Berkley Center

On Monday, November 24, I woke to the news that Officer Darren Wilson of the Ferguson Police Department in Missouri had not been indicted by a federal grand jury on the charges of shooting and killing an unarmed Michael Brown on August 9. I devoured my Facebook newsfeed, looking to gather every detail from the articles and videos shared by my friends. After a solid hour of reading, I put my face in my hands and cried.

In that moment, Michael Brown stopped being an individual and became a metaphor for all black men in America. I thought about my dad, my uncles, my cousins, and my best friends and was so frustrated that I had the audacity to be studying abroad in the wake of a pivotal moment in American history! At the same time, I also had an earth-shattering realization: as a black person, I’m probably more respected here in France than back at home in the States.

Now is that a polarizing statement? Yes. Is three months in a country long enough to make this kind of assessment? Maybe not. But one has to realize that no facts, figures, or examples in opposition to this claim can negate my lived experience as a black woman.

To start with, France and the United States have obviously different histories with black people. France was a colonizer in Africa and the Caribbean, with blacks only starting to live in mainland France in the late nineteenth/early twentieth centuries. The United States, however, took slaves from Africa and has had black inhabitants since the beginning of the seventeenth century. European political leaders, pseudo-scientists, and philosophers had been classifying blacks as inferior for ages; but chattel slavery in the United States was revolutionary in the sense that it literally transformed human beings into objects and forever changed the perception of people of African descent around the world.

Fast-forward to present-times, and while things certainly have changed for the better, the ugly history of the past still manages to manifest itself in both popular opinion and political systems. In context of the globe: every single society has a pathology of colorism--in which those of fairer complexion are highly valued and those of darker complexion are discriminated against. But in context of my comparison, these are some observations I have made... In France, my blackness will not inhibit my ability to receive equal medical, legal, or even customer service; the same is not true in the United States. In France, my blackness will not be the basis of judgments made about me (a common occurrence here) because my self-presentation, attitude, and intelligence speak for themselves; the same is not true in the United States. In France, my blackness does not determine how likely I am to live or die; the same is not true in the United States.

I fully acknowledge that France has a more homogenous and self-segregated society than the United States, so it is difficult to compare their experiences with race relations. But there is something to said for a country that openly promotes equality at the expense of diversity--rather than a country that openly promotes diversity at the expense of equality.

We associate good with white and evil with black because it is a dualism that has existed in Western culture for so long, it is now subconscious. And for the purpose of my argument, all non-white people are in a sense, black—because they do not represent the “norm” or the “standard.” So because we live in a modern world that developed from Western (read: white) civilization, the problem of blackness around the globe is that people of color, who actually exist in the majority, have never been fully respected by the minority and are in a constant battle to secure equal footing.

The good news is four of the five fastest growing economies are non-White nations: Brazil, India, China, and South Africa. Economic power is certainly an effective step towards leveling the playing field, but I believe that a change in perception is the only way to solve the problem of blackness. I said in a previous post that the power of ideas can be used as weapons of mass destruction or agents of change. Here is to hoping the world will grow tired of the destructive idea of “black as evil,” because I certainly am.