The spatiality of racial load: navigating spaces (of whiteness) in Bordeaux (France)

This study examines the (re)production of race and racism in the city of Bordeaux (France) as perceived by fifteen women who have experienced racialization processes positioning them outside of whiteness. Informed by intersectional and postcolonial feminist scholarship, this study sheds light on the nuances, complexities and historicity of the participants’ daily urban experiences. A focus on race and space is particularly useful in race-evasive contexts like France as it helps reveal current material—yet invisibilized—implications of race. The city of Bordeaux provides a particularly relevant context for the study of race and racism given its (obscured)history as a major French colonial harbor, therein illustrating the functioning of French raceless discourses at the local level. The participants were interviewed in Spring 2023 and their testimonies analyzed using thematic analysis (Braun and Clarke 2021). Particular attention was paid to the participants’ racial load (charge raciale)(Dibondo 2024; Soumahoro 2020) and its concrete manifestations in urban settings. Performance, code-switching, and state of hyper-vigilance came to the fore as the participants revealed the strategies they resorted to when navigating the city centre of Bordeaux and spaces of whiteness. The findings also shed light on the inter-sectional positionalities of the participants as simultaneously dis/privileged. The findings thus shed light on the emotional and cognitive work the participants deployed in their everyday lives to deal with shifting positionalities and navigate spaces of whiteness.