The experience of discrimination and citizenship: A study with inhabitants of French banlieue neighborhoods

The article deals with individuals’ experience of ethno-racial discrimination and stigmatization as it occurs through experience with public institutions: the police, school and to a certain extent, urban policies. It documents the nature and salience of these experiences, and shows how they participate in ordinary relations to the state and citizenship. The article reviews the main available qualitative studies, and presents results from a collective research based on in-depth, biographical interviews conducted in six banlieue neighborhoods in France, and three disrupted neighborhoods in other national contexts in 2017 and 2018 (N = 245). First, we present the state of the art (mainly qualitative studies) as regard to the experience of institutional discrimination in different national contexts. Then we show how the experience of institutional discrimination produced by state institutions participates in ethno-racial minorities’ identification processes and relation to the state. The article also deals with the methodological issues of research about discriminatory experiences, and the related empirical strategy or how to build empirical evidence based on in-depth interviews.