Quotes of the Day (James Baldwin and Christiane Taubira, on race in Europe and America, 1951 and 2008)

“The European image of the black man rests finally, one must say, on ignorance, and however expedient this ignorance may be, it is sustained by the objective conditions; whereas the American image of the Negro has been created out of our terrible experience, and it is sustained by an anguished inability to come to terms with that experience, or to conquer the guilty fear and shame which have been its quite inevitable and self-perpetuating legacy. This heritage deprives us entirely of the kind of racial innocence which one finds in Europe. Europeans can blacken their faces with cork because the black man as a human being has no reality in their lives. He is not one of them. But he is one of us—and from this reality there is no escape.”—James Baldwin, “The Negro at Home and Abroad,” The Reporter, November 27, 1951, in his Collected Essays (Library of America, 1998)

“France needs to learn from what is happening with Obama. The U.S. population has grown with Obama, they have overcome their prejudices….Such an experience is impossible in France.”—Black politician Christiane Taubira, former Presidential candidate of the Left Radical Party, quoted in Max Colchester, “France Rethinks Relations With Minorities,” The Wall Street Journal, November 6, 2008

(On November 11, 1948, using what was left of a Rosenwald fellowship, the 24-year-old Baldwin departed for Europe with a one-way ticket, eventually settling in France. The aspiring novelist-essayist had to get out of the United States, he felt, or else racism would not only crush his development as a writer but also strangle him with self-hatred.

It’s safe to say that the author of the urgent 1963 meditation on America’s civil rights crisis, The Fire Next Time, could not even have conceived of Barack Obama winning the Presidency. Judging from the running commentary throughout the last election, neither could most of the European intelligentsia. The victory of the Illinois senator, however, is now forcing serious rethinking of whether Europe is as open as so many have always claimed.

Consider the following facts outlined in Colchester’s article:

* Only three of the 36,000 elected mayors in mainland France are black;
* Only one member of France’s National Assembly is black;
* There are no black chief executives at major French companies;
* There are no black ambassadors.

All of this, lest we forget, in a population with 10% African or Arab roots, courtesy of its own longtime significant colonial presence, and in a nation that did not, finally, extinguish slavery for good until 1848—only 15 years before Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.

We’ve had a Tocqueville, a French observer examining Democracy in America (or two Tocquevilles, if you count Bernard Henri-Levy’s self-conscious recreation of the earlier Frenchman’s trek in American Vertigo). Now, how about a Tocqueville in reverse—an American analyzing the structure of French society to see how well, in an age of rising minority population, the latter nation that prides itself on “liberty, equality, and fraternity” has been living up to its revolutionary ideals?)