Introduction

1The purpose of this article is to analyze the categorization processes and social uses of racial stigma employed by young people in disadvantaged neighborhoods. The analysis is based on a comparative ethnography conducted between 2006 and 2011 in a boxing gym in the United States and a Thai boxing gym in France, respectively located in marginalized urban neighborhoods of New York and Paris. These spaces were the target of contradictory public policies that included both social measures (“lien social” [social cohesion] and “empowerment”) and law enforcement (“tolérance zero” [zero tolerance] and mass incarceration) (Wacquant 2009). Due to the homology of their position in the class, ethno-racial and spatial structures of their country, the young people living in these spaces were, and still are (Roux, Purenne and Talpin 2023), the object of stigmatizing categorizations that interweave social dynamics of race, gender, and class. The boxers who participated in the study were also likely to be labeled as deviant, and even more so because they compete in a combat sport perceived as violent, practiced by Arab and Black minorities with a reputation for violence, sexism, and homophobia (Guénif-Souilamas and Macé 2004). Not only are the competences acquired by boxers rarely, if ever, perceived as a cultural resource (Oualhaci 2019), they are also delegitimized and redefined according to stigmatizing (“sport de racaille” [sport of scum]) and racializing social traits.

2The main goal of this study was to analyze and compare racial domination and urban marginality in France and the United States, and to understand how this domination is reflected in bodily practices. Racial domination is understood as the historical and social process of differentiation and hierarchization, according to which some identities are established as universal, legitimate, and without negative markers, while other identities are produced as racialized, minoritized, and socially disqualified otherness. It involves processes of identity classification, naming, and ascription that transform historically and socially constructed differences into essentialized and naturalized properties. Racial domination thus contributes to solidify social and symbolic boundaries and legitimize inequalities (Essed 1991, Guillaumin 1972, Barth 1969). This article focuses on how categories of racial domination are constructed and (re)deployed in contrasting ways in France and the United States, highlighting the unique features of each context as well as what they share, by linking these categories to the social processes that produce them.

3The first section of the article presents the comparative ethnography and analyzes how the process of racial domination is re-enacted within racialized groups. The second section identifies the ways in which boxers and coaches embody and activate racial classifications; the weight of institutional and political contexts on the (re)production of these classifications; and finally, the multiple social uses of racial stigma by these racialized minorities: racial domination is embodied and naturalized, but it can also be challenged by the social uses of its stigma.

1. A comparative ethnography of racial domination and its categorizations in action

4The comparative ethnographic study carried out in France and in the United States aimed, in part, to analyze the frameworks by which boxers perceive, classify, and interpret performance differences, as well as the social and racial ascriptions specific to their sport. The comparison was based on the principle of controlled similarity: in both countries, the study was conducted in gyms with comparable characteristics in structure (urban location in a marginalized neighborhood, amateur and competitive categories) to make the situations observed analytically comparable and to isolate the effects of different national configurations. Conducted over an extended period (six years), the study mainly involved participant observation of ordinary ranking situations: assignment of sparring partners, informal assessments of skill level, comments on bodies and performance, roles assigned by coaches, and interactions outside of practice (in locker rooms, during travel, and during recovery). These scenes were systematically recorded in field notebooks and served to identify the emic categories used, the conditions in which they were activated, and their concrete effects. Special attention was paid to the modes of expression (euphemisms, reformulations, and silences) by which racialized differences became more or less visible depending on the national context. Biographical interviews supplemented the observations and were used to reconstruct the boxers’ athletic and social trajectory, but also, based on observed situations, to uncover the interpretive frameworks behind the actions.

5The heuristic value of an ethnography of bodily practices such as boxing is twofold. First, it allows for an analysis of the embodiment of social norms into actions. As in any educational activity, the transmission of fighting skills in boxing gyms involves the embodiment of classification systems and categories of perception of the social world. Second, the ethnographic study allows for an observation of the strategies—the modes of action and behavior—by which racialized individuals belonging to the working class attempt to reintroduce social honor (Weber 1978: 934) into boxing, which is viewed negatively by the dominant groups. The study also sought to empirically question one of the fundamental dimensions of racial power dynamics, both in France and in the United States, which is the categorization of bodies by assigning phenotypic markers to racialized individuals—and especially those belonging to the working class—that largely reduce them to their bodily dimension and devalue their intellectual capacities.

6Boxing gyms are especially enlightening fields of ethnographic research for investigating the processes of naturalization of bodily competences, by which socially produced dispositions are perceived and legitimized as natural individual qualities both by practicing boxers and those unfamiliar with the sport. While research about boxing shows that training sessions are a means of bodily and moral socialization based on repetition, discipline, self-control, renunciation, and controlled exposure to violence (Wacquant 2000), these codified combat sports (Gaudin 2009) generate essentialized interpretations of performance based on categories such as “gifted” (Schotté 2012), “mental strength,” or “natural toughness.” These understandings of the sport’s practice and performance obscure the socialization processes that produce these competences. Racial categorization is one of the core principles involved in these classifications. Our ethnographic study of boxing revealed these processes and highlighted the discrepancy between, on the one hand, the intense efforts required to produce and embody boxing skills and, on the other hand, the emic categories used to explain differences in level and performance. The naturalization of fighting skills is, in fact, inseparable from social dynamics of class, race, gender, and the forms of symbolic domination that permeate sports (Azzarito and Harrison 2008).

7This process is further strengthened by its association with forms of classification tied in part to colonial and post-colonial dynamics, and it contributes to the production of symbolic hierarchies among boxers (Jobert 2006a). The boxers interviewed in the American and French context sometimes referred to this historical legacy, identifying with a racial group, and associating racial categories with fighting skills, while at other times, they distanced themselves from forms of essentialization and even challenged them. Boxing therefore provided a paradigmatic field for analytically distinguishing naturalization from biologization in athletic skills because it allowed for the observation of distinct and often confused symbolic operations.

8Naturalization operates first and foremost as a common principle for understanding and coding performance, according to which socially acquired dispositions—endurance, combat intuition, tolerance to pain, or controlled aggressiveness—are perceived as “natural,” without any need to associate this perception with an explicitly biological register. The impression that this operation is obvious is produced by the integration of competences and abilities while overlooking the socialization effects of boxing. Biologization, however, introduces a specific explanatory register based on biological and pseudo-scientific references (morphology, muscle fiber, and genetic predispositions) that seeks to legitimize performance differences that have already been naturalized (Gaudin 2017). Our ethnography of boxing showed that the biologization of competences did not precede explanations of performance and was not systematic, but it often followed and was associated with naturalization. Biologization thus reinforces the legitimate and self-evident nature of athletic and social hierarchies, and it applies these hierarchies to a classification of bodies presented as natural.

9The broader perspective offered by an international comparison between two different fields of research provided a better analysis of how young men socialized in segregated disadvantaged neighborhoods perceive the racial stigma of being labeled “racaille” [scum] and experience life in a dominated social position on a daily basis. This approach provided an understanding of both the classification logics specific to the world of boxing and how they are cognitively and practically implemented in each national context. This analysis of the racialization of athletic skills shifted the focus to boxer classifications that transform socially produced differences into naturalized hierarchies solidified into practices and representations, which could nevertheless be blurred and even challenged. Therefore, the aim of this article is to show how young men in disadvantaged neighborhoods assimilate racial domination dynamics, how they interpret them, and how they adjust them to other social factors, namely social class, gender, and age. The study focuses on two intertwined categorization processes. The first is the process by which the respondents (boxers and coaches) categorize themselves by being the target and carrying in their body the stigma of racial power dynamics. The second process is how the same respondents use racial stigma to socially categorize others, highlighting similarities and differences between the United States and France.

2. How boxers refer (or do not refer) to racial classifications

10In the boxing field, racialized classifications are imposed on boxers by their coaches, peers, clubs, federations, and, more widely, specialized media (Jobert 2006b, Wilson 1997). In France, these institutions tend to euphemize racial categories, referring instead to technical and social criteria that make racialization more implicit and subtle, and thus more difficult to identify. In the United States, however, racial classifications are more explicit—codified by the history of segregation, the environment specific to each sport, and specialized media (Wiggins 1988)—and they directly influence performance visibility and legitimacy. Alongside this, boxers use and reinterpret categories inherited from other social contexts to develop their own principles of racialized self-classification. They use these cognitive frameworks to find their place in the hierarchy, to anticipate assessments, and sometimes to contest or escape imposed classifications. A dynamic intersection of these logics reveals that racialization, naturalization of competences, and the questionable nature of classifications are co-constructed in interaction but deployed differently depending on the national context. In France, they are more often contested indirectly or symbolically, while in the United States, the opposition can be more visible and explicit. This mechanism produces a differentiated embodiment of racial domination, where hierarchies, norms, and stereotypes are neither simply imposed nor simply internalized, but where they restructure practices, dispositions, and social trajectories. An analysis of these inter-related dynamics shows that racial domination is reproduced in a situated manner by combining social ascriptions with subjective frameworks. The analysis also reveals the strategies used by respondents to adjust, avoid, or affirm an identity and to negotiate their place in the social space.

2.1. Boxers’ self-categorization

11Boxers’ racial self-categorization can be analyzed as a process produced by the combination of social, physical, and interactional mechanisms. The dispositions inherited from different socialization processes within their family, school, and sports lay the foundation for their perception of themselves and others and determine how bodily competences are interpreted as “natural,” thus contributing to the naturalization of performance and the implicit legitimization of hierarchies. Boxers also mobilize and reinterpret racial categories inherited from other social spheres to strategically situate themselves and negotiate their place within local hierarchies, both in the boxing gym and in their neighborhood. In concrete interactions during training sessions and competitions, this type of framing is activated, adjusted, and sometimes contested, giving rise to situated classifications that do not necessarily overlap with those produced in the family, school, or professional environment. The latter are recycled and recontextualized in the boxing field, where they produce contingent forms of hierarchy legitimization or contestation (Majors 1990), and reveal the plasticity of power dynamics and incorporated norms.

12French respondents referred more frequently to the “quartier” [neighborhood] as the place where they live, emphasizing an attachment to the working class and racialized minorities, and less often claiming a racial identity. American respondents also referred to their neighborhood, but more often explicitly referred to racial categories as categories of practice, sometimes intersecting the two frames of reference: racial and territorial. The American neighborhood in the study was perceived as “special” by the boxers, who claimed that it gave them a certain strength drawn from its tough environment. They used bestial language to describe it, speaking of “animals” and “ferocity,” or a military language, referring to “warriors” and the need to “go into battle,” but also a sense of community: all these neighborhood attributes allowed them to become good boxers, who are “hungry.” American boxers tended to describe themselves as “hood nigga,” while the French respondents used “mecs de cité” [guys from the projects] or “mecs de quartier” [guys from the neighborhood]. Racial power dynamics nevertheless had an impact on the daily lives of French respondents, especially when, like the American respondents, they temporarily left their neighborhood and faced individuals and groups who viewed them with prejudice and treated them with discrimination (Anderson 2021, Druez 2016). The very frequent use by French and American respondents of expressions such as “frère,” “fréro” [brother], “gros” [fatty], “son,” “nigga,” and “bro” shows that they mainly referred to two principles of identification (Brubaker 2001): first, the importance of the peer group rooted in the neighborhood and the intensity of the relationships entertained there, a sense of shared life experiences and of a common social destiny; and second, the awareness of belonging to a racialized minority (Du Bois 1994). The study showed that the boxers’ and coaches’ processes of self-categorization did not totally escape categorization by others, who ascribe them to a dominated position, even if self-categorization was sometimes associated with a challenge of the racial or territorial stigma. Self-categorization was thus trapped in a mirror process with other-categorization, contributing to racial domination.

13In France, while coaches considered boxers’ references to religion during training sessions irrelevant, arguing that only hard work in practice improves skills, and while dietary restrictions were sometimes mocked (see below), many boxers identified as Muslims and referred to their regular religious practices. In contrast to the “moral panic” (Cohen 1972) surrounding Islam and Muslims (Hajjat and Mohammed 2013) observed by some, and even in response to it, the Muslim boxers’ relationship to Islam was untroubled. Even though the stigmatization of Islam has contributed to the otherization and essentialization of Muslims and individuals perceived as such (Brubaker 2013, Galonnier 2019), for the boxers, being a good Muslim and demonstrating it in an ordinary way contributed to the performance of their identity and the construction of their local respectability. This was the case for Ayoub, a young Algerian who had been living in France for five years at the time of the study. Compared to the other boxers with strong local roots, his social resources were limited, and he compensated by showing discipline, willpower, endurance, and energy during practice and by emphasizing his religious practice. Once, for example, at the end of a training session, he interrupted an extended conversation with a very good boxer by quickly mentioning that he was going to the mosque and did not want to be late for evening prayer.

2.2. The importance of the institutional and political context in racial socialization

14Each of our two fields of study has a different national and local historical and institutional context. In the United States, this context creates an institutional and cognitive framework that encourages forms of categorization and identification as a racial group, while in France it tends to discourage such practices. In the United States, racial categories are state and bureaucratic categories established through the population census (Nobles 2000). These categories of practice are marked by a highly binary Black/White structure that has remained relatively stable historically. Thus, individuals are likely to experience all three main dimensions of racial categorization during their lifetime: self-identification, bureaucratic categorization, and ascription based on phenotype. In France, racial categories are less institutionalized than in the United States and less stable historically, but they remain categories of practice even though they are not recognized as such (Beaman and Petts 2020, Bonilla-Silva 2003). At minimum, they function as cognitive frameworks for understanding the social world through racially based distinctions. While it is generally accepted that biological races do not exist, the naturalization of purportedly irreducible cultural differences remains firmly entrenched. Institutional practices involving racialized classifications are nevertheless a reality, notably in housing allocation (De Barros 2005). These practices reintroduce categorizations inherited from the colonial empire (Nasiali 2016) and continue to shape contemporary life (Palomares and Roux 2021). In the neighborhoods studied in the United States, there are no local policies explicitly aimed at combating athletic activities that target a single racial category. This contrasts with the area studied in France, where the elected official responsible for sports—himself Black—explained the town’s policy regarding what he calls “communitarianism” in an interview:

I mean, our way of fighting [against communitarianism] is to say: “I mean, a club has to welcome everybody living in our area”; second, we refuse, and in that respect it’s very clear, we refuse new clubs created with the same purpose as an existing one. They can be created, but we won’t welcome them in our facilities. What I mean is that at some point, you can’t have ten clubs for badminton, a Comorian badminton club, and Indian club, etc. I’m not interested in that. There’s just badminton. If you’re Comorian, I don’t care; it’s none of my business, you just go to the club. That’s what we tell them very clearly. […]

15The American respondents identified more frequently with a racial group that they could link to a territorial identity. Lamar mentioned, for example: “I did some stupid things when I was younger, but now I’m trying to rebuild my life. If I make it in boxing, I’ll never forget the people in my neighborhood.” He clearly claimed that he wanted to help the people in his neighborhood and in his racial group: “I’m connected to people, [through boxing], who can help me climb up the ladder. As soon as I have information, I pass it on to the neighborhood. The Blacks leave their neighborhood and let it die. The other races help each other out. I want to do the same thing.” According to him, “there’s too much hatred among Black people. As soon as one Black person does something good, another Black person is going to hate him.” Like Lamar, American respondents not only internalized racial categorizations but also played a part in racial socialization, even when it aimed to resist racial domination. Tyler, who considers himself Black, strongly believes in the ability of the members of the Black community to improve their condition, at least he hopes so. He tries to get involved in his own neighborhood or in causes specific to the African American community. He believes that he owes a debt to his neighborhood and is aware of the “problems” that it faces, and he wants to “give back to the community” and improve the social climate there. He once participated in an event in another poor African American neighborhood of New York City. A boxing ring had been installed in a town square, and Tyler gave the children boxing lessons. He was “glad to give some of his time to the children” and maybe “give them a taste for boxing,” adding that boxing could help them “be more self-confident.” Tyler’s idea of being Black was based on ancestry, which is a common racial categorization in the United States (Davis 1991). It blurs differences and variations within the group but is also based on a community of experience. Boxing is perceived here as the means to provide young people in poor, mostly Black, neighborhoods with the bodily and psychological competences needed to face situations of racial domination, and implicitly class subordination and spatial segregation, which, according to him, undermine the self-confidence of poor Black individuals. Boxing is how he can “give back to the community” and be part of it. Boxing is thus a means of racial and class socialization in the sense that his commitment is intended to transform the living conditions of poor Black New Yorkers. “Giving back to the community” is one way of engaging in an exchange of goods and services, as Carol B. Stack (1974) has shown, based first on race, then class, and finally the neighborhood, the community in which Tyler redistributes, in his own way, the boxing competences acquired within his community.

2.3. Categorizing others and dealing with stigma

16The boxers’ bodily and language dispositions develop through repeated interactions in public spaces (calls, stares, evasive and controlling maneuvers, and jokes), during which their bodies are constantly evaluated, interpreted, and categorized. In France, these interactions occur in a public space where racial references are often euphemized, which encourages implicit naturalization of differences. In the United States, the more explicit salience of racial categories in public interactions makes the corresponding body and language adjustments more visible. While boxers associated with racialized minorities were very likely to be essentialized, they themselves used forms of self-categorization, as seen before. They also sometimes categorized others, especially in the context of fighting, where some of them associated physical characteristics and abilities with a specific racial group, which was observed more often in the United States than in France. Tyler, for example, claimed that: “Mexican fighters are tough. They have hard heads, they hit hard, but they have soft bellies. But they also have a lot of heart, they keep coming.” Conversely, other American respondents dissociated boxing skills from racial categorizations and emphasized the importance of social position, challenging the commonly held belief that African American boxers are naturally more gifted or better boxers than others. Darrell claimed that minoritized boxers were good fighters, “tough,” not by essence, but because they come from disadvantaged neighborhoods and have been socialized to live in difficult conditions that they are now trying to escape:

It’s because they come from poor background you know, with a poor background no matter where you’re coming from. You come from a poor European background you gonna be a tough fighter cause you try to fight your way out of that. You come from a poor Latin American background, you’re gonna be a tough fighter cause you gonna fight out of poverty, you know. And the African American guys wherever in the ghettos, it’s the same situation, they all try to fight their way out of the ghetto, the Latinos are trying to fight their way out of el barrio, the Europeans are trying to fight their way out of their poverty situation, you know, and that makes you more hungry. You become good because of that, it’s not having anything to do with race.

17Interviews in the French field of research did not reveal comments that associated boxing and bodily capabilities to a racial group as explicitly as those of Tyler in the United States. On the contrary, respondents tended to avoid particularizing boxers. They erased phenotypic or at least morphological differences and claimed, for example, that their opponent was just a man like any other, “with two arms and two legs,” and that no reason prevents them a priori from beating him. Everything suggests that this difference can be explained, in part, by the fact that they have internalized the coaches’ constant emphasis on a work ethic and a more egalitarian discourse. However, associations between hexis, racial ascription, and fighting skills could be observed more clearly in real-life situations than in the interviews.

• 1 Translator’s note: “Renoi” is a French slang word for “Black”, formed by reversing the syllables of (...)

At the end of a Thai boxing training session, two coaches are talking together. Both are Black. Alain is skeptical about the skills of the boxers he has just watched. Aimé, the other coach, with a very muscular and sculpted physique, has just congratulated the “team,” made up of beginner and intermediate boxers with diverse phenotypes, after an intense sparring session in the ring. To qualify Aimé’s praise of the boxers, Alain says: “Yeah, but they don’t have your body! How long have they been training? Look,” he says, pointing to a young Black boxer who is tall, about 6’3, and quite slim, and has just helped put away a punching bag. Aimé answers: “Yeah, but at least he’s not fat.” Alain replies: “Yeah, but look, ever since he’s been back from vacation,” pinching the young man’s belly fat, “he went to Tunisia, and I don’t know what they fed you, Renoi1 [Nigga], but they tricked you!” The young boxer does not answer but smiles, perhaps out of respect or agreement with Alain’s words.

18Alain expects all the boxers on this “team” to be more muscular, as a sign of proper training and to show that they have acquired sufficient muscle tone to be explosive in combat. This example demonstrates that this physical capital is associated with a racialized categorization of a Black boxer’s body and practices by ascribing biological characteristics to him that associate Black phenotype with muscular power (Ezell et al. 2021, Saperstein 2012).

19Although less prevalent than among American respondents, certain forms of racial categorization and identification could be found among the French respondents.

A group of boxers from Bainville, a disadvantaged suburb of Paris with a very heterogeneous population, arrive in the 13th arrondissement of Paris to support their gym’s boxers participating in a competition. A dozen of us decide to buy drinks in a local supermarket on the ground level of high-rise buildings resembling social housing. The boxers are surprised by the imposing presence of these buildings. Bastien, surprised to see social housing downtown Paris, exclaims: “We leave the cité [social housing project] only to find more cités in the middle of Paris!” Nabil adds that he has “never seen so many Chinese, even in Bainville!”

20“Chinese” here refers to the “Asian” phenotype, since it is impossible for Nabil to spontaneously distinguish people of Chinese descent or nationality. The 13th arrondissement in Paris is racially marked in common representations as the “Chinese neighborhood,” even though only 11.9% of the Chinese of the greater Paris region live there and they are, in fact, poorly represented, compared with 24.5% in the 19th arrondissement (Attané, Chuang and Wang 2023). Some of the young boxers had never been to Paris before and probably had very few opportunities to encounter a “cosmopolitan canopy” (Anderson 2012). Their presence in the capital for the first time gave them the opportunity to question the morphological difference between Paris and the suburbs, a difference based on both the class position and racial ascriptions of their residents, which they previously took for granted and which have contributed to their vision of the social world.

21Both the French and American respondents were aware of being institutionalized as a problem (Du Bois 1994) and this awareness sometimes caused them to develop destigmatization strategies. These strategies stopped short of passing for another category but included practices such as language hypercorrection when they were in more affluent spaces, outside their neighborhood, or in government offices where they immediately received suspicious looks.

Omar says: Honestly, I’ve been through that, to be checked three or four times during the day, sometimes by the same team. I tell them: “Yeah, are you having fun?” [The Police officer:] “Yeah, but we’re just doing our job,” [Omar:] “You did it an hour ago!!” You did it an hour ago, why do you have to do it again? Honestly, it’s annoying, it’s irritating, it’s irritating, it’s irritating. You know that some people live in other more residential areas, and they’re never checked, while you, because you live in a neighborhood, in a social-housing project, you’re going to be checked fifteen times. Honestly, it’s annoying…

Interviewer: or at the supermarket, the security guard…

• 2 Translator’s note: “Caillera” is a French slang word formed by reversing the syllables of “racaille (...)

Omar: [spoken almost at the same time] …the security guard, yeah, to be followed by the security guard. Yeah, that’s happened to me several times. It’s the same thing; it’s annoying to experience that every day. You go somewhere, the way you’re dressed, they’re going to look at you: “Yeah, him, he’s from the suburbs, he’s gonna start some shit,” they expect you to start shit. People expect you to do something. They have a lot of prejudice and in the end, it’s happened to me several times going to the administration or even to Paris. Well, it’s true that at the time I looked the part of a guy from the projects with a hoodie or cap, little Cartier glasses [smile], it’s funny when you come and you start to talk, they expect me—I don’t know—to come and talk like caillera2 [scum]: “Yeah, excuse me” [he changes the tone of his voice and talks in an excessively polite way] and I would say: “Hello, excuse me,” I would talk like that, calmly and kindly: “Excuse me, I would like…” with a formal language and everything, and I could see in their eyes that they were a little like: “Well, it’s okay, this savage knows how to talk!” Basically, that’s the impression I had, and afterwards when you say: “Thank you, have a good day, goodbye,” they answer: “Yeah, thanks to you too,” but you could tell that they were surprised by the way you were talking. Based on your looks, actually, if you talk to them like caillera [scum], for them, it would be easier than if you talk to them correctly, that’s what’s a little bit sad. They say that you can’t judge a person by their looks, but I think that actually you can; unfortunately, you can judge a person by their looks in the world we live in today. Just look at what they’re doing with the full veil right now, you can judge a person by their looks.

22One frequent way respondents found of dealing with stigma of a racial nature was to use humor or irony. In the following excerpt from field notes, a boxer uses a form of self-deprecation when speaking of his relationship to Islam. The episode reveals an ordinary and untroubled approach to religion, as mentioned above. Religion was almost unnoticeable within the gym and very rarely addressed in the interviews (Omar was one of the few to say: “I might say a little doua [prayer] before stepping onto the ring before a fight”). In this excerpt, the boxer talks about some snacks, saying that even if they contain pork, he would eat them, even though everybody knows that they do not contain any:

At the end of practice, Seb, the club champion, celebrates his recent victory in a high-level fight. The boxers arrive one by one as Seb sets out the drinks and snacks: Curlys [peanut-flavored chips], cheese balls, Coke, Oasis [fruit juice], and Iced Tea. Aziz helps himself without waiting for the others, who are still in the locker rooms. Omar jokingly tells him that he is starting before everyone else, and Aziz answers that it’s time for prayer and that he has to go to the mosque. Aimé asks him if the snacks are halal, then laughs and says: “I asked him if they were halal, he [Aziz] pulled a face!” Still joking, the boxers hint that the snacks have pork in them, and Fouad, laughing, says to Karim: “I don’t give a damn if there’s pork in it!” [Fieldnotes, June 9, 2010]

24Alain’s rhetoric contrasted with and coexisted alongside the coaches’ usual discourse claiming that the club is “a family” where everyone is equal. The allusion to underwear at the swimming pool defined what a body should be, how it should be presented, and its social uses. It highlighted the inequality between those who have the cultural skills to behave correctly and those (the racial group identified as “Renoi”) who supposedly lack the abilities expected in this space (i.e. knowing how to swim and wearing the appropriate clothing).

25The study conducted in France shows how racial categorizations are blurred, unstable, and ambivalent, and how stigma is embodied in racial socialization. It also shows that the respondents can adopt strategies to distance themselves from the stigma, especially its racial component, and challenge it.

Conclusion

26The different aspects of the respondents’ categorization processes, as well as the categorizations imposed on them by other individuals and social groups, reflect the struggle for a legitimate definition—both symbolic and political—of bodies and bodily representations, and therefore, by extension, a redefinition of boundaries between social groups. The respondents’ socialization into boxing followed at least two contradictory logics that both essentialized and de-essentialized the bodies of racialized boxers. The boxers showed signs, adopted bodily attitudes, and were involved in a series of practices that manifested their social status and ascribed or claimed racial identity. In specific situations, they also racially categorized others. In both fields of study, while less so in France, socialization into boxing in a closed and homogeneous environment from a racial standpoint nurtured (de)racializing logics at the intersection of categorization processes and social uses of bodies (Boltanski 1971). Boxing gyms are performative spaces that create and reactivate racial characteristics associated with combat sports. Paradoxically, during practice, the respondents performed their racial ascription in the sense that they enacted one of the components of the stigma attached to them, which is a natural propensity for fighting and for basic forms of physical violence—which is precisely what boxers must renounce—and a supposedly natural muscularity.

27The social interactions that developed in the boxing gyms investigated were partly the result of racial and socio-spatial segregation, yet they served to smooth over social differences between boxers. Significant symbolic efforts to achieve group cohesion produced observable effects, notably a decline in social domination by providing respondents with space, time “for themselves,” and symbolic resources. Within this relatively closed environment, boxers were thus partially and temporarily protected from external judgments and sanctions and, each to varying degrees, were valued. When coaches engaged in these symbolic efforts from one practice session to the next, they were able to de-emphasize a whole range of social characteristics, forms of identification, norms and practices, such as petty criminality or religion in the French context, while highlighting and encouraging those that they deemed essential or pertinent within the gym, such as work ethic, merit, endurance, solidarity in France, and leadership in the United States. However, these symbolic practices also involved contradictory processes: rankings, categorizations, divisions, hierarchies, and judgments within the group that sometimes reproduced essentialized social positions and racialized ascriptions imposed on these young people by the world of “others” and by local officials (administration officials and police officers).

28The bodies of racialized boxers have a paradoxical effect. While boxing provides these boxers with the cultural resources and local respectability that should prevent them from being essentialized, their physical characteristics trap them in a system of representations and classifications that essentializes them, assimilating them sometimes to “racailles” [scum], sometimes to boxers who may be talented but “good for nothing else,” uneducated and violent. Through these processes, the combat sports practiced in the disadvantaged neighborhoods investigated in this study contribute to reproduce the foundations of racial domination. The respondents are reduced by others to the condition of young, low-income, racialized men who value the body over the intellect, when they are not accused of deviance. The boxers themselves consider their practice as a “school of life,” a “lifestyle,” a “mixture of emotions,” a “science,” a “game of chess,” based on knowledge, strategy, reflexes, in short, a social world that makes sense, socializes them and gives them agency within their own social trajectory. Ultimately, for young people in disadvantaged neighborhoods who “perform their race,” these dynamics reflect both the reproduction and challenge of racial domination.