‘Arabic is for White People’: Racializing Ideologies for Teaching Arabic in France

Abstract (English)

Contested heritage landscapes for Arabic learning in France reveal a fraught duality of
exclusionary adversity and privileged access that evoke a “postcolonial semiotics” (Reyes 2021).
Despite an extensive colonial history with MENA countries and in direct contrast to framing
French language as cherished national heritage, contemporary Islamo-linguistic-phobic
discourses (García-Sánchez & Tetreault 2024) situate Arabic’s place in a post-colonial France
not as part of le patrimoine but rather as aligned with communautarisme or communalism.
Whereas French is cast as productive heritage (Geismar 2015)—integral to le patrimoine and
construed as culturally available to all French citizens—Arabic is often framed as destructive
heritage contributing to religious, ethnic, or cultural enclaves and potentially leading to, in
French President Macron’s words, “Islamic separatism.” Building upon these public discourses,
this article uses lingual life histories (Krosrity 2021) of advanced heritage Arabic language
learners to examine how they navigate these educational landscapes that cast Arabic(s) as both
racialized (suspect) heritage and privileged knowledge for elite “white people” as one student
noted. An ideologically laden diglossic landscape frames Fusha (MSA) as morally superior to
Darija (North African dialect), leading to the simultaneous valuing and de-valuing of Arabic
language learning in France. The “whitening” (cultural bleaching) of Fusha (MSA) depends
upon the racialization of North African dialect(s) as “street language” that is “not even real
Arabic.” However, rather than the supposedly inherent qualities of Arabic variants, such fractal
recursivity (Irvine & Gal 2000) more strongly correlates with the racialization of North African
heritage students who are learning a variety of forms of Arabic in contemporary, post-colonial
France (Das 2016; Rosa 2016).