Racial Gaslighting or Self-Fulfilling Beliefs?

Since Edward Said’s Orientalism (2019 [1978]), postcolonial anthropology has increasingly explored how dominant groups employ stigma against ethnic minorities to uphold and reinforce existing power structures. Robert K. Merton’s well-established concept of self-fulfilling beliefs posits how such subordination is perpetuated through a direct justification using derogatory stigma (1968: 475ff.). More recently, postcolonial philosophers Angelique M. Davis and Rose Ernst (2019) have proposed an alternative framework: ‘racial gaslighting’ analyses how stigma operates to conceal subordination and thereby sustain it. This paper is the first to critically compare the two models and demonstrates how social anthropology can analyse the persistence of subordination through stigmatisation beyond self-fulfilling beliefs, as racial gaslighting. It examines the ethnographic case of police violence and stigmatisation against Parisian banlieue residents in contemporary France. The analysis shows that, although French police officers may justify oppressive actions against banlieue residents through beliefs that render their violence self-fulfilling, actions are heavily informed by power interests, which racial gaslighting identifies as the underlying force sustaining them. The paper further discusses the implications of this for understanding banlieue residents’ experiences of resistance, hegemonic power structures in France, and the potential for systematic change.