Claiming Status: How Working State Jobs Mediates French Caribbean Women’s Experiences of Othering

This chapter examines the tension between the ideal of equal treatment that the French state professes to advance in its management of public jobs and the processes of subordination and othering its racialized workers’ experience. It analyzes 14 biographical interviews conducted with Caribbean women who work or have worked in public health and elderly care facilities in the Paris region. Using data from the French Labor Force Survey, the chapter also contextualizes the occupational positions and career trajectories of the interviewees, in particular, comparing the occupational positions of Caribbean women with those of non-migrants and other migrant groups in metropolitan France. This method allows for capturing specific dimensions of both institutional and everyday racism, focusing on the interpretations of the interviewees, as well as the performative value of their discourses. While Caribbean women may consider public care facilities as protective spaces, they also encounter racism and colonial persistence in the workplace. Both their interactions with patients and their subordinate status in relation to higher-ranking, mostly-white civil servants contribute to such a mechanism. Yet, these women put discrimination at a distance, highlighting relational skills that reaffirm their professionalism and femininity, while avoiding or even reversing the stigma of racism.