This wasn't a single trip, and I want to say that plainly before anything else, because it changes what the observation is actually worth. I've been to France dozens of times, going back to a job in the early 2000s working for a Parisian, Pierre Fay, at a company called Eyeweb. I studied business French at the French Institute in New York before any of that started. I've taken my own kids there two or three times since. My French was broken the whole way through -- I could speak it, but badly, an American accent I never fully lost, grammar I never fully trusted myself with. And across dozens of visits, not one, I noticed something I haven't been able to shake since. I was treated differently than French citizens from the DOM -- the overseas departments, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana -- were. Differently, and better. Those were people who spoke fluent French, who were French, full citizens by law, no asterisk on the passport. I was neither of those things. And it didn't matter. If anything, it ran the other way.

I want to sit with that before I explain it, because the easy version of this story is the wrong one. The easy version says France was simply less racist than America, and Black Americans figured that out a hundred years ago and started leaving. Josephine Baker left for Paris in 1925 and became one of the biggest stars in France while the country she left behind kept her out of rooms because of her skin. Richard Wright left in 1946. James Baldwin left two years after that, in 1948. Same city, three separate decades, three separate people who didn't scatter to wherever happened to be open to them -- they all went to the same place, on purpose. Eartha Kitt is the harder case in the same arc. She didn't choose exile the way the other three did. She confronted Lady Bird Johnson about Vietnam at a White House luncheon in 1968, and for nearly a decade after that she couldn't get work in her own country. She called herself, in her own words, persona non grata in my own country. She worked abroad because home had closed to her, not because she went looking for somewhere better.

That's real, and none of it is the part I want to correct. What I want to correct is the assumption sitting underneath the easy version -- that France's acceptance of people like Baker and Wright and Baldwin and, later, me, means France solved something America hadn't. It didn't. The same France that felt like relief to Black American visitors was, in the same decades, systematically denying rights to its own colonial subjects. Algerians bound by French law, unable to claim any other nationality, without the political and civil rights French citizenship was supposed to guarantee. The historian Tyler Stovall built an entire body of work around exactly this contradiction -- Paris Noir documents the real warmth Black American artists found in the city, and his own later writing is explicit that the whole story is there specifically to call into question the myth of a color-blind France. Stovall traced the same pattern back to World War One: African American soldiers came home describing French troops and French civilians as open-minded, while colonial troops from Algeria and Senegal, serving under the same French command, describe something far closer to what they'd left. Historians still argue about how much of that gap was real versus which side got asked and which side got believed. But the shape of it held for a century, and I lived a small, present-day version of it myself without knowing any of this history was already written down.

Here's the part that actually surprised me once I looked at it straight on. It runs backward from what you'd expect. In America, the whole documented story of how immigrant groups gained acceptance -- the Irish, the Italians, Jewish Americans -- is a story of assimilation. You become accepted by becoming absorbed into the dominant group, often by actively putting distance between yourself and Blackness. Historians call it becoming white, and there's a real literature on exactly how it happened, group by group. What I lived in France is close to the opposite. DOM citizens were already assimilated in every way that should have mattered -- French by law, French by birth in some cases, fluent in a language I never fully had. And it didn't buy them what my own foreignness bought me. I got something they didn't get, and I got it specifically by staying outside the thing they were already legally inside of.

I don't know what to do with the fact that I benefited from the asymmetry I'm describing, and I'd rather say that plainly than pretend the observation is neutral just because I'm the one making it. I didn't create the gap between how I was treated and how a DOM citizen was treated. I also didn't refuse it, or interrogate it in the moment, or do anything but notice it, years later, from the comfortable side of it. Whether that makes me complicit in something or just an honest witness to something that was never mine to fix is a real question, and I don't think it has one clean answer. I'm leaving it open rather than resolving it either direction.

I don't have a clean moral to put at the end of this, and I've stopped expecting myself to manufacture one every time. Being an outsider bought me something in France that being an insider didn't buy people who'd earned insider status the hard way, over generations, through citizenship and language both. That's not France being better than America. It's a different sorting mechanism, running on a different axis, and it happened to sort in my favor the same way it happened not to sort in favor of people who by every formal measure belonged there more than I did. Baker and Wright and Baldwin found something real in Paris. So did I, decades later, without meaning to go looking for it. None of us found a country without a race problem. We found one with a different one, aimed somewhere else.

Part of the same family: "The Cost of Going Public" and "How to Build a Mind."