Ni**as in Paris

 Ni**as in Paris is the title to a popular rap song by Jay Z and Kanye about their time spent during Paris Fashion Week. The lyrics describe the freedom and weirdness of being there. The lyrics to the song speak to the experience of NOT being treated like a ni**a despite being a ni**a in Paris. The ‘n-word’ is ugly and offensive and was long tied to the identity of black Americans. We were ni**as and every negative connotation associated with the word and treated as such. So what would cause a ni**a to seek respite in the city of lights? How does a black American become a Ni**a in Paris? 

Now, if you’re an avid Pinterest recipe user like myself, you’re accustomed to these long intros but still screaming, “GET TO THE RECIPE ALREADY!”

So here it is:

• *400 heaping cups of structural racism

• *15 cups of lynching

• *9 tablespoons of Jim Crow Law

• *3 or 4 teaspoons of several wars that don’t benefit or improve your life in America

And there you have it! Ni**as in Paris!

 According to Blackfacts.com, up to 50,000 free blacks emigrated to Paris from Louisiana after Napoleon sold the territory to the United States in 1803, and after WW1, around 90% of the 200,000 black G.I.’s brought over to fight, stayed in France as a result of the stark contrast in treatment of African Americans in Paris compared to the United States. Paris became home to well-known artists and writers like Eartha Kitt, James Baldwin, Josephine Baker and Nina Simone and still draws artists like Lenny Kravitz. I know what you’re thinking...It’s PARIS! Who wouldn’t want to call Paris home?! Well, I remember watching Sydney Poitier in the movie In Paris Blues, and he’s trying to convince other black musicians that Paris is the place to be, but the whole time I’m thinking, “Didn’t you see the human zoos?”  Surely of the 250,000 black migrants to France, at least a few had heard of the human zoos and especially about Sarah “Saartjie” Baartman .

 

 So how could black Americans walk past such an atrocity and still set up shop in Jazz clubs in Montmartre? Because in Paris, the black American wasn’t the ni**a. The human zoos were filled with people from the 6 colonies owned by France at the time, and the people on exhibition reenacted life back home- a home not familiar to black Americans. 

The disconnection to Africa and its people by black Americans, and their desire to move to Paris, is a perfect illustration of what Avtar Brah, in Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities, describes as, “a homing desire which is not the same thing as desire for a ‘homeland.”  Brah notes this as an important distinction “because not all diasporas sustain an ideology of ‘return.” Why didn’t black Americans flee to Paris instead of Nigeria? There is no part of Africa black Americans could have returned to that would have felt like home despite African countries being their place of origin (and really, everyone’s place of origin, but that’s a blog for another day). Paris, however, was not as far removed from them. African Americans in Louisiana up to the 17th century were steeped in French culture, so the move to Paris once Louisiana became a part of the United States, was an easy one.

 The disconnect between the black Americans and the Africans in Paris can also be linked to Rey Chow’s arguments around nativist discourse in what Chow calls “the activity of watching” which is “linked to projections of physical nakedness” and is “a primary agency of violence.”  Black people, in America, are the natives on display- in fields picking cotton, being followed while shopping, or negative projections of black Americans on television-, but in Paris, the black person is no longer on display (because they are not the ‘native’), but instead, their Americanness is on display with intrigue. On the other hand, the African is the native on display. The issue of nativism revolves around the stereotypes and expectations of a particular race, and to Parisans, the black American is what Tyler Stovall, author of Paris Noir: African-Americans in the City of Light, describes as “ a sort of privileged minority, a kind of model minority, . . .—a group that benefited not only from French fascination with blackness, but a French fascination about Americanness.”

The matter of nativism between black Americans and Africans continues to be a large topic of discussion between the two cultures because just as I wonder about the ‘expat’ black American seeing the human zoos, I wonder about the ‘migrant’ African within the confines of the zoo seeing the black American roaming freely.

In truth, both the black American jazz player and the African migrant were refugees seeking asylum from the harsh conditions of their ‘native’ land. Andrew E. Shacknove Who Is a Refugee? defines  a refugee as someone ‘fleeing life-threatening conditions.’ The Jim Crow south was definitely life-threatening for black Americans, and the Congo was prone to violence at the time, but neither were immediate threats in the way that we typically imagine the conditions that cause refugees to flee their country. What about fleeing without the threat of persecution? Shacknove claims that persecution is only one reason to seek refuge, and it should not be the only reason. If a government is “[absent] of state protection of the citizen’s basic needs,” then they have created refugeehood. 

In 2009, I visited Paris, France for vacation and on a subway platform, two gentlemen turned to me and said, “I’ve never seen a black American before.” I said, “How would you know?”