they want." A wood salesman concurs when he says that market mechanisms should not determine salaries, and he concludes, "all workers should be reasonably well paid." L ike many others, this salesman opposes classical liberalism and its invisible hand because it is inhuman and penalizes the weakest. Social welfare is not in question, the undue protection of foreigners who are not truly part of the collective "us" is.

Republicanism, Christianism, and Socialism all provide elements of cultural repertoires that favor such weak internal boundaries by stressing the importance of social solidarity among citizens (independently of race), among the poor, and among workers, respectively. Along these lines, when asked to choose, from a list of traits, five qualities that they find particularly important in others, a third of the French workers chose solidaire or égalitaire, in contrast to less tha n a fifth of their American counterparts; also, while none of the French chose "successful," again a fifth of their American counterparts did. French workers often reject of social climbing in the name of personal integrity; to it are opposed notions of t ogetherness, "partage," and egalitarianism. They frequently have negative attitudes toward money and power, which they most often experienced as something that is coercive, repressive, and disempowering. They often describe the upper half a s exploitative and dehumanizing, suggesting that class, and the discourse of class struggle, remains very salient in their worldview (contra Ulrich Beck (1998) and others).

In the mind of many American workers, social and cultural membership remain largely equated with being white and being at least lower middle or working class. Indeed, while the French workers I talked to did not draw strong boundaries again st the poor, the opposite is true in the United States. Although a number of American interviewees are critical of the upper half for their moral failings (Lamont 1999), they more often evaluate people on the basis of their "success" and more readily draw boundaries against individuals below themselves on the socioeconomic ladder, as compared to the French. They often resort to arguments having to do with work ethic and ambition in doing so. For instance, Frank Thompson from Hempstead, Long Island, says t hat if he had to draw a line to distinguish superior and inferior people, he would draw it against "some people out there I think that could do better and don't try. There's nothing wrong if you don't want to become something, but don't blame somebody e lse for it." Also, a worker from Linden who does not have a college degree says that he feels superior to "people who have no control over their lives. If a person just does nothing to help themselves, I'm very hard on these people."

The interviews suggest a close association between moral and class boundaries in the United States. While the literature has clearly documented the association between poverty and irresponsibility, laziness, and lack of self-sufficiency (e.g., Katz l98 9), my interviews reveal similar constructs. For instance, after declaring proudly that he is a diehard Republican, one of the men I talked to explained that being Republican means "Don't give anything for nothing. Incentive . . . Go get a job . . . [We should not] make it so easy to stay on unemployment, on welfare." Another explained that he is a conservative Republican because he does not "like people who try to take advantage of things and take, take, and give nothing back." These men are angry that they have to pay so much in taxes to support the poor who "don't work at all and get everything for free." They more often stress traditional aspects of morality (e.g., the Ten Commandments and the defense of traditional work ethic) than the F rench. When asked to choose, from a list, traits that they disliked most, half chose "lazy" in contrast to a fifth of their French counterparts. Moreover, when asked to choose five traits that they appreciate nine out of ten respondents chose "responsible ," and half chose "hardworking" in contrast to, respectively, half and a fifth of the French.

Letís now turn to American racism. When asked to whom they feel superior and inferior, the majority of American interviewees constantly and subtly shift from moral to racial boundaries, drawing both at once, and justify racist attitudes via moral arguments. The rhetoric they use to draw boundaries against blacks resembles that they use to reject the poor: they stress their alleged lack of work ethic and sense of responsibility. They also point to their inability to educate their children properly , particularly in moral matters. Again, they accuse blacks of "getting away with murder . . . with things that I wouldn't even think of doing." (civil servant). They view African-Americans as "having a tendency to . . . try to get off doing less, th e least . . . possible as long as they still maintain being able to keep the job, where whites will put in that extra oomph" (electronics technician). Another electronics technician summarizes the way many perceive the situation when he says:

I work side by side constantly with Blacks, and I have no problem with it . . .

I am prejudiced to a point . . . What is a nice way to say it . . . I know this is a

generality and it does not go for all, it goes for a portion. It's this whole

unemployment and welfare gig. What you see mostly on there is blacks. I see it

from working with some of them and the conversations I hear . . . A lot of

the blacks on welfare have no desire to get off it. Why should they? It's free

It may be white thinking, but, hey, I feel it is true to a point . . . You hear it on

TV all the time: "We don't have to do this because we were slaves 400 years ago. You

owe it to us." I don't owe you shit, period. I had nothing to do with that

and I'm not going to pay for it . . . Also, I don't like the deal where a black person

can say anything about a white, and that's not considered prejudice. But let

a white person say even the tiniest little thing about a black person, and

bang, get up in front of Reverend Al Sharpton and all the other schmucks. That's bullshit. That's double standard all the way along the line.

This passage illustrates how for some American workers, class, racial, and moral boundaries work hand in such a way that the community of "people like us" is defined very narrowly and certainly excludes blacks who are largely constructed as living off working people. That boundaries against the poor and blacks in the United States are so strong is undoubtedly related to the fact that these two groups are associated with one another (in contrast, in the French context, the long-term unemployed are most ly white French workers who are victim of economic restructuration.) Hence, in the United States, blackness and poverty trace the limits of social membership, and this trend is likely to become more accentuated as we move toward an opposition between all non-blacks and blacks (Gans 1999), and this, despite the centrality of egalitarianism in American political culture (Lipset l979; Tocqueville l945).

In this context, immigrants, and particularly caucasian immigrants who attempt to achieve the American dream, are easily made part of "us" (Lieberson l980). These immigrants still hold a privileged place in the country's collective self-image in part b ecause this country is first a country of immigrants. Indeed my interviews suggest that, in the words of Michael Walzer (1992), the United States remains a "nation of nations" where external boundaries remain relatively weak. When describing th eir mental maps, few workers point to immigrants, and when they do, it is rarely to single out their moral failures. Some point to failure to assimilate, and are slighted by what they perceive to be a lack of desire to learn English among immigrants. Howe ver, they tend to be more concerned with the dangers this represent for the decline of the relative status of the nation, than for immigrantsí moral character. National surveys also show that in the early eighties, the percentage of Americans who did not perceive immigrants as "basically good, honest people" was only around 20 percent, and the percentage who did not consider them as hardworking was only 18 percent (Lapniski, Peltola, Shaw, and Yang l997, 367). Moreover, Espenshade and Belanger ( l998)ís survey analyses reveal that if Americans have negative feelings toward immigrants, these are ambivalent and not strongly held.

Stronger boundaries toward immigrants might be found in states with larger immigrant population (although New Jersey and New York are among the states with most immigrants) and in regions where the black/white polarization is mitigated by a multi-racia l demographic composition. Also, recent debates about Latino immigration may suggest that we have entered a new phase of xenophobia (which is confirmed by increases in the percentage of the population that expresses negative attitudes toward immigrants--s ee Espenshade and Belanger (1998) and Lapniski, Peltola, Shaw, and Yang (l997)). Although I do not want to downplay the importance of this recurring feature of American society, I would contend that because of its history, by definition, the United States cannot adopt strong external boundaries whereas in France, such strong external boundaries are facilitated by a social contract articulated around the clearly demarcated and shared political culture of republicanism.

This brief sketch of the boundary patterns that prevail in France and the United States still begs qualification and raises a number of questions. However, in a nutshell, it does suggest the presence of somewhat contrasted models in which moral boundaries play a key role: in France, strong boundaries are erected toward Muslim immigrants whose culture is viewed as fundamentally incompatible with a universalistic French culture while immigrants who can become French (e.g., Italians, Hispanic s and Portuguese) are taken in as members of the collectivity (Noiriel l988). Simultaneously, boundaries against blacks and the poor are downplayed in the name of French universalism and a view of morality that stresses solidarity, egalitarianism, and hum anism and is influenced by Christianism, socialism, and republicanism. In contrast, in the United States, we find strong moral boundaries drawn against the poor and African-Americans on the basis of responsibility and work ethics while immigrants who part ake in the American dream are made part of the collective "us." In general, immigrants are much less salient in the boundary work of American workers than it is in that of French workers. Furthermore, when they are critical of immigrants, American worker s condemn less their moral character than the fact that they bring down the status of the United States when they refuse to assimilate.

Analyzing how workers define worth and cultural membership is particularly pressing today, in our era of neo-liberalism. We know that national welfare systems reveal implicit rules about conceptions of merit and social citizenship that vary across s ocieties. Yet, conceptions of moral communities and cultural membership that underlie policy choices remain under-examined. Using the tools of cultural sociology, I attempted to get at moral communities by focusing on the schemas of evaluation used by ord inary citizens. National social policies are more likely to be adopted if they resonate with conceptions of the boundaries of the community that citizens upheld. Moreover, boundary ideologies also have a powerful impact on the agenda of political parties and the electoral strategies they use. Hence we must study these conceptions if we are to make sense of some of the most important social and political changes that we are facing today, at a time when community boundaries appear to be narrowing and when p rinciples of solidarity seem to apply to an increasingly small number of "people like us." That French and American workers adopt contrasted models for defining their imagined community suggests that national differences remain strong despite g rowing trends toward globalization and the celebration of post-nationalism.

In the United States, I talked with sixty stable blue-collar workers who have a high-school degree but not a college degree. This includes thirty self-identified African-Americans and thirty self-identified Euro-Americans, who were, when poss ible, matched in terms of occupation and age. I also talked with fifteen Euro-American low-status white-collar workers. They were randomly selected from phone books of working class towns located in the New York suburbs, such as Elizabeth and Linden, in N ew Jersey, and Hempstead on Long Island.

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