URBAN OUTCASTS - STIGMA AND DIVISION IN THE BLACK-AMERICAN GHETTO ANDTHE FRENCH URBAN PERIPHERY

This article contributes to a comparative sociology of urban inequalit y and ethno-racial/class exclusion by means of a contextualized analys is of the social and mental structures of immobility and ostracization in the Parisian working-class banlieue and Chicago's Afro-American gh etto. The first part of the paper addresses territorial indignity and its disintegrative consequences upon the fabric and form of the local social structure. Analysis of the powerful stigma that attaches to res idence in an area publicly recognized as a 'dumping ground' for poor p eople and downwardly mobile households reveals die symbolic dispossess ion that turns their residents into urban outcasts. The second part ta ckles the social divisions and bases of conflict operative within thes e stimatized neighbourhoods and identifies some of the factors that ac count for the pervasiveness of a dichotomous racial consciousness in t he American Black Belt and for the lack of potency of ethno-racial dis tinctions in the French Red Belt despite their discursive proliferatio n in the public sphere. This comparison highlights the distinctively r acial dimension of inner city poverty. in the United States and sugges ts that colour segregation, especially when it is tolerated or reinfor ced by the state, radicalizes the objective and subjective reality of urban exclusion and intensifies the cumulation of urban dispossession.