Didier Fassin, James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science, Institute for Advanced Studies; and Director of Studies, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales-Paris. Part of the LSA Theme Semester "Understanding Race" and "50 Years Later: (R)Evolution of MLK." Sponsors: CES, International Institute.

Although racial discrimination is an established fact in most contemporary societies, it remains frequently an object of denial both from authorities and individuals. The lecture will address this paradox through two case studies. The first one examines the way in which, in recent years, the French state finally recognized the existence of racial discrimination only to surreptitiously elude it again. The interpretation of this shift will be based on Freud's distinction between disavowal and negation. The second one explores the debate, among criminologists and sociologists, about the reality of racial discrimination in law enforcement. The analysis of the scientific claim that differential treatment of the public by the police is not what one thinks it is will suggest the necessity to reframe the problem on new grounds. These cases therefore have a wider significance for both an anthropology of denial and a sociology of discrimination

Didier Fassin is James D. Wolfensohn Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study of Princeton and Director of Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris. Laureate of the Advanced Grant "Ideas" of the European Research Council, he is currently conducting an ethnography of the state, exploring how institutions such as police, justice and prison treat immigrants and minorities in France. His recent publications include :De la Question Sociale a la Question Raciale? (with Eric Fassin, La Decouverte, 2006) and Contemporary States of Emergency (with Mariella Pandolfi, Zone Books, 2010), as editor; When Bodies Remember. Experiences and Politics of AIDS in South Africa (University of California Press, 2007), Humanitarian Reason. A Moral History of the Present(University of California Press, 2011). His last book titled "Enforcing Order. An Ethnography of Urban Policing" is forthcoming by Polity Press. He is currently working on an anthropology of prisons.