ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 provides an overview of the everyday experiences of the respondents in their prestigious higher education institutions. Their accounts corroborate one of the main findings of the scholarship on the mobility experience: namely, there is a ‘price’ to pay for the promise of mobility. Upon admission in places over-represented by members of dominant classes, the respondents are indeed exposed with cultural styles and institutional habitus which commonly silence and negate ways of being they have inherited from their home background. Yet, in the case of racialized class ‘transfuges’, the chapter shows, the ‘price of the ticket’ is not solely rooted in the class divide. It has simultaneously stemmed from mundane racist remarks conflating ‘Arabness’ and Muslimness as durably foreign to, and incompatible with the culture of the French elite. The operation of this multifaceted process of marginalization in the experiences of the respondents is closely examined, along with its gender-specific effects.
