Racial slurs and social status: Making use of verbatim transcription from the “Cadre de Vie et Sécurité” French national victimization survey

This paper presents a set of results and methods for statistical analysis of slurs. Slurs were reported by victims in the French “Cadre de Vie et Sécurité” (CVS) national victimization survey. A large part of the analysis is devoted to statistical textual treatment of slurs, from the short sentences available in the data. Next the paper explores the relationship between types of slurs and victims’ attributes. The focus is then on ethnic saliency, using an ad hoc methodology. Our main result is that ethnic saliency is linked to social status: people of foreign origin are more likely to receive racist slurs if they belong to a lower status social group.