Reading Small French Muslim political parties through the lens of Baldwin’s racial innocence

Abstract

James Baldwin’s concept of racial innocence is, at its core, a tool for examining the process whereby a dominant group subjugates another while prominently, proudly maintaining an egalitarian self-image. Rather than merely point to the existence of such a seemingly untenable paradox, Baldwin uses his concept of racial innocence to interrogate how that paradox persists; how it is consciously and unconsciously maintained. In this paper, racial innocence is used to explain the process whereby Muslim political critique based on lived experiences of discrimination and marginalisation in France is rejected – and, specifically, rejected in a way that supposedly reinforces French norms of liberty, equality, and fraternity.