This chapter analyzes the rhetorics of racism and anti-racism used in France and the United States to demonstrate, dispute, and explain the inferiority of North African immigrants and African Americans, respectively. I draw on in-depth interviews conducted with seventy-five randomly sampled white and black workers living in the New York suburbs and with seventy-five white and North African workers living in the Paris suburbs to reconstruct the mental maps and symbolic boundaries through which these individuals define “us” and “them,” simultaneously identifying the most salient principles of classification and identification that are operating behind these definitions, including race and class. These interviews do not concern racism proper, but the types of people the men I talked to say they feel superior and inferior to, and the types of people they describe as “their sort of folks” and “the sorts of folks they don't like much.” In other words, I analyze the rhetorics of racism and anti-racism by focusing directly on how people define their own identity and the identity of their community, or the boundaries through which they distinguish between people like themselves with whom they identify, and others.

In-depth interviews with French and American professionals and managers revealed that they rarely mention race when they describe people they like and dislike (Lamont 1992, chap. 3). However, among workers, this category is very often salient. An example is provided by a firefighter who lives in Rahway, New Jersey.